Stigmatized by History or by Historians?: The Peoples of Russia in School History Textbooks

The dramatic post-Soviet transformations have profoundly affected school education in Russia. History courses were deeply involved in this painful process. They experienced a revolutionary shift in emphasis from class struggle to nationalism and ethnocentrism. Textbooks were rewritten several times over the course of fifteen to twenty years. One of the problems faced by their authors was how to create a balanced presentation of the numerous ethnic groups that constituted the former Soviet Union in textbooks where the dominant majority was represented by ethnic Russians. In this article I demonstrate that an aspiration to depict Russia as a homogeneous civilization led to the biased representation of certain non-Russian ethnic communities.