It’s just a great time to indulge in Russian/Chinese paranoia, because the stories keep popping up. Check out the Soviet-style nationalistic revisionism going into Russian textbooks:
The newly approved textbook, Russian History 1945-2007, is to be tried out in schools in five Russian regions pending nationwide approval.
Kommersant said “the eras of Joseph Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev get good marks, with justification of authoritarianism and repression”.
The 1990s rule of Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first post-Soviet leader, is portrayed as “crisis”, while Mr Putin’s presidency – seen by critics as reversing many post-Soviet freedoms – is shown to be “effective”, Kommersant said.
In particular, the book puts a positive spin on the controversial imprisonment of Yukos oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky under Mr Putin and the 2004 decision to end direct elections for regional governors, the report said.
But this is no coincidence. Last June Putin met with Russian history teachers and textbook authors (photo at right), and laid down the law. I believe that the speaker following Putin, Leonid Polyakov, best encapsulated Putin’s thoughts:
“You [Putin -ed.] are right,” emphasized Leonid Polyakov, “there’s mush in everyone’s heads! Speaking in Cold War terms (this obviously being the most accurate characterization of the current situation) we have ideologically disarmed ourselves. In 1990-1991, we rejected Marxism and communism like so many scientific theories.”
It was difficult to tell from Mr. Polyakov’s face whether he was sorry about that or whether he was trying to be glad about it. It became clear from his subsequent remarks that the first possibility was much more likely.
“And what did we get instead?” he continued. “We got some shaky, abstract ideology of universal values! We adopted the words ‘freedom,’ ‘democracy,’ ‘market,’ ‘human rights,’ ‘civil society’… It’s just like giving children alphabet blocks but not teaching them how to spell words…
“In essence, what kind of ideology are we creating?” he asked, … “A national ideology!”
Mr. Polyakov considers it natural to extend that into a “national patriotic” ideology, the foundations of which, as he acknowledged, have already been formulated by the commander-in-chief himself.
It’s a good thing that Stalin’s now a good guy, because Putin’s Russia is looking more and more like Stalin’s Soviet Union.
