Soviets to Fill In Textbook ‘Blanks’

Soviet high school students will be given supplements to their history books by the start of next year to fill in “blank spots” in their knowledge of the country’s past, a senior education official said Saturday.

Vladimir D. Shadrikov, deputy chief of the State Committee for People’s Education, said the supplements will include chapters on a power struggle preceding the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the repressions of the Stalin Era and ousted leader Nikita S. Khrushchev.

“Much attention will be devoted to individual revolutionaries, their differing views on the revolution and the post-revolutionary development of Russia,” he told the government newspaper Izvestia.

He said students would learn about the parties that competed with V. I. Lenin’s Bolsheviks, about the people who fled the country during the post-revolution civil war and about Lenin’s New Economic Policy, with which the reforms of Kremlin leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev are now compared.

The supplements are being prepared for 15-year-olds.

For older students, new textbooks will include chapters on Khrushchev’s “merits and mistakes” and stagnation under the late leader Leonid I. Brezhnev.