New Texts Reshape Past for Russians

To the class of 1995, the world will never look quite the same.

This month, thousands of Russian high school juniors and seniors are being handed a book that could have gotten them arrested a decade ago. It is the first post-Soviet textbook of 20th-Century world history.

Unlike its predecessors, this text is written in plain Russian, shunning Soviet-speak. It is determinedly devoid of ideology. And for the convenience of history teachers, it begins in 1914; all Soviet textbooks had launched into modern European history in 1917--Year One of the Russian Revolution but smack in the middle of a world war.

Gone are such chapters as “The deepening of the overall crisis in capitalism” and “The anti-imperialist struggle of the Latin American people.”

Instead, there are matter-of-fact explanations of such once-heretical subjects as President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, the Soviet Union’s annexation of the Baltic nations and the superpower competition in the Third World during the Cold War.

Textbooks such as “Modern History,” “Economics Without Secrets” and at least 87 others--which are being tried out for the first time this school year--are meant to give Russia’s 20 million pupils a grip on their place in a dramatically reshaped world.

The goal, Education Minister Yevgeny Tkachenko said, is to impart to each child “an ability to analyze and to make independent decisions.”

“In a certain sense, this is the opposite of what we had before,” he said.

Soviet catechism has disappeared from schools, along with the “Grandpa Lenin” primer and Communist Young Pioneers. But the struggle over what the new generation should learn is just beginning.

The tidal wave of historical revisionism that Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev unleashed in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s hit its high-water mark in 1988, when high school final exams in history were canceled because of the “lies” contained in the official texts.

In most schools, the curriculum centered on bombshell revelations about the Soviet past that were appearing daily in the press.

Textbook writers are only now beginning to catch up. Soviet-era books are so comically obsolete that teachers have been relying on lecture notes, homemade translations of foreign publications or even vintage czarist primers.

“History teachers are in a terrible bind,” said Alexander A. Kreder, author of the new “Modern History.”

In Soviet times, virtually every history teacher had to be a Communist Party member and the curriculum could not be questioned. Today, many teachers are quitting in exhaustion or spending long evenings in the library preparing for class.

“If they use the old textbooks, the pupils just start laughing at them,” Kreder said.

Kreder, 47, an amiable expert on American history at the University of Saratov, is a liberal but said he tried to keep his views from influencing his choice of facts. “I wanted a textbook that was so objective that a teacher of any ideological bent could use it,” he said.

In this, he has apparently succeeded: One critic complained that the book reads as if it were not written by a Russian. Still, some teachers are critical.

“My hopes for this book were not justified,” said Mikhail N. Prudnikov, who until the August, 1991, failed coup was in charge of Soviet textbooks at the Communist Party Central Committee Department of Ideology and who now teaches history at a private school in Moscow.

Prudnikov, who remains active in the new Russian Communist Party, says Kreder’s book is too pro-American, neglects the Third World and glorifies capitalism. “In my class, I will not lead students to this conclusion,” he said. “We must be more balanced in telling students why socialism failed.”

Nevertheless, Prudnikov says he will use the new textbook until a better one comes along. “The old one is even worse,” he said.

The authors of the Soviet modern history text did release a revised edition in 1993 that deleted some of the most glaring rhetorical excesses of earlier books.

In the 1989 edition, for example, the definition of “genocide” includes the statement that “a policy of genocide . . . is being implemented by the government of Israel against the Arab people of Palestine.”

The 1993 edition deleted that sentence. But the book’s overall structure remained unchanged. And with the chronic shortage of money and texts, not all schools received copies of the new edition.

Kreder was chosen to write the new “Modern History” after his outline won a nationwide competition sponsored by the Soros Foundation. Under a program largely funded by Western financier George Soros, the foundation has been promoting the development of an array of new texts for all age levels.

As a scholar in provincial Saratov, a city in Russia’s southern heartland whose defense plants made it off limits to foreigners for decades, Kreder was an unlikely winner of the contest.

But Kreder, who formerly taught at the training institute for Communist Party leaders in Saratov, had for years enjoyed special permission to read the secret daily digest of articles from the Western press translated unabridged for the top party leadership.

“I was getting a colossal amount of information which nobody else was allowed to have,” Kreder said. As soon as perestroika permitted, he began to teach a frank course in modern history. The high school text, which he had only three months to write, is based on his university lecture notes.

With 80,000 copies in print, the book is being tested in Saratov, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and four other cities. Based on suggestions from teachers and students, plus classroom visits, Kreder plans to produce a final version next year.

Russian teen-agers, he says, are too young to remember much of the Soviet past. “A 10th-grader comes in and we have to explain to him what the planned economy was,” Kreder said. “He already knows what the market economy is.”

At School No. 1159, a typical public school in a working-class neighborhood on the northern outskirts of Moscow, the seniors in one class sported denim jackets, colorful knapsacks and earrings on some of the boys. They looked nearly indistinguishable from their American counterparts--except for the cheaper sneakers. And the world view they were absorbing jibes with that of their counterparts in Europe, the United States and Japan.

Students today are struggling to form an objective view of Russia and of the West, said their teacher, Irina G. Zhukovskaya, who added, “There was more worship of America during the Soviet period, when everything American was banned.”

Dressed in a sweat shirt that said in English, “Happy Weekend,” Zhukovskaya was discussing the origins of World War II, referring from time to time to Kreder’s book.

First, she led the students through the grievances of the Axis countries. Next, she explained what it meant for a nation to have an aggressive foreign policy. Finally, she asked students to consider, for the next class, whether the Soviet Union’s prewar foreign policy was aggressive or nonaggressive.

“Before, they taught everything from one point of view: Everything Soviet was good and everything non-Soviet was bad,” said Olga Trushina, 16, who aspires to become an English translator. “This teacher gives us the right to formulate our own point of view.”

Zhukovskaya, who has been basing her teaching on an American text she was given in 1989, welcomes the chance to have students help improve Kreder’s text. “I feel we can and must work with him, because this is a person who understands history in a humanistic way, in a different way,” she said.

Now that teachers have broad discretion in what to teach, some Russian students may learn about Marxism as one of several competing ideologies that can still instruct the world, while in other classrooms the old state religion will be treated as a historical anachronism.

It is too soon for any of the new texts to have become controversial. But judging from the furor over the content of history books in postwar Germany and Japan, that may be only a matter of time.