How Russian Kids Are Taught World War II

From Kaliningrad to Vladivostok, Russian schoolchildren are preparing for the most important holiday of the year: Victory Day. Commemorated with a grand military parade on Moscow’s Red Square every May 9, the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany has long been used by authorities to rally support for the state. And it starts in school.

In September 2016, three history textbooks were sanctioned by the Ministry of Education, all of which gloss over Stalin’s crimes and his initial alliance with Nazi Germany. “My main issue with the textbooks is that they do not reveal the whole truth,” says historian and teacher Leonid Katsva.

What is still unclear is who decides which book should be used in the classroom. “Is it the teacher, the school director or the city? I asked this question to the Moscow city government many times and received no answer,” says Abalov.

Most schools across the country have sided with one of them, published by Prosveshenie, whose retelling of the war focuses almost exclusively on the heroic aspects of the Soviet war effort.

For Russians, World War II began—not in 1939 as it did for the rest of the world—but in 1941. What happened before, and the Soviet Union’s role in it, has stirred emotions and denial in Russia. The most controversial moment, which the Kremlin traditionally does not emphasize, is the Molotov–Ribbentrop “non-aggression” pact between the USSR and Nazi Germany.

Putin has made contradictory statements about the pact. He struck a conciliatory tone in 2009 when he spoke in Gdansk in Poland, saying the Russian parliament had condemned the pact. Six years later, in a meeting with Germany’s Angela Merkel, Putin said the pact “made sense for ensuring the security of the Soviet Union.”

Don’t exaggerate. 1918-1919 in the west and until 1922 in the Far East.

Really, then why did Russia and Japan sign the Soviet–Japanese Basic Convention in January 1925, ratify it a month later, which required Japan to remove its troops from northern Sakhalin Island by May 1925?

Another fraudster from the Ukraine.

Few Ukrainians know that newly independent Poland was very dependent on the Allies for support, as referenced by the Treaty of Polish Independence signed at Versailles, and the Allies determined Poland's borders according to Art. 87 of the Treaty of Peace with Germany at Versailles (1919). They tend to blame the Poles for the failure of the Treaty of Warsaw and not the British, French and Americans. The history of the region isn't well known, and frequently colored by personal biases against one nation or another, such your disdain for the Poles and Prof. Lord's proposal that Poland should have been recreated based on its historic boundaries and not limited to outside definition of who was or wasn't an ethnic Pole. Another troll from Putin's troll farms.

You know your history.

I've studied the region's history in some depth, and IMHO, that history is not taught properly in the Anglo-American world. Some of that is ethnic biases. American historians on the region are disproportionately Jewish, and Canadian historians are disproportionately Ukrainian. Poland never lustrated the communists from its universities and they continued to preach certain "facts" about the Second Polish Republic that sprouted from the communists need to bash it as illegitimate, rather than the best alternative to Soviet or German hegemony in the region which had a few growing pains. Some historians are afraid to challenge certain accepted opinions out of fear of losing funding for their research, or access to government archives.

What has been taught as accepted history is that it was right to demolish the Austo-Hungarian Empire because it suffered from too much diversity, (and that was its great weakness not its strength...), and it was thus illegitimate, but Russia could be still remain very diverse, even if people in Belarus and Ukraine fought to leave the Bolsheviks and ally with Poland, and masses there died of starvation or were forced to eat their dead children to survive so Stalin had cash to industrialize and start WWII. Then there is the propaganda that Poland eastern border was illegitimate because the British thought millions of ethnic Poles, and others including the self-described ethnic Ruthenians who rejected the novel Ukrainian endonym and had intermarried with the Poles for centuries, should be stuck living under communism. That POV is what is taught in Western universities, and there is great hostility to alternative opinions. Almost universally, what is taught is that Versailles regime was too harsh on Germany, not that it was too eager to rebuild an aggressive revanchist Russia renamed the Soviet Union which conspired with Nazi Germany to start the deadliest war in human history, and then benefited from doing so.

We don’t care.

If you didn't care, you wouldn't keep posting nonsense, and speak for yourself unless you have a tapeworm. This is a well read forum. It's not about you.

Stop rehashing ancient grieavances and picking old sores.

Putin invaded Ukraine based upon his revanchist view of history that Ukraine isn't a nation and the people there are Russians who just don't know it. Distinguished academics disagree: "The forgotten history of Poland and Ukraine: Ukraine was part of Poland for longer than it was inside Russia – and this is key to understanding Ukrainian nationhood
If you want to remain an ignoramus, that's your choice. The history of the region is relevant to both rebutting Putin's Soviet historiography and understanding possible political solutions for a lasting peace, e.g., Poland and Ukraine form a military alliance with nuclear weapons to check further Russian aggression. That alliance might expand to include the Baltics and Belarus, or even Georgia.

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