Posted on 12/27/2007 6:35:34 AM PST by TigerLikesRooster
Pro-Putin history textbook 'response' to Russophobia: editor
Thu Dec 27, 2:54 AM ET
A new Russian history textbook that reportedly praises President Vladimir Putin and justifies Stalin's dictatorship is a response to anti-Russian tendencies abroad, Kommersant daily quoted the controversial book's editor saying Thursday.
"I have analysed books on Russian history in neighbouring countries and came to the conclusion... that our neighbours excel at educational Russophobia," the editor, Alexander Filippov, was quoted as saying.
"The Russian people is presented as a source of all evil. It was necessary to respond," he said.
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 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 Putin and the 2004 decision to end direct elections for regional governors, the report said.
The text is based on a handbook published earlier this year by pro-Kremlin historians that described Stalin as "efficient."
"We don't justify Stalin on his purges but we also don't stigmatise him on every page," said Pavel Danilin, one of the book's authors and a researcher at the pro-Kremlin Foundation for Effective Policy.
The new textbook is not yet available in bookshops and the 1,000 copies published have been sent directly to the schools concerned, where it will be used in classrooms during 2008, the Nezavisimaya Gazeta daily reported.
I agree the guy was efficient. Heck, I couldn’t bury twenty million people if I started right now and worked 24/7. Hey, that’s a great idea for the next book: “Stalin’s Guide to Time Management”.
So they are copying US history books eh?
LOL! What's 20-million dead among friends?
I’ve read many, many books on the period in question, but the best is probably “The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991” by Martin Malia. Tragedy is the right word, except that it cannot even remotely capture the disaster of the Soviet era, at every level and from every perspective. I can hardly even think of that time without recounting all the stories of the individual lives destroyed; it was an evil of unfathomable proportion, and the only response I can think of that is appropriate for a civilized man is to weep in recollection. All those pour souls; Putin and his criminals are shoveling dirt on their memories once again.
Putin is icing a cake that is really a cardboard shell. Under the frosting, there is no cake.
Thank you for this thread.
The book will soon be in our schools.
It will first go to etext.org, which is the storage site for the communist writings that we see re-written so often in America.
At etext.org click on politics and you will see what I meant.
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