“Patriotic” – “Imperialistic” – and Again Almost “Patriotic”: A Political Pendulum of the Evaluations of World War I in School Courses on Russian History

Authors:

Pages: 615-621
DOI: https://doi.org/10.54664/DXSL9312

Abstract:

This article analyzes the images of World War I constructed in school history textbooks of the USSR and Russia in the 20th and early 21st centuries. Emphasis is placed on the recent reconstruction of the image of the War and on the estimates of Russia’s participation in it, which are formulated in the Historical Cultural Standard (2014). This document was drafted on the instruction of the President of Russia, and contains a basic evaluation of the key events in the past, as well as the main approaches to teaching national history in modern schools. The author traces the evolution and revolution of the images of World War I in school textbooks on Russian history for almost a century (from the 1930s up to the present) in correlation with the historical policy’s influence on the school subject of History, and with the ideas of humanization and demilitarization of history teaching that meet the objectives of the study of history in the 21st century.

Keywords:

history education; historical policy; evaluations of World War I

Download

NA