One of the most telling indicators of fundamental change in public attitudes is a shift in a topic’s treatment in school textbooks.
Amending Soviet and Russian history in school programs has helped to impose a positive image of Josif Stalin and this conclusion is easily derived – after all, he led the Soviet Union to glorious victory and liberated Europe from the scourge of Nazism.
According to earlier textbooks of the 1990s, Stalin was “a beast, a tyrant, an inept commander” whose battlefield successes were won at the cost of sacrificing millions of young men offered up for cold-blooded slaughter. Stalin, according to those books, headed a ‘criminal regime’.
The current text has been co-authored by the Minister of Culture and Putin’s nationalist presidential aide, Vladimir Medinsky. He’s known as a promoter of Soviet ideological indoctrination.
In 1991, with a new Soviet law – the “Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples” – accusations of collaboration were withdrawn and deportations condemned. Now deportations have been marginalized. Now the book accuses the targeted nationalities of alleged collaboration with Germans during WWII, and they include Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars and may more.
The deportations, including hundreds of thousands killed, have been catastrophic for the groups. Needless to say, they qualify for investigations as war crimes. But the new book dismisses the seriousness of Stalin’s actions saying that they were justified “on the basis of cases of collaboration with the enemy.”
(Pikemalt saab lugeda Eesti Elu 12. jaanuari 2024 paber- või digilehest eestielu.ca)
Laas Leivat: From beast to ‘commander-in-chief’ in a few short years (1)
Eestlased Kanadas | 12 Jan 2024 | Eesti Elu
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