Moscow Asks Federal Subjects to Prepare History Textbooks that Treat Their Lands as Russian Regions rather than as National Republics

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Dec. 13 – Having come up with a new history text for the first grades of schools in the Russian Federation, Moscow is now supervising the preparation of textbooks about the federal subjects for the middle grades to be introduced next year and has asked the 32 governments to treat themselves as regions rather than republics.
    Tatarstan is one of the 32, and Marat Gibatdinov, the deputy head of the republic Academy of Sciences Institute of History, says “Moscow has requested that the accent in these volumes be not national but regional” and thus focus on all the nationalities of the republics rather than just the titular ones (business-gazeta.ru/article/657159).
    Of course, in the case of Tatarstan, the Kazan scholar continues, the Tatar are the dominant group and will receive the most coverage, “but there will also be discussions about other peoples and their contribution [to the development of the region] and about connections among these peoples.
    The new textbooks which are based on the conception of all the federal subjects being krays, a Russian word which means not only region but “on the edge” of the state ignore many subjects that have been at the center of Tatar history and rewrite others, scholars involved in the preparation of the new textbook say.
    Any talk of a Tatar-Mongol “yoke” has disappeared. Russia’s advance into Tatarstan in the 16th century is treated as a mostly peaceful enterprise with no discussion about the sacking of Kazan in 1552, and the mass purges of Tatar officials and intellectuals in the Great Terror ignored altogether.
    Instead, Tatarstan is presented as one region among many committed to being part of Russia and whose history reflects that at all times and places, the facts of the case notwithstanding. These changes are already sparking anger in Tatarstan, anger that is likely to be far greater than that about Medynsky’s general history texts for lower grades.