Countries in Organization of Turkic States Adopt Common History Textbook

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 3 – The Organization of Turkic States have adopted a common textbook on the common history of the Turkic peoples, a development that Kazakhstan commentator Seri Maleyev says will create “a common optic” through which these peoples will see their unity as far more important than anything that divides them.

            “The main consequence of the appearance of a common history is the formation of a common cultural code,” one that will unite them in far-reaching ways, he says (altyn-orda.kz/v-shkolah-tyurkskogo-mira-poyavilas-obshhaya-istoriya-pochemu-eto-sobytie-menyaet-uchebnuyu-programmu-navsegda/).

            According to Maleyev, “it is important also that the textbook consciously focuses on period which united and did not divide,” the period before the era of “colonial divisions” of the Turkic world and the conflicts into which some parts of that world were drawn into with other Turkic peoples.

            Whether textbooks alone can achieve the goals the Kazakhstan commentator suggests remains to be seen, But this effort shows that those promoting the re-emergence of a unified Turkic world have already achieved more than Putin in his efforts to promote a common Russian World.

            In Soviet times, Moscow imposed a common history on the various peoples of the USSR. That fell apart in the 1990s when the Soviet Union did. Putin has sought to recreate such a common historical education across the various peoples of the Russian Federation; but he has had absolutely no success in promoting it more broadly.

            And that suggests that those who want to talk about the rise of cultural worlds broader than a single country should be looking at the Turkic one rather than the Russian, even though today Russia because of its nuclear weapons and pretensions invariably attracts more attention in most places.