The Vicissitudes of Socialism in Russian History Textbooks

VERA KAPLAN
The article examines the changes in both the meaning and the role of the concept of socialism in post-Soviet historical discourse through the particular prism of the writing of history textbooks. Reinhardt Kosellecks ideas on the nature of modern historical concepts and Jerzy Topolskis model of historical narrative serve as analytical devices for exploring methodological aspects of the subject and for surveying Russian history textbooks. The article claims that the changes undergone by the concept of socialism, which was one of the fundamental Soviet axioms of historical discourse, served as the basis for developing a new theoretical language that became characteristic of post-Soviet historical writing.

The twentieth-century n de sicle marked a watershed in Russian historical studies. The rejection of Marxism, which had long supplied the theoretical basis for Soviet historical scholarship, brought about a profound shift in the conceptual frameworks that were to inform post-Soviet historiography. As a consequence, fundamental Soviet axioms of historical discourse such as class, socialism and capitalism were replaced in the 1990s by rediscovered versions of civilization, nation and ethnicity. These changes served as the basis for developing a new theoretical language that would become characteristic of post-Soviet historical writing. This article addresses the vicissitudes that overtook one of the key concepts of Soviet history, namely, the concept of socialism. My intent is to examine how both the meaning of this concept and its role in the postSoviet historical narrative changed. Methodologically, this problem can be located in the context of conceptual history. Its major currents have been the Begriffsgeschichte, which focuses on semantic structures of historical concepts,1 and the Cambridge School, which deals with the history of

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Vera Kaplan political discourses2 or, as one of its leading gures, Quentin Skinner, formulated it, with the history of the uses of concepts.3 Since the 1990s, Russian scholars have joined the eld with a body of works on questions of conceptual borrowing and the interplay between autochtonous and adopted concepts.4 The subject of Soviet conceptual language also became an issue of cultural and, to a lesser extent, historical and linguistic studies.5 From the perspective of conceptual history, the short span of time dened as the post-Soviet period is extremely signicant, since it has been characterized by an enormous acceleration in political and intellectual processes and the ensuing modication of the basic concepts of Soviet political culture. It is still an open question, however, whether these two decades might be regarded as the beginning of a distinctive Russian Sattelzeit, a time when political and social concepts have been reformulated within a short period of rapid change.6 The aim of this article is to trace the changes in the concept that served as one of the basic notions in Soviet political discourse and, in this capacity, also in the Soviet historical narrative. While these changes can be examined through different aspects of historical discourse, I will approach the issue through a very particular prism, the writing of history textbooks.7 This choice requires some explanation. In general terms, textbooks can be distinguished from other texts in a variety of ways. The rst distinct trait of the textbook is its anonymity. As education studies have observed, textbooks are often perceived to be collective products with an independent existence unconnected to any individual authors.8 In this respect textbooks serve as a vehicle for conveying social and cultural messages and thereby play an important role as instruments of socialization. Textbooks introduce new generations to the existing social order, presenting versions of culture that suit the dominant political ideology. In the case of history textbooks, this usually means presenting a most basic, simplied and consensual narrative of the past. The political and educational reforms instituted in Russia during the 1990s, however, brought about a sharp divergence from this common pattern. Not only did the highly structured and insistently consensual Soviet narrative fall apart, but the notion of creating history textbooks that told differing, and even contending, narratives was promoted. New publishing policies led to a dramatic diversication of the textbook corpus. An unprecedented variety of texts came into existence for any given course 84 History & Memory, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 2009)

Vicissitudes of Socialism of study. At the same time, the central political, social and cultural signicance of the history textbook became even more obvious. In light of the deep crisis in historical scholarship that overcame Russia with the demise of the Soviet Union, a new and rather paradoxical situation developed. In the early 1990s history textbooks emerged as a sort of popular tribune where new historiographical ideas and conceptualizations were tried out. Textbooks lost, at least in part, one of their dening traits, their anonymity. They now became identied with their authors while also maintaining their authority, which helped, inter alia, to promote new scholarly agendas during this period of uctuation and change. Moreover, from the late 1980s and continuing throughout the 1990s, discussion and debate over the content of history textbooks developed into the principal channel of communication between society at large and the academic community. The textbooks continued to perform this function into the new century as well. At this point, however, the state sought to reestablish its hegemony over the eld, that is, both over the debates and over the actual content of the texts. This effort had considerable effect. Since the middle of the present decade it is possible to discern a tendency to turn history textbooks once again into anonymous vehicles of a state-approved narrative. At the same time, however, this state-sponsored narrative remains more sophisticated and less closed off to interpretation than it was during the Soviet era.

ThE rOLE Of sOciaLism in thE histOricaL ParaDiGm Of

sOciOEcOnOmic fOrmatiOn

What made the concept of socialism so important to Soviet historical studies? The Soviet perspective on history was teleological: history was seen as a steady movement toward a communist future, one in which each stage was dened as a distinct socioeconomic formation. Class struggle was presented as the force driving this historical progress. The formulationor discoveryof objective laws that allegedly regulated the movement of history was suggestive of how history was perceived to be a linear, invariant and irreversible process. The goal-oriented character of this perspective emphasized the temporal dimension of history.

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Vera Kaplan This same perspective presented modern history as an ontological opposition between capitalism and socialism. The latter, allegedly born of and then triumphing over the former, was considered to be the more progressive formation. On the one hand, the capitalist world was portrayed as a formidable entity and a cause of suspicion and mistrust inasmuch as it constituted a threat to socialism. On the other hand, capitalism was also recognized to be a positive cultural source because it stimulated progress. This model identied capitalism with the West. This did not mean, however, that socialism, although juxtaposed to the capitalist West, represented the East. In fact, there was no place for the East at all in this model. The Third World, rather, was a separate arena of struggle between socialism and capitalism. This approach put socialism at its center. Like revolution, socialism had a metahistorical character: it was one of those notions that Reinhart Koselleck, the leading gure of the Begriffsgeschichte, dened as a collective singular, a exible general concept representing a multitude of possible variations and concrete forms of socialism, much as Kosellecks revolution appeared to unite within itself the course of all individual revolutions.9 Being perceived as a phase in the transition from capitalism to communism, socialism was open to and oriented toward the future. The Soviet conception of socialism was, thus, consistent with other modern concepts of movement, such as republicanism, democracy and liberalism, all of which, as Koselleck argued in his seminal essay, served the purpose of theoretically anticipating future historical movement and practically inuencing it.10 Their common denominator was the element of promise, anticipation and expectation; in terms of Kosellecks well-known formulation, they were oriented to the horizon of expectations, not to the space of experience.11 In the same essay Koselleck also addressed a situation in which the temporal structure of these concepts changes: If corresponding political designs were realized, then, once generated by a revolution, the old expectations worked themselves out on the basis of new experience. This is true for republicanism, democracy and liberalism to the extent that history permits us to judge. Presumably this will also be true for socialism, and for communism as well, if its arrival is ever announced.12

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Vicissitudes of Socialism No one quite foresaw that it would be the end of socialismrather than the arrival of communismthat would one day be announced. With socialisms removal from the horizon of expectation to the space of experiencein its abrupt transformation from the dynamic concept of movement into a static phenomenon of the pastRussian historians found themselves facing a unique situation. In order to liberate themselves from a failed socialism it became necessary to reconceptualize Russian history, to search for other avenues of development that might not have been successfully realized in the past but could be achieved in the present. A new perception of history evolved in the late 1980s and early 1990s which shifted the emphasis from the temporal to the spatial, and from diachronic to synchronic dimensions of historical experience. This essential shift provoked another basic change: history ceased to be invariant and irreversible and became endowed with alternatives, with opportunities to return from the allegedly mistaken to the correct path of development. Last, but not least, this new historical perspective also contained a comparative component, particularly between Russia and the West, which became characteristic of historical writing during the transitional decade of the 1990s. These changes in scholarly perspective required corresponding adjustments in the language of historical scholarship. At the same time, it proved to be impossible to wholly purge those concepts that had lost their relevance from the historical discourse. The problem essentially lay in how social and political changes are incorporated into a new discourse.13 Social transformation does not automatically bring about change in discursive practice. Rather, the new reality is generally interpreted through categories inherited from the old one. A new discourse then takes shape through the interaction between novel conditions, the discursive legacy and the subsequent conceptual transvaluation of that legacy.14 This means that the old concepts change their meaning before new ones emerge. These changes, moreover, entail a modication of the whole structure of historical narrative. While the literature on historical narrative is immense,15 the model of the latter proposed by Jerzy Topolski would seem to be most effective for understanding this connection. Topolski suggested a distinction between the vertical and horizontal structure of the historical narrative. From the vertical perspective, he discerned three substructures (or levels) of narrative: information, rhetoric (all the instruments of persuasion) and politics, which he dened 87

Vera Kaplan also as theoretico-ideological substructure. The latter, Topolski claims, inuences both the content of information and the mode of rhetoric. From the horizontal perspective, he conceives the narrative structure as consisting of smaller narrative wholes (histories), which combine to create ever more complex, larger narratives. By becoming part of these more complex narratives, Topolski argues, every single statement acquires more and more meaning. He denes this process as binding with content. He ascribes the most signicant role in this process to general concepts, which implement the binding function. Therefore changes in the meaning of general concepts invariably lead to changes in the narrative as a whole.16 What is more, as a version of the Marxist narrative, Soviet history possessed the character of a grand, or master narrative, the kind of story that underlies, assigns legitimacy to and explains the particular choices a culture prescribes as possible courses of action.17 A master narrative provides coherence by obscuring the conicts that arise in the course of a societys history. It functions as a framework for all other cultural narratives, giving the latter their specic meaning. In the Soviet case, these other cultural narratives were national ones, with Russian history playing the dominant role. The history of the Soviet Union was actually the history of the Russian state interspersed with fragments of the histories of other nationalities. A surrealistic vertical balance of class and national perspectives of history was achieved once factors conducive to state power were treated as positive contributions to historical progress, and the Soviet Unions status as a superpower was clear proof of the advantages of the socialist system. At the horizontal level, however, a permanent tension was in play between the history of the USSR and the various national histories. This tension was particularly noticeable in the history classroom. Courses on national history had been taught in Soviet schools since the late 1950s,18 but Russia was the only Soviet republic where such a course was not offered, a paradox that offers striking proof of its predominant national status. Although school curricula prescribed a xed (and limited) amount of hours devoted to national history in the framework of the course on the history of the USSR, in practice the number of teaching hours that were allocated to courses on the history of the particular republics rose steadily at the expense of the history of the Soviet Union as a whole.19 From the late 1980s, a gradual dismantling of the Marxist framework 88 History & Memory, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 2009)

Vicissitudes of Socialism became part and parcel of evolving national narratives. Until 1991, efforts were made to nd a new, multicultural framework that would allow for the coexistence of these various narratives. After 1991, when the USSR ceased to exist and was replaced by fteen separate nation-states, the goal of writing national histories became paramount. Although these histories constituted distinct narratives in their own right, some of the problems encountered by post-Soviet historians in writing them were shared by all. Most common were the difculties encountered when describing the period previously known as the socialist one. Revising the denition of socialism, which had previously served, in Toploskis term, as a binding concept, was an essential step before nation-based historical narratives could be disseminated.

ThE cOncEPt Of sOciaLism in POst-sOviEt tEXtbOOks The rst attempts to critically reassess the concept of socialism were undertaken in the second half of the 1980s, as part of the political and educational debates that developed during the period of perestroika (the economic and political reforms adopted by Mikhail Gorbachev). Although at this time socialism still retained its character as a binding concept, certain changes in focus were already evident. Thus, socialism now became closely tied to questions of social justice, to issues concerning alternative paths in the development of socialism and to the human costs of building socialism. Several years later, in 199091, public discussion already included talk about breaking the cycle of socialism and about the necessity of nding ways out of socialism.20 This was the context for deep changes in the eld of history teaching. Between 1986 and 1988, in response to public demands to tell what was often referred to as the heretofore hidden truth, and to ll in the numerous blank spots in Soviet history, initial steps were undertaken to improve the extant textbooks. These improvements consisted of new data, mainly on the Soviet period of history, including conspicuous information on its previously omitted heroes and villains. And yet, the revised textbooks became obsolete the moment they were published because they lagged behind the pace of political change. This crisis reached a climax in 1988, when the nationwide matriculation exam in history was canceled due to the great gap that had been revealed 89

Vera Kaplan between the formal educational curriculum and what was now common public knowledge. In response to the need for sweeping changes in the history curriculum, the journal Prepodavanie istorii v shkole (The teaching of history in school) initiated a broad set of discussions in 198990 that were devoted to formulating new conceptions for teaching history. The most radical and, in hindsight, most inuential proposal was that originating in the Temporary Scientic Research Group Shkola (School), an ad hoc institution established by the State Committee on Education. This research group sought to develop a program for restructuring secondary education as a whole, with particular attention to the history curriculum.21 Shkolas conception challenged the very foundation of Marxist history, namely, the theory of socioeconomic formations, which the authors characterized as an ossied scheme according to which the masses of the people obey rigid sociological laws and move inexorably along the path of progress to a predetermined goal.22 Signaling a dramatic step away from the Marxist perception of history, Shkolas proposal placed the human being, instead of historical laws, as the object of historical investigation, thereby pulling the rug out from under the concept of socialism. In the course of further debate over history teaching it was suggested that socialism be considered as a historical experiment that, like every experiment, was fraught with the risk of failure, or, alternatively, as a romantic dream and political utopia.23 Another blow to the concept of socialism was delivered in the ongoing debates over how best to incorporate the histories of the various Soviet republics into the history of the USSR. This issue was initially discussed at the All-Union Conference on the Problem of History Teaching, which was held in Tallinn in February 1988.24 From 1988 until the end of 1991 the issue continually resurfaced in disputes over history education, being raised each time by representatives of the national republics. They proposed that the history of the peoples of the USSR be taught instead of the history of the so-called new historical community, that is, the Soviet people (sovetskii narod).25 This meant much more than merely allocating additional class time to the history of the national republics. It required a radical revision of the comprehensive course on the history of the USSR. Some proposed that programs and textbooks devoted to the history of the USSR be respectively tailored to the different national republics. The concept of regional history was introduced, one that required the study 90 History & Memory, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 2009)

Vicissitudes of Socialism of neighboring states rather than just Soviet states. This entailed learning about the history of cultural centers in the region. Thus, Scandinavian history would be studied in Estonia, and Indian and Chinese history would be learned in Uzbekistan.26 The authors of the Shkola conception tabled one of the most ambitious proposals at the time when they suggested that the histories of the respective national republics from the period prior to their integration into the Russian state should be taught in the context of world history rather than Soviet history.27 At the same time, Estonian educators, who were the most consistent supporters of innovation, advocated a different solution. They proposed that a general course in world history be introduced that would consist of both world and Soviet history. This suggestion contained the notion of an overarching history course in whose framework Russian history and the history of national republics could be integrated in equal fashion. The concept of socialism, which underscored the antagonism between the Soviet Union and capitalist states, became inadequate and ineffective for this suggested explanatory model. The notion of civilization was perceived as an apt substitute which could perform a binding function in the newly proposed curriculum far more successfully (see below). The search for a universal framework was not the only new trend that found expression in discussions about history teaching. In contrast to the universalistic spirit prevalent in the late 1980s, a strong particularism took hold in Russia in the early 1990s. This was especially pronounced during the brief period from June 1990 until December 1991, when Russia remained within the Soviet Union but had already declared its sovereignty de jure. In light of the new historical reality, Russian educators stressed the need for generating continuity in relation to Russias prerevolutionary period, and for establishing a genetic link to an age when Russia rather than the USSR functioned as the sovereign entity.28 This initiative was driven by the desire to play down as much as possible the signicance of the socialist period in the nations history. The desire to reduce the place of socialism in Russias historical narrative became even more pronounced in the wake of the dismemberment of the Soviet Union and the rise of an independent Russia. The curricula of the 1990s referred to socialism principally as a political ideology rather than as a period in the countrys modern history, as it had previously been presented. A singular version of socialism was now replaced by 91

Vera Kaplan a multiplicity of socialisms. These included state socialism, barrack socialism, totalitarian socialism and the Stalinist model of socialism.29 New textbooks written in the mid-1990s further contributed to socialisms declining position in the historical narrative. Different authors, however, chose different discursive strategies in pursuing this goal. Three textbooks among those that were sanctioned by the Ministry of Education in the mid-1990s provide clear examples of how the history of socialism was rewritten. Two of these texts had almost identical titles, namely, The History of the Motherland and Motherland History. The other was entitled The History of Russia, the 20th Century. All three were published in 199495.30 Motherland History, written by Moscow historian and educator Igor I. Dolutskii, is the most interesting of these books and might be dened as a transitional text. Socialism remained a key concept in Dolutskiis narrative. He described it as a social ideal, a social theory and a social system. The texts principal aim was to raise questions concerning the society that took shape in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s and to ask whether it was indeed a socialist one. If so, then was socialism a system of mass repression and forced labor? And if not, then what was that systems relationship to the socialist ideal?31 Dolutskii did not provide a single, correct answer to these questions. He presented, instead, diverging opinions, each buttressed by extensive historical documentation, and he sought to give the oor to the voices of the past in creating the conditions that would guide pupils in their search for their own independent answers. At the same time, Dolutskii focused on several methodological aspects of the problem. First, he demonstrated that socialism was not synonymous with Bolshevism. He did so by introducing his readers to various branches of the socialist movement and presenting distinct images of socialism, thus revealing a history of ongoing polemics between socialist factions and parties.32 He also subverted the linear logic that purportedly characterized the transition from capitalism to socialism. The peasants longing for a free life on free land, the soldiers desire for peace, the workers aspiration to control their factories, and the non-Russian nations choice of self-determination (including separation from Russia)and everyones common inclination to support Soviet powerdid not, according to Dolutskii, necessarily connote a desire for socialism, at least of the kind aspired to by the leaders of the socialist movement.33 The workers movement at 92 History & Memory, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 2009)

Vicissitudes of Socialism the beginning of the twentieth century, he argued, was anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois but was not necessarily socialist. This was the texts most important hypothesis. In creating a dichotomy between capitalism and anti-capitalism rather than between capitalism and socialism, Dolutskii led his readers to ask a fateful question: If there was no place for socialism in Russian history, then what was to be done with the widespread conviction that socialism had been built in Russia, not to mention the fact that a whole period of Russian history had been exclusively understood by contemporaries through the lens of socialism? Dolutskiis answer reected the political realities of the 1990s. He argued that decades had had to pass before the mistaken character of the theoretical assumption about the worlds readiness for socialism became apparent.34 From this point, the author began to approach the question of socialism from two temporal perspectives. In the historical time of the 1920s and 1930s the struggle for socialism remained the central axis around which modern history revolved. In the real time of the author himself, that is, from the perspective of the early 1990s, the murderous results of the misinterpretation of socialist theory became the key question. According to this view, the Bolsheviks aspiration to build an economic basis for socialism had resulted in forced nationalization and the destruction of the economy. Attempts to carry out a just redistribution of land had resulted in peasant riots in the villages. The initial willingness to employ violence as a means of building socialism had gradually turned power into a supreme value and transformed the socialist ideal into a tool in the struggle for power. The depiction of the gap between the idea and practice of socialism took on a tragic form in Dolutskiis textbook. Examples abound. The deputy minister of the interior under Stalin, Leonid Zakovskii, was quoted as boasting of his ability even to force Marx to confess that he worked for Bismarck,35 while communists interred in Stalins camps were presented as having derived strength from the notion that they were still building socialism. The wives of the enemies of the people imprisoned in the camps had established socialist competitions in order to implement the ve-year plans economic tasks, and sung songs glorifying the Soviet system on their way back to the barracks from their forced labor. Real Soviet practice, according to Dolutskiis interpretation, was absurd and distorted, but it by no means compromised the socialist idea. Dolutskii still 93

Vera Kaplan held out the possibility of another, alternative socialism whose parameters matched those of the founding fathers of Marxism and whose prophets were Mensheviks rather than Bolsheviks, Iulii Martov rather than Vladimir Lenin. This socialism would be based on the freedom of the individual and was located in the future rather than in past socialist practice. This dynamic openness toward the future is what preserved socialism as a meaningful concept in Dolutskiis narrative. He distanced himself from the Soviet concept of socialism, which he deconstructed, while offering a reconsideration of socialism from a contemporary perspective. At the same time, Dolutskii was reluctant to propose a new denition of socialism. His socialism, rather, remained open to interpretation. This is what distinguished his texts from the two others, which presented a less complex, and more self-contained, version of socialism. The latter also discussed socialism in terms of the nation or the state rather than of society. The textbook written by history teachers Irina A. Zharova and Liudmila A. Mishina, The History of the Motherland, constitutes an interesting attempt to reconsider socialism through the prism of a national and cultural approach.36 For these authors, the concept of socialism principally connotes a utopian ideal. They practically exclude socialism from the actual world of economics and politics. Instead, they apply concepts of modernization and totalitarianism in describing political and economic developments. In Zharova and Mishinas text, socialism refers to the sphere of mass consciousness and psychology. This perspective guided them in formulating their principal historical problem: what happened to the socialist ideal developed in Western culture once it was transferred to the Russian context? In the opinion of the authors, Western socialist ideals became assimilated to traditional Russian notions of equality and authoritarianism, a hybridization that then molded Soviet society. That is to say, the conjunction of Western socialist utopianism with traditional Russian ideals of equality gave birth to an egalitarian mass psychology that served as the anchor for the development of a totalitarian regime in Russia. This view was developed even further by L. S. Semennikova, author of a textbook for institutions of higher education, who claimed that the socialist idea was the most critical factor in allowing individuals to adapt to totalitarian society for it made ones life meaningful despite the harsh political repression.37

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Vicissitudes of Socialism This approach was rejected by those who interpreted socialism in the context of Russian statehood, such as the authors of the third textbook, Valerii P. Ostrovskii and Aleksei I. Utkin, whose History of Russia, the 20th Century presented socialism as an ideology that had generated both a revolutionary movement and a totalitarian state. The most important characteristic of socialist doctrine according to this approach was its radicalism, its readiness for armed action, and even its terrorist inclinations. Ostrovskii and Utkin emphasized that socialism had been imported to Russia from the West, but, at the same time, they rejected the view that the Russian national mentality was inherently receptive to socialist ideas. Indeed, they were reluctant to discuss the cultural aspects of socialism altogether since they presented it as a political rather than a cultural phenomenon. Socialists, and in particular the socialist left, or, in other words, the Bolsheviks, were described in the text as crafty politicians who had manipulated the popular mood and successfully exploited the political system of Tsarist Russia in order to destabilize it. The Soviet state, depicted as the embodiment of the socialist idea, emerges here as a rigid political and economic mechanism. The authors explanation of its structure and its modes of functioning also seems mechanical. Viewing the Soviet state as based on the destruction of the market and on economic overcentralization, Ostrovskii and Utkin argue that the mass mobilization of forced labor consequently became unavoidable. Such mobilization, in turn, was not possible without implementing techniques of total planning and total control, which included the control of thought. Socialism thus becomes synonymous with totalitarianism.38 According to this textbook, socialism offered no alternative versions. But while proving that totalitarian socialism was unavoidable, the authors also argued that this regime was destined to collapse at a certain point. Totalitarian socialism, they maintained, was effective for state development during a period of industrialization. But socialist ideology had been unable to bind society together during the Great Patriotic War (World War II). Instead, traditional patriotic values had become the means for uniting the state and society during the crisis of the war. As a result of the moderation of totalitarianism during Nikita Khrushchevs reign, the regime lost its mobilizing raison dtre. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, socialism gradually exhausted its last resource, namely, the ability

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Vera Kaplan to satisfy the minimal needs of the population. It then lost its attraction for foreign supporters and was no less than doomed.

ThE EmErGEncE Of thE civiLizatiOn ParaDiGm: a variEtY Of intErPrEtivE mODELs Or a nEw hEGEmOnY? History textbooks of the late 1990s adopted various combinations of these new denitions of socialism that had been introduced by the rst generation of post-Soviet texts. In being stripped of its binding status, socialism was gradually incorporated into the new paradigm of civilization that supplanted the theory of socioeconomic formation. In contrast to the notion of formation and its essentially temporal character, the concept of civilization embraced such spatial dimensions of history as territory and geographical environment. Moreover, the civilization-oriented approach put an emphasis on cultural norms, values and ideals while ascribing less signicance to the economic and political aspects of history. Igor Ionov, who is one of the leading adherents of the theory of civilizations in postSoviet historical scholarship, dened the peculiarity of the civilization paradigm in the introduction to his textbook on the history of Russian civilization. According to Ionov, the traditional attitude to power and law is more important for the history of civilization than is the actual form of the state (which is susceptible to change). Likewise, attitudes toward work and property are more important than any particular form of economics (which might assume any number of forms).39 Ionov also coauthored with Valerii Khachaturian a thorough scholarly study on the theory of civilization; in a fashion typical of post-Soviet practices in historical studies, the textbook preceded the scholarly publication.40 Signicantly, the concept of civilization served as the basis of two distinct historical narratives in the new textbooks. The rst, which was typical of textbooks devoted to world history, interpreted history as a steady development of world civilization through the growth and expansion of Western universalism. According to this approach, liberal democracy and market economics are the two institutions that give Western civilization its universal character.41 Totalitarian regimes that practice a planned economy are identied by this narrative with socialism and the East. West and East consequently came to stand for capitalism and socialism, respectively, 96 History & Memory, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 2009)

Vicissitudes of Socialism while the actual distinction was largely based on political and economic factors. This resulted, rst of all, in an obvious conict between mental and physical geographies, since, on the basis of this approach, Australia and Japan belonged to the West and Cuba to the East.42 At the same time, these criteria made the concept of world civilization an essentially inclusive one. According to this model, the East moved closer to the West if its political regimes became more democratic and its economies more market-oriented. Proceeding from this assumption, world history textbooks devote serious discussion to the elevation of the rest of the world to the level of Western civilization.43 This process is dened as modernization by which a policy of qualitative changes is adopted for structuring society around the experience of advanced countries, that is, the experience of the West. Modernization signied progress, which had been an important value in Soviet texts as well. Now, however, postSoviet schoolbooks detached progress from socialism and aligned it with a universal path to the West. This move revised the history of Russia in the twentieth century, transforming it from a history of socialism into a history of efforts (some unnished, others misguided) to modernize the country. Together with this narrative of world civilization, however, another interpretive model evolved which focused on local civilizations and was found most commonly in textbooks of Russian history. Ionovs textbook on Russian civilization presents the most developed expression of this model. It depicts Russia as having a distinctive civilization, situated as it is between Europe and Asia, between the world of progress and modernization, on the one hand, and the world of tradition, in which progress has no value and the boundaries separating past and future are often vague, on the other. Ionov based his denitions of traditionalism and modernization on distinct perceptions of time. Traditional culture, he claimed, was oriented toward the past rather than the future, toward unshakable, stable values rather than peoples needs and interests, toward belief and imitation rather than the logic of proof, toward collective and external modes of control rather than individuality and personal self-control. By contrast, modernization signied for him not only the development of an industrial society but a process by which tradition was overcome and culture was reorientated toward change.44 This juxtaposition of traditionalism and modernization as symbiotic counterconcepts45 made it possible to describe Russian history as 97

Vera Kaplan a hybrid of diverse historical periods and Asian and European paths of development. In turning the course of Russian history into an ongoing choice between alternative civilizations, Ionov proposed a distinctive interpretation of Russias choice of socialism. As he presented this history, Russian governments had continually sought to reorient the country toward the West from the eighteenth century, making Russia a European state by the early twentieth century. By then Russia not only enjoyed the status of a great European power but was emerging as an agent of European civilization in Asia. This state development, however, created distinctive social and cultural problems. While the nobility acquired European education and European values, Asian traits continued to dominate the common peoples attitude to power, law and property. Moreover, the stronger the European inuence over the Russian economy and the countrys culture became, the stronger too was resistance to this inuence. The Russian populace celebrated the values of collectivism and egalitarianism as a counter to Western values of individualism and private property. Such social and cultural conicts provoked by this interaction between traditionalism and modernization resulted in a profound crisis that was signied by the events of October 1917. The Bolshevik revolution reinstated the separation of Russia from Europe. Instead of continuing in its role as an intermediary between East and West, Russia chose to create its own civilization, one that rested on egalitarian values. Building socialism was depicted by Ionov as anti-modern, that is, as a program for strengthening the archaic elements of traditional Russian culture and as a victory of Asian self-isolation. Post-Soviet Russias rejection of socialism appeared, in this perspective, as a path for overcoming the crisis of Russian civilization and returning to Europe.46 Paradoxically, their differences notwithstanding, this variety of narratives remained in relatively peaceful coexistence until the early 2000s due to the multiplicity of textbooks that were used in secondary schools. Discrepancies in the representation of historical events that stemmed from this multiplicity triggered some public controversy about the unpredictability of the national past,47 but generally this situation was perceived as the inevitable cost of the pluralism of interpretations during the rst half of 1990s. Moreover, this variety was compatible with both the political situation of the early 1990s and the new educational philosophy, which ascribed an active role to teacher and pupil in their work with the text98 History & Memory, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 2009)

Vicissitudes of Socialism books. History textbooks, according to this new didactic approach, were supposed to be polyconceptual in order to present rival interpretations of historical events, and they should include plenty of facts in order to give the teacher an abundance of materials to work with. Yet eventually this information overload (informatsionnaia izbytochnost) of the new textbooks and their overly sophisticated structure led to criticism by teachers, who found them too complicated. Furthermore, the diversity of textbooks became criticized by parents and, in hindsight, by pupils. Signicantly, a public opinion survey conducted later, in 2007, among those who had studied in schools in the late Soviet period as well as in post-Soviet times, found that more than half of the respondents (52 percent) considered the conditions typical of Soviet schools, where there had been the same textbook for all, preferable to the post-Soviet educational situation where the teacher was given an opportunity to choose among textbooks. Only 24 percent of former pupils approved of a multiplicity of textbooks, while basically, about 30 percent of respondents suggested that there should have been only one history textbook, which, however, should have presented a variety of opinions; 56 percent of respondents claimed that the state authorities were supposed to control the content of history textbooks.48 Against the backdrop of this disappointment with diversication in history teaching, a tendency toward a counter-reformation in history education evolved in the late 1990s. Since 1997/98 the Ministry of Education has tightened its grip over history teaching. The establishment of a compulsory minimum content of education for secondary schools was an important step in this process, since it provided the Ministry of Education with an excellent benchmark to use in shaping the content of history textbooks.49 The next and very signicant step was the publication in March 2000 of a draft conception of history education in the institutions of general education of the Russian Federation.50 For the rst time the progress of educational reform was severely criticized in this document. Differentiation of history education, once thought to be the main achievement of educational reform, was considered questionable, at best. Numerous theoretical approaches that had replaced vulgar Marxism, the authors of the conception observed, had failed to create a comprehensive theoretical framework for history teaching. Frequent shifts in theoretical approaches were blamed for creating a simplistic transition from a posi99

Vera Kaplan tive to an absolutely negative assessment of the same event. Moreover, they claimed that the diversity of programs and textbooks had led to the absence of any standardized criteria for further textbook development, and they demanded that limits be set on such diversity. The publication of the draft led to an outcry among well-known experts on history education, and this conception never became an ofcial document.51 However, subsequent developments made it clear that the counterreformist steps in history education were proceeding in line with the new educational policy being implemented at the beginning of the millennium. This policy was characterized, in the words of a popular slogan of the time, by the return of the state to the sphere of education. Generally this meant that decisions and practical moves were undertaken at the governmental, not ministerial, level. Thus, in August 2001 the government of the Russian Federation held a special meeting devoted to the issue of modern Russian history textbooks. Both the report of the Ministry of Education and the keynote remarks delivered by Prime Minister Mikhail Kasianov included direct attacks on the diversity in interpretations of national history.52 Similar criticisms were subsequently expressed in President Vladimir Putins political speeches.53 In 2003 Dolutskiis textbook was removed from the federal set of recommended texts, a step commonly seen as politically motivated.54 Changes in the procedure of state authorization of texts were introduced in 2005 and they effectively brought about a decline in the variety of textbooks.55 An important development in this process occurred in 2007, with the publication of a new textbook actually commissioned by the ofce of the president. It was intended to serve as a handbook for history teachers. The authors of this text (who were not explicitly identied) worked under the supervision of A. V. Filippov, whose name was then largely unknown to either historians or educators. Indeed, Filippov has no background in historical scholarship or pedagogy, but he had represented the National Laboratory of Foreign Policy, which was afliated with the ofce of the president.56 The new textbook, entitled The Modern History of Russia, was devoted to the period 19452006, which included the most politically explosive years in contemporary Russian history.57 It marked a signicant departure from the rst generation of post-Soviet textbooks for, in contrast to the texts of the 1990s, which sought to minimize the signicance of the Soviet period of Russian history, Filippovs book argued for the 100 History & Memory, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 2009)

Vicissitudes of Socialism importance of the Soviet era and emphasized continuity, not only between prerevolutionary and post-Soviet Russia, but also between the history of the USSR and contemporary post-Soviet history. The text also shifted the focus back from social and cultural to political aspects of modern Russian history, while closely examining Soviet foreign policy. As a result, the nature of Russian statehood and the countrys geopolitical interests reoccupied a central place in the historical narrative. Relegitimating the Soviet period did not mean, however, returning to Soviet perceptions of socialism. This textbook not only continued to present the post-Soviet de-emphasis on socialism but carried such a program even farther as it deconstructed socialism as a meaningful idiom. The notion of socialism was now turned into a pseudo-concept, one that had served principally as a cover for actual developments while being shorn of any signicance in its own right. Filippovs text thus presented socialist ideology as a kind of red religion with its own creed and martyrs dating from the rst decade of Soviet power. Religious terminology was also used in explaining Gorbachevs perestroika as a communist Reformation and Marxist Protestantism.58 The authors explained how socialist ideology, as a form of faith, had been mobilized as a stimulus for increasing economic growth during the reigns of Stalin and Khrushchev. Under the rubric of the conception of developed socialism it had then served as camouage for Leonid Brezhnevs politics of stability that came at the expense of growth.59 The socialist state, the authors claimed, was merely a version of traditional Russian statehood, whose political characteristics had already been molded during the Muscovite (fteenth to seventeenth centuries) and imperial (eighteenth to early twentieth centuries) periods of Russian history. These characteristics included the centralization of power and resources and rigid administrative control that resulted in the omnipotent status of the head of state, who was able to bend all other political forces to his will.60 The new textbook presented these characteristics as born of Russias huge size and harsh climate, implicitly assigning ideology a marginal role in the history of the state. According to this same logic, the world system (or alliance) of socialist states was depicted as a sphere of Soviet geopolitical interests, while the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics itself was presented as a euphemism for the Russian Empire.61 Signicantly, while using the array of those elements that have been characteristic of the civilization paradigm, the authors of the textbook use the 101

Vera Kaplan idiom of Russian Empire, not Russian civilization, for depicting the place of the Soviet period in the chain of Russian history. While ascribing no meaning to socialism as a theoretical concept, the authors of this textbook use socialism as a dening term for a late phase of Soviet history, delineating the period 196485 as one of developed socialism. The new textbook thus resumes a practice that had been customary during those same decades, but does so now with an ironic implication.62 In being transformed from a metahistorical concept of movement into an auxiliary term of periodization, socialism concluded its role as a basic concept in the narrative of Russian history.

COncLusiOn The change in the notion of socialism in post-Soviet Russian history textbooks vividly demonstrates that theoretical concepts that serve as analytical devices for examining historical events are themselves historical in nature and, as such, are susceptible to change. In the case of the concept of socialism these changes were dramatic indeed and, at some point, engendered the aspiration to produce a new kind of historical discourse endowed with alternative, essentially comparative paradigms, free from domination by one particular conceptual model. An examination of post-Soviet history textbooks, however, has shown that this aspiration has not been realized. The notion of socioeconomic formation that assigned a central role to the concept of socialism was replaced by the no less dominant notion of civilization, which provided a conceptual framework for a universalistic narrative of world civilization and particularistic narratives of local civilizations. The concept of socialism, whose meaning was changed and whose role was reduced dramatically in the post-Soviet historical discourse, was stripped of its binding function and turned into a subordinate element within an evolving civilizational narrative presented and disseminated by contemporary Russian history textbooks. The gradual dismantling of socialism as a central concept of the historical narrative resulted in a proliferation of notions of nation and state. Signicantly, the revitalization of the idea of statehood as the main motif of Russian history led, at some point, to the denition of the Soviet period of history as a particular stage in the cohesive story of the Russian Empire. The ques102 History & Memory, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 2009)

Vicissitudes of Socialism tion why and how the concept of civilization provided fertile ground for the reemergence of a statist and nationalist narrative of Russian history deserves special investigation.

NOtEs
I am grateful to Michael Conno and the anonymous readers of my article for their useful comments and insightful criticism. 1. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck, eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (Stuttgurt: E. Klett, J.G. Cotta, 19721993), vols. 18; Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 1985); idem., The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 2. Quentin Skinner, The Foundation of Modern Political Thought, vols. 12 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); John Pocock, Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (London: Methuen, 1972); James Tully, ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Terence Ball, James Farr and Russell L. Hanson, eds., Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For a comparison between Begriffsgeschichte and the Cambridge Schools methodological approaches, see Melvin Richter, Reconstructing the History of Political Languages: Pocock, Skinner, and the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, History and Theory 29, no. 1 (February 1990): 3870; idem, The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical Introduction (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Hartmut Lehman and Melvil Richter, eds., The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts: New Studies on Begriffsgeschichte (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 1996). I am grateful to Reut Harari for drawing my attention to the useful literature on the Cambridge School. 3. Skinner explained his approach as following: To understand a concept, it is necessary to grasp not merely the meaning of the term used to express it, but also the range of things that can be done with it. This is why, in spite of the long continuities that have undoubtedly marked our inherited patterns of thought, I remain unrepentant in my belief that there can be no histories of concepts but only the histories of their uses in argument. See Quentin Skinner, Reply to My Critics, in Tully, ed., Meaning and Context, 283.

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4. M. V. Ilin, Politicheskii diskurs: Slova i smysly (Political discourse: Words and meanings), Polis, no. 1 (1994): 12740; Idem., Slova i smysly: Opyt opisaniia kliuchevykh politicheskikh poniatii (Words and meanings: An attempt to delineate key political concepts) (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1997); Oleg Kharkhordin, ed., Poniatie gosudarstva v chetyrekh iazykakh (The concept of state in four languages) (St. Petersburg: EUSP Press and Letnii sad, 2002); D. R. Khapaeva, Gertsogi respubliki v epokhu perevodov: Gumanitarnye nauki i revoliutsiia poniatii (Dukes of the republic in the age of translations: The humanities and the conceptual revolution) (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2005); N. E. Koposov, ed., Istoricheskie poniatiia i politicheskie idei v Rossii XIVXX veka (Historical concepts and political ideas in Russia in the 14th20th centuries) (St. Petersburg: EUSP Press: Aleteiia, 2006). 5. The list of relevant literature includes Mikhail Epstein, Relativistic Patterns in Totalitarian Thinking: An Inquiry into the Language of Soviet Ideology, Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, Occasional Paper, no. 243 (Washington: The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1991); Michael S. Gorham, Speaking in Soviet Tongues: Language Culture and the Politics of Voice in Revolutionary Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003); G. Ch. Guseinov, D.S.P.: Sovetskie ideologemy v russkom diskurse 1990-kh (Soviet ideologems in the Russian discourse of the 1990s) (Moscow: Tri kvadrata, 2004); D. M. Feldman, Terminologiia vlasti: Sovetskie politicheskie terminy v istoriko-kulturnom kontekste (Terminology of power: Soviet political terms in historical and cultural context) (Moscow: Rossiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 2006). 6. Sattelzeit was the central term in Begriffsgeschichte; Reinhart Koselleck, its leading theoretician, used this term to describe the period of time from approximately the mid-eighteenth to the midnineteenth century when, he argued, distinctively modern political and social concepts were reformulated or created. See Richter, Reconstructing the History of Political Languages, 4445. 7. Post-Soviet history teaching in general, and the question of history textbooks in particular, have been studied since the early 1990s. The following publications offer a general impression of the main research problems addressed in these studies: Klas-Gran Karlsson, History Teaching in Twentieth Century Russia and the Soviet Union: Classicism and Its Alternative in Ben Eklof, ed., School and Society in Tsarist and Soviet Russia (London: St. Martins Press, 1993), 204223; Catherine Merridale, Redesigning History in Contemporary Russia, Journal of Contemporary History 38, no. 1 (2003): 1328; Joseph Zajda and Rea Zajda, The Politics of Rewriting History: New History Textbooks and Curriculum Materials in Russia, International Review of Education 49, no. 34 (2003): 36384; Vera Kaplan, History Teaching in Post-Soviet Russia: Coping with Antithetical Traditions, in Ben Eklof, Larry Holmes and Vera Kaplan, eds., Educational Reform

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in Post-Soviet Russia Legacies and Prospects (London and New York: Frank Cass, 2005), 24771; Alexander Shevyrev, Rewriting the National Past: New Images of Russia in History Textbooks of the 1990s, in ibid., 27290; and Igor Ionov, New Trends in Historical Scholarship and the Teaching of History in Russias Schools, in ibid., 291308. 8. Elena Lisovskaya and Vyacheslav Karpov, New Ideologies in Postcommunist Russian Textbooks, Comparative Education Review 43, no. 4 (1999): 52243. 9. Reinhart Koselleck, Historical Criteria of the Modern Concept of Revolution, in idem, Futures Past, 40, 4647. 10. Reinhart Koselleck, Semantic Remarks on the Mutation of Historical Experience: Space of Experience and Horizon of Expectation, in ibid., 287. 11. Ibid., 286. 12. Ibid., 288. 13. The term discourse is used here in its instrumental meaning: as a language in use that reects social, epistemological and rhetorical practices. See Victor E. Taylor and Charles E. Winquist, Encyclopedia of Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 101. 14. Miguel A. Cabrera, On Language, Culture, and Social Action, History and Theory 40, no. 4 (December 2001): 82101. 15. The writings of Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit provided the grounding for studies on historical narrative. See Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essay in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); idem, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore and London:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); F. R. Ankersmit, Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historians Language (The Hague:M. Nijhoff,1983); History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor (Berkeley, 1994); idem, Historical Representation (Stanford:Stanford University Press,2002). For a survey of Whites and Ankersmits theories of narrative, see Chris Lorenz, Can Histories be True? Narrativism, Positivism and the Metaphorical Turn, History and Theory 37, no. 3 (October 1998): 30929. A distinctive semiotic approach to historical narrative was suggested by Yuri M. Lotman in Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (London: I.B.Tauris, 1990). 16. Jerzy Topolski, The Role of Logic and Aesthetics in Constructing Narrative Wholes in Historiography, History and Theory 38, no. 2 (May 1999): 2012. 17. The term grand narrative was introduced by Jean-Franois Lyotard in his The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). On the concept in general, see Beatrice Skordilis entry on grand narrative in Taylor and Winquist, Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, 16466.

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18. Aleksandr Kolodin, Ot gosudarstvennoi mifologii k realnomu znaniiu (From state mythology to real knowledge), interview with Deputy Minister of Education V. K. Batsyn, Narodnoe obrazovanie, no. 6 (1995): 10. 19. The issue was rst openly raised as early as 1987 when Voprosy istorii published the results of an analysis of textbooks from the Soviet republics. See Voprosy istorii, no. 12 (1987): 92. As a result of an increase in the teaching hours allocated to national history, the course on national history in Moldavia, for example, received 102 instead of ten hours allowed by the state curriculum. See Kolodin, Ot gosudarstvennoi mifologii k realnomu znaniiu, 11. 20. See the roundtable discussion of March 28, 1990, Istoricheskaia nauka i shkolnoe istoricheskoe obrazovanie (Historical scholarship and historical education in the schools), Prepodavanie istorii v shkole, no. 4 (1990): 13. 21. The authors of this concept included scholars from Moscow State University (M. A. Boitsov, M. A. Maslin, A. P. Shevyrev) as well as schoolteachers (I. E. Ukolova, T. V. Chernikova, T. N. Eidelman). A. P. Shevyrev headed the group on history education. See Prepodavanie istorii v shkole, no. 6 (1989): 76. 22. Kontseptsiia istoricheskogo obrazovaniia v srednei shkole (The conception of historical education in secondary school), ibid., 52. 24. Kolodin, Ot gosudarstvennoi mifologii k realnomu znaniiu, 10. 25. Roundtable discussion, December 2, 1988, Prepodavanie istorii v shkole, no. 2 (1989): 77. 26. Ibid., 80, 88. 27. Kontseptsiia istoricheskogo obrazovaniia, 84. 28. E. E. Viazemskii and B. V. Khavkin, O prepodavanii istorii v shkolakh (On teaching history in schools), Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no. 3 (1991): 225. 29. O prepodavanii kursov istorii i obshchestvoznaniia v obshcheobrazovatelnykh uchrezhdeniiakh Rossiiskoi Federatsii v 1994/1995 uchebnom godu: Bazovye komponenty soderzhaniia kursov obshchestvoznaniia, otechestvennoi i vseobshchei istorii (On teaching courses in history and the social sciences in institutions of general education in the Russian Federation in the 1994/95 school year: Basic components of the courses on social sciences, national and world history), Prepodavanie istorii v shkole, no. 7 (1994): 25. 30. I. I. Dolutskii, Otechestvennaia istoriia, XX vek, Chast 1: Uchebnik dlia X klassa srednei shkoly (Motherland history, the 20th century, Part I: A textbook for the 10th grade of the middle school) (Moscow: Mnemozina, 1994); L. N. Zharova and I. A. Mishina, Istoriia Otechestva, 19001940 (The history of the Motherland, 19001940) (St. Petersburg: Khardford, 1995); V. P. Ostrovskii and A. I. Utkin, Istoriia Rossii, XX vek (The history of Russia, the 20th century) (Moscow: Drofa, 1995). The Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation published a Federal

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Set of Textbooks Recommended for Primary and Secondary Schools for each school year. 31. Dolutskii, Otechestvennaia istoriia, 417. 32. The program of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, cited in the textbook, depicted socialism as a self-governing union of producers associations based on the equality of its members. This view is contrary to that championed by the Social Democrats, who saw socialism as a society based on the public ownership of the means of production where exploitation would be impossible and class division would nally disappear. As Dolutskii noted, Stalin wrote about socialism in 1905 as a promised land while Lenin, in 1917, claimed that socialism was anything but a state capitalist monopoly since it desired to serve all of the people, and therefore was not a capitalist monopoly. See Dolutskii, Otechestvennaia istoriia, 61, 63, 127, 162. 33. Ibid., 170. 34. Ibid., 83. 35. Ibid., 372. 36. Zharova and Mishina, Istoriia Otechestva. 37. L. I.. Semennikova, Rossiia v mirovom soobshchestve tsivilizatsii: Uchebnoe posobie dlia vysshikh i srednikh spetsialnykh uchebnykh zavedenii (Russia in the world union of civilizations: A teaching aid for higher and middle special educational institutions) (Briansk: Kursiv, 1996), 38081. 38. Ostrovskii and Utkin, Istoriia Rossii, XX vek. 39. I. N. Ionov, Rossiiskaia tsivilizatsiia, IXnachalo XX veka: Uchebnik dlia 111 klassov obshcheobrazovatelnykh uchrezhdenii (Russian civilization from the ninth to the early twentieth century: A textbook for the 1st11th grades of general educational institutions) (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1998), 5. For the civilizational approach, see also Victor Shnirelman, Stigmatized by History or by Historians? The Peoples of Russia in School History Textbooks, in this issue, 11316 below. 40. I. N. Ionov and V. M. Khachaturian, Teoriia tsivilizatsii ot antichnosti do kontsa XIX veka (A theory of civilizations from antiquity until the end of the nineteenth century) (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2002). 41. O. S. Soroko-Tsupa et al., Mir v dvadtsatom veke (The world in the twentieth century) (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1996), 56; A. A. Kreder, Noveishaia istoriia, XX vek (Modern history: The twentieth century), 2 vols. (Moscow: Tsentr gumanitarnogo obrazovaniia, 1995), 2:17274. 42. Kreder, Noveishaia istoriia, XX vek, 2:43. 43. Soroko-Tsupa et al., Mir v dvadtsatom veke, 5. 44. Ionov, Rossiiskaia tsivilizatsiia, 125, 31314. 45. I borrow the term counterconcepts from Koselleck, in his discussion of the semantic structures of what he dened as asymmetric counterconcepts (con-

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ceptual oppositions such as the mutually exclusive pair Hellenes and Barbarians, the reciprocically related pair Christians and Heathens, and the most general and inclusive pair Mensch and Unmensch, bermensch and Untermensch). See Reinhart Koselleck, The Historical-Political Semantics of Asymmetric Counterconcepts in idem., Futures Past, 15996, 16465. 46. Ionov, Rossiiskaia tsivilizatsiia, 1619, 3056. 47. The term our unpredictable pastthe title of a book by Iu. A. Poliakov, Nashe nepredskazuemoe proshloe: Polemicheskie zametki (Our unpredictable past: Polemical essays) (Moscow: AIRO-XX 1995)became extremely popular in both the mass media and among historians. 48. Peter Bavin, Shkolnye uchebniki po istoriikakimi im byt? (School textbooks in historywhat should they look like?) (Report on a public opinion survey conducted on July, 19, 2007), Fond Obshchestvennoe mnenie, http:// bd.fom.ru/report/map/d072906 (accessed April 12, 2009). 49. See Prikaz ot 30.06.99 #56 Ob utverzhdenii obiazatelnogo minimuma soderzhaniia srednego (polnogo) obshchego obrazovaniia: Obrazovatelnaia oblast obshchestvoznanie (Directive of 30.06.99 #56 On conrmation of the compulsory minimum of the content of education for secondary schools: Educational eld social sciences), Prepodavanie istorii v shkole, no. 7 (1999): 2426. 50. Proekt kontseptsii istoricheskogo obrazovaniia v obshcheobrazovatelnykh uchrezhdeniiakh Rossiiskoi Federatsii (A draft conception of history education in the institutions of general education of the Russian Federation), Istoriia (History), supplement to Pervoe sentiabria, no. 8 (2000), available at http://his.1september. ru/2000/no08.htm (accessed April 13, 2009). 51. Obsuzhdenie kontseptsii istoricheskogo obrazovaniia v Moskovskoi assotsiatsii prepodavatelei istorii (kratkii otchet), 15 marta 2000 (Discussion on the conception of historical education in the Moscow association of history teachers [brief report], March 15, 2000), Prepodavanie istorii v shkole no. 4 (2000): 4143. 52. Anton Sveshnikov, Borba vokrug shkolnykh uchebnikov istorii v postsovetskoi Rossii: Osnovnye tendentsii i rezultaty (The struggle over school history textbooks in post-Soviet Russia: Main tendencies and results), Neprikosnovennyi zapas 36, no. 4 (2004), http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2004/4/sv10-pr. html#_ftn1 (accessed April 13, 2009); Kaplan, History Teaching in Post-Soviet Russia, 26364. 53. Mikhail Moshkin, Kratkii kurs VVP: Vladimir Putin khochet popast v obektivnye uchebniki istorii (Short course of the VVP: Vladimir Putin wants to appear in objective history textbooks), Vremia novostei, June 22, 2007. 54. Olga Zakharova, Uchebnik istorii: Pravitelstvo v kachestve tsenzora? (History textbook: Government as censor?), Litseiskoe i gimnazicheskoe obrazovanie, no. 3 (2004), http://www.lgo.ru/panorama3-04.htm (accessed April, 13, 2009).

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55. Mona Platonova, Po kakim uchebnikam uchatsia i budut uchitsia nashi deti (From what textbooks our children are learning and will learn), Vecherniaia Moskva, December 21, 2006 56. Anna Kachurovskaia, Istoricheskii pripadok (The paroxysm of history), Vlast, July 16, 2007. 57. A. V. Filippov et al., Noveishaia istoriia Rossii, 19452006 gg.: Kniga dlia uchitelei (The modern history of Russia, 19452006: Teachers handbook) (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 2007). This textbook is also available on-line: http://www. prosv.ru/umk/istoriya/0.html. I cite from the electronic version. 58. Ibid., http://www.prosv.ru/umk/istoriya/1.html#n8; http://www.prosv. ru/umk/istoriya/4.html#n7 (accessed April 13, 2009). 59. Ibid., http://www.prosv.ru/umk/istoriya/2.html#n8; http://www.prosv. ru/umk/istoriya/3.html#n8 (accessed April 13, 2009). 60. Ibid., http://www.prosv.ru/umk/istoriya/1.html#n8. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., http://www.prosv.ru/umk/istoriya/3.html#n3 (accessed April 13, 2009).

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Contributors
MICHAEL CONFINO is Professor Emeritus of History at Tel Aviv University and a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. His publications include Domaines et seigneurs en Russie vers la n du XVIIIe sicle: tude de structures agraires et de mentalits conomiques (Paris: Institut dtudes Slaves, 1963); Daughter of a Revolutionary: Natalie Herzen and the Bakunin-Nechayev Circle (Alcove Press, 1974); and Socit et mentalits collectives en Russie sous lAncien Rgime (Paris: Institut dtudes Slaves, 1991). (mconno@post.tau.ac.il) GABRIEL GORODETSKY is the incumbent of the Rubin Chair for Russian Studies at Tel Aviv University and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. His publications include The Precarious Truce: Anglo-Soviet Relations, 19241927 (Cambridge University Press, 1977; revised reprint in paperback, 2009); Stafford Cripps Mission to Moscow, 19401942 (Cambridge University Press, 1984; revised reprint in paperback, 2002); Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia (Yale University Press, 1999); and Stafford Cripps in Moscow, 19401942: Diaries and Papers (Vallentine Mitchell, 2007). (gabriel.gorodetsky@all-souls.ox.ac.uk) VERA KAPLAN is a lecturer in the Department of History, Tel Aviv University, and a research associate at the universitys Cummings Center for Russian and East European Studies. She has co-edited two volumes, The Teaching of History in Contemporary Russia: Trends and Perspectives (with Pinchas Agmon and Liubov Ermolaeva) (The Cummings Center for Russian and East European Studies, 1999) and Educational Reform in Post-Soviet Russia (with Ben Eklof and Larry Holmes) (Frank Cass, 2005). (vera@post.tau.ac.il)

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