The Great Patriotic War in Russian history textbooks.
The Great Patriotic War in Russian history textbooks.

Summary/Abstract: The topic of this article is presenting how the Great Patriotic War (GPW) is depicted in Russian national history textbooks. Here, I consider textbooks not only as a source of knowledge about the past times, but first and foremost as a tool to create the state’s historical policy. I examine the GPW, in turn, as a fundamental myth of the Russian society which—without any doubt—constitutes one of the main pillars of identity of modern Russians. Another subject of this study is the changes in Russian education that took place in 2013-2015, that is during the presidency of Vladimir Putin. In so doing, I focus primarily on the creation of the Concept of a new educational and methodological complex for teaching national history and the introduction of new national history textbooks (the idea of the so-called “single textbook”). I strive to show in the article that the picture of the GPW in the new textbooks is mainly based on success—of the Red Army, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Soviet nation.

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