May 9, the Victory Day, is the biggest holyday in Russia. A holyday also for families and children. Who, however, learn a different story.
Let’s start with the name. Because what the world knows as the World War II, in Russia is remembered as the Great Patriotic War. A name that says it all.
And indeed, there is a lot of patriotism in this celebration, from the great parade on the Red Square in Moscow, to the gadgets that go sold out already days before: Red Army flags, Red Star caps, mini Military uniforms for children.
There is something beyond the holyday itself. The celebration of the end of a war that has caused something like 25 million deaths in Russia is turning from a moment of remembrance of an immense collective tragedy to the pure and simple exaltation of the Soviet Union’s war success.
And history is changing. Beginning with what children learn at school.
Rewriting History
Last year, three textbooks for schools were amended by the Ministry of Education because they put too much emphasis on the USSR pact with Nazi Germany, unlike the approved textsbooks. Since then, virtually all the textbooks for Russian schools have adapted to the model, the “official” history book published by the former state publisher, Prosveshchenje, whose narrative focuses almost exclusively on the heroic sacrifice of Soviet soldiers.
In an bright article appeared on the Moscow Times, Ola Cichowa remembers that teaching history has never been easy in Russia, where the archives are secret and there is no clear debate on the Soviet past.
For Russians the Second World War didn’t begin like the rest of Europe in 1939, but in 1941 with the Nazi invasion. All that has happened before is a limbo that the Kremlin has an interest in barking, beginning with the non-aggression pact between the Urss and Nazi Germany. Putin himself, during a meeting with Angela Merkel in Poland in 2015, said that “the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact made sense for ensuring the security of the Soviet Union.”
Millions of dead
Therefore, textbooks have sided with the mainstream narrative. The most popular history textbook glosses over the secret protocols of the Pact in which Germany and USSR carved up Eastern Europe. It never uses the word “aggression“, but goes on to say that, “The Red Army was given orders to cross the Western border and liberate western Ukraine and western Belarus”. And when it comes to the Baltic states, it says the invasion and the annexation of the three countries took place as a result of democratic elections.
The same treatment with velvet gloves is reserved to Stalin’s crimes. Not even a word on Holodomor, the famine induced in Ukraine that made millions of people die out of starvation.
The bloodthirsty dictator who because of his paranoia caused the death of tens of millions of people; the man who did not hesitate to let his son die in the hands of the Nazis; the one who brought the Gulag system to the efficiency of the Great Terror, is increasingly being portrayed as the most patriotic among Russian patriots. But it is clear that under the ideological war the Kremlin is fighting today against ghosts of fascism in Europe, the memory of the Great Patriotic War can not be ruined by some details.
@daniloeliatweet
May 9, the Victory Day, is the biggest holyday in Russia. A holyday also for families and children. Who, however, learn a different story.
