Secondary School History Texts in the USSR: Revising the Soviet Past, 1985-1989

Abstract

T he fictionalized Joseph of Anatolii Rybakov's Children of the Arbat is a man sensitive to history. During 1934, a pivotal year in his consolidation of power, Rybakov's devotes considerable energy to drafting the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course, giving special attention to embellishing his own accomplishments as a revolutionary before 1917. This preoccupation with the past is crudely utilitarian, as he demonstrates one afternoon in his study: Stalin got up from his armchair. A bee was buzzing about his head, close to his ear. He waved it away and it flew off and settled on the table. It crawled toward the ashtray, and he swatted it with a volume by Kliuchevskii.1 Swatting insects with classics while at work on falsifications thoroughly captures the essence of the Stalinist historical legacy. This image conveys the denigration of the tradition represented by Vasilii Kliuchevskii (Russia's most innovative nineteenth-century historian) in favor of the Short Course, the schematic orthodoxy of which defined official truth from its publication in 1938 until Stalin's death-and constrains Soviet historical writing even to this day. Coming to grips with the Stalinist past, of course, transcends the scope of any single literary device, however apt. Rewriting history by no means constituted Stalin's greatest crime, nor did the Short Course decide the full content of official Soviet history for all of the past half-century, even if it strongly influenced the scholarly agenda.2 Moreover, Soviet society has grappled with the legacy of the