The Image of the Western Neighbor: The History of Poland in Tenth–Seventeenth Centuries in Russian History Textbooks

Abstract

Abstract Marc Ferro stressed that the images from school history might become fixed in memory for the whole life. The history of Poland has a vital place in Russian school textbooks. Russia and Poland have been long-standing neighbors and their relations were not simple in the past. Poland was an important transmission channel of information and experience from Europe to Russia. The Poles played an important role in the construction of Russian identity as one of the key Others. However, the Poles were not considered in Russia as one hundred per cent representatives of the West, but rather as close western neighbors. The history of Poland is regarded as a process associated with the formation of the Russian state. The history of Poland in the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries appears in the textbooks only relating to foreign policy events which involved Russia. Some narratives of the textbooks emphasize that the development of the peoples of Eastern Europe led to a rivalry of Western and Eastern Christianity. The textbooks clearly have a bias towards the history of nations of Western Europe.