ANTI-UKRAINIAN MYTHS IN CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN SCHOOL HISTORY TEXTBOOKS FOR GRADES 8–11

Abstract

The impetus for this article was an analysis of Vladimir Putin’s annual press conferences. The misleading statements found there suggested that similar politicized narratives might appear in school textbooks, which shape young people’s understanding of history, culture, science, and related subjects. If such textbooks contain false claims or politicized assessments, they may distort historical consciousness.
This article examines and analyzes myths in contemporary Russian school textbooks that were prepared and published after the beginning of Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine. The study is important in the context of the information war that affects many spheres of life; here we focus on the field of education. Three thematic blocks were studied: myths of the pre-Soviet period; myths of the 20th century up to early 1991; and myths concerning the history of Ukraine in 1991–2024. Four 2023 editions of history textbooks were selected for analysis (for grades 8, 9, 10, and 11). Both long-standing myths and relatively new narratives that began to appear in textbooks after the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian war were examined, including: the myth of “Novorossiya”; the claim of a “civil war” in Ukraine at the beginning of the 20th century; denial of the Holodomor (the 1932–1933 genocide); the portrayal of Ukrainian nationalists as agents of Nazi intelligence services; the narrative of Crimea’s “return to its native harbor” in 2014; the beginning of the occupation of Donetsk and Luhansk regions; and the false framing of the 2022–2024 events as a “special military operation.”
This analysis of contemporary Russian history textbooks leaves ample scope for further research. The authors do not attempt to cover every possible myth, but rather focus on the most entrenched and the most recently emergent narratives related to the onset of the contemporary Russo-Ukrainian war.