New Manuals Push A Putin's-Eye View In Russian Schools

The manuals, which run to several hundred pages each, will serve as guides for the drafting of new textbooks to be introduced in September 2008.

"We are developing a national ideology that represents the vision of ourselves as a nation, as Russians, a vision of our own identity and the world around us," said Leonid Polyakov, a professor of political science at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and editor of the social studies manual.

Polyakov was speaking at a meeting Putin held with high school teachers and academics after the teachers' conference last month.

"Teachers will then be able to incorporate this national ideology, this vision, into their practical work in a normal way and use it to develop a civic and patriotic position," Polyakov said, according to a Kremlin transcript.

Russian officials said the guides would not be mandatory for teachers and insisted that they did not represent an attempt to impose a single version of history.

"We must see the dark moments of history and its problems," Surkov said at the conference. "But I presume that it would also be wrong to go as far as to completely deny the successes and achievements of our great country. . . . Without answering the questions of who we are, how we should live and what we are living for, effective political work and an effective economic system are impossible."

Some educators said that any material that comes with a Kremlin stamp of approval is likely to sideline other curricular material.

"The scariest thing, and the fact that makes me really sad, is that these manuals and any new textbooks will be seen not as a recommendation or a choice for teachers, but as an order," said Galina Klokova, who specializes in the teaching of history at the Russian Academy of Education.

The author of the "Sovereign Democracy" chapter in the history guide said as much when he responded on his blog to criticism from teachers that parts of the book were little more than crude Kremlin propaganda.

"You will teach children in line with the books you are given and in the way Russia needs," wrote Pavel Danilin, a 30-year-old editor at the Effective Policy Foundation, a consulting firm that works for the Kremlin and is headed by Kremlin loyalist Gleb Pavlovsky. "To let some Russophobe [expletive], or just an amoral type, teach Russian history is impossible. It is necessary to clear the filth and if it doesn't work then clear it by force."

The teaching of history has always been a charged subject in post-Soviet Russia, especially when it touches on the rule of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, whose purges led to the deaths of millions and the notorious gulag system of labor camps.

A textbook that took an unflinching look at Stalin's policies, including his nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany in 1939 and the mass deportation of Chechens and other Caucasians during World War II, was pulled by education officials in 2003.