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New Manuals Push A Putin's-Eye View In Russian Schools
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That book also suggested that students discuss whether Putin could be considered "authoritarian," a term his domestic and Western critics often use to describe him.
According to the new history manual, Stalin was brutal but also "the most successful leader of the U.S.S.R."
"As for the methods of coercion used toward the ruling bureaucratic elite, the goal was to mobilize the leadership in order to make it effective in the process of industrialization, as well as in rebuilding the economy in the postwar period," the manual states, while providing few details on the scale and horror of Stalin's totalitarianism. "This task was fulfilled by means of, among other things, political repression, which was used to mobilize not only rank-and-file citizens but also the ruling elite."
To historian Nikita Sokolov, the manual is so equivocal on Stalin's terror that "his crimes are being taken into the shadows."
"A very dangerous thing is happening," said Sokolov, co-author of the book "Choosing Your Own History."
"They want to take us back to unified thinking. The president and the presidential administration believe we lack the national self-confidence to confront and debate the past."
But Vladislav Golovano, a middle school teacher in the Siberian republic of Yakutia, disagreed, saying, "Our history should not be cause for self-flagellation," according to the Kremlin transcript of Putin's post-conference meeting with teachers and academics.
Putin told the group that "we must not allow others to impose a feeling of guilt on us," according to the transcript. "We do have bleak periods in our history, just look at the events starting in 1937," he said, referring to the beginning of the Stalinist atrocities known as the Great Terror. "And we should not forget those moments of our past."
The president went on to say that "in any event, we have never used nuclear weapons against civilians, and we have never dumped chemicals on thousands of kilometers of land or dropped more bombs on a tiny country than were dropped during the entire Second World War, as was the case in Vietnam. We have not had such bleak pages as was the case of Nazism, for example."
