Putin Commences Soviet-Style Brainwashing of Russian Youth

The United States has been actively planning a nuclear attack on Russia since 1945. The Marshall Plan was a dependence scheme benefitting American capitalists. The Truman Doctrine was nothing but U.S. imperialism. NATO is nothing but an offensive alliance against Moscow. These are just a few examples of the “truths” included in a new “history textbook” unveiled for Russian students this year.

The fresh set of Kremlin-approved narratives about Russian history post-World War II are a crucial part of Putin’s effort to shape how young generations of Russians think about the West and the United States. The 448-page volume paints America as the world’s great villain since the start of the Cold War, further describing “the return of our historical lands into the Federation” as “the most important event in modern history.”

Education Minister Sergei Kravtsov formally introduced the textbook in August, with some 650,000 copies quickly distributed to 11th-grade students – the final year of Russian high school.

Russian historian Nikita Sokolov, the author of 28 original articles and books on actual Russian history, called the state-approved textbook “an excessively swollen propaganda brochure.” Sokolov added that the textbook underscores one of the Russian society’s biggest problems – a failure to adequately educate students.

Another Russian historian, Dr. Ivan Kurila, told this author that the new textbook wrongly imposes the idea that the government has always played the primary role in history. In doing so, it violates the three guiding principles of any good textbook: that history should be about how people actually lived; that history cannot be centered on one entity, like the government in Moscow; and that textbooks should teach students differing viewpoints, and that sometimes those viewpoints cannot end in compromise.

Vladimir Medinsky, a propaganda aide to Russian leader Vladimir Putin who served as culture minister from 2012 to 2020, is a co-author of the textbook and described the sections from the 1970s to the present as “thoroughly reworked.”

The result is that the new textbook mirrors versions used in the Soviet Union during the depths of the Cold War, when pupils were forbidden to challenge the state-approved narratives and the truth was actively concealed.

Like their peers before 1991, Russian students will now learn that every decision made by the Soviet Union during the Cold War was to stop nuclear conflict, rather than instigate it.

America is, of course, the primary enemy in this story. “The Second World War had not yet ended, and the United States was already developing plans to invade the territory of the USSR and bomb Soviet cities with nuclear weapons,” the textbook reads.

The textbook also flips true history on its head and claims that the Soviet Union “supported the national liberation movements in Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe to protect them from the U.S.-imposed global colonial system.” Of course, the reality is exactly the opposite.

Russian students will learn that the Soviet government was always correct, even when it perpetrated seemingly heinous crimes against its own people.

For instance, the textbook states that Stalin’s imprisonment and execution of POWs returning from Germany at the end of World War II was justified because most people accepted harsher punishments (“Such measures found understanding in society”).

As for dissidents imprisoned for calling attention to Moscow’s human rights abuses, the textbook says it was understandable because the Communist Party had to address the terror scare: “State security agencies observed the West patronizing the dissidents. The growing threat of terrorism in the West rationalized this surveillance.”

The textbook even incredibly claims that the famines of the late 1940s – a direct result of the Soviet regime’s politicization of agricultural science, a phenomenon known as Lysenkoism – “made people even stronger and more united.”

In some cases, the textbook is so divorced from reality that it is even in conflict with prior statements from Vladimir Putin himself on past mistakes of the U.S.S.R.

Earlier this year, Putin told a reporter that the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and 1960s were wrong. “We acknowledged long ago that part of the Soviet policy was mistaken and only led to tension in relations. One must not do anything in foreign policy that directly contradicts the interests of other peoples,” he said.

However, the new textbook teaches that the Soviet regime had a “justified fear that the Western spy agencies were the catalyst for the Hungarian crisis led it to dispatch troops to Hungary and aid the authorities to suppress the uprising.”

Predictably, President Ronald Reagan is demonized as applying “secret directive pressure on Western countries to reduce economic cooperation with the Kremlin.”

The last part of the new textbook is devoted to the war in Ukraine, with the authors describing the conflict as a “battering ram” being used by the West to destabilize Russia. Ukraine is portrayed as an “ultranationalist state” that is a direct threat to Russian citizens.

Many Western observers have expressed fears that Putin’s ultimate goal is to recreate the Soviet Union. At the very least, it’s now clear that he has revitalized the Soviet propaganda machine.

Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.