Secondary history education is only one of the many ways for a state apparatus to influence and be involved in constructing historical narratives and public memory. Yet, the state-sponsored history...Show moreSecondary history education is only one of the many ways for a state apparatus to influence and be involved in constructing historical narratives and public memory. Yet, the state-sponsored history aspect of compulsory secondary education plays a highly important role considering its target audience - a country's youth - and because of the clear articulation, widespread distribution and compelling moral framework of state-sponsored textbooks. In this thesis, the recent standardisation and nationalisation policy in Russia serves as a clear example of the increase of state control on history education. Adding to the existing state-sponsored history research on Russian secondary textbooks, this thesis approaches state-sponsored history from a historical perspective by examining the historical background of Russian state-sponsored history, while diving into an in-depth case study of one historical event: the revolutionary period of Russia in 1905, also referred to as the Russian Revolution of 1905. The re-evaluation of this short period of time could be summarised by three successive dominant perspectives in Russian state-sponsored history: two ideological perspectives (traditional socialism and Russian patriotism served by Great Russian nationalism) and one perspective characterised by pluralist revisionism that represents the re-evaluation of Russian history education during the 1990s. In regard to the standardisation period since the early 2000s, the state document called Kontseptsiya appeared to function as the cornerstone of the current educational policy, which is focused on instilling patriotism and re-affirming the status of Great Russia, while legitimising authoritarian values is promoted by certain historical interpretations of particularly tsar Nicholas II and Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin. As a final point, the Kontseptsiya included the political motivation to apply a new approach to the history of Russian culture as a continuous process of acquiring a national identity that is formed by its political and socio-economic development, which affirmed the role of state-sponsored history in the Russian state policy of social engineering or cultural reproduction to find a post-communist national identity that could measure up to the great power status of the former Russian Empire and Soviet Union. The conclusion of this historical case study of Russia in the theoretical framework of state-sponsored history leads to the awareness of state control on compulsory history education and raises the question of the desirability of international agreement on a universal basic understanding of history in secondary education.Show less
The trigger of this thesis is the war movie ’28 Panfilovcev’ by director and scriptwriter Andrey Shalyopa, released in Russia in November 2016. The movie is about the heroic story of General...Show moreThe trigger of this thesis is the war movie ’28 Panfilovcev’ by director and scriptwriter Andrey Shalyopa, released in Russia in November 2016. The movie is about the heroic story of General Panfilov’s 28 soldiers of the 316th Rifle Division and their defense of Moscow in November 1941. To mirror the heroic tale of the Battle for Moscow, the first-hand account of battalion commander Baurdzhan Momysh-Uly on the battle near Volokolamsk is used, written down by Russian reporter and writer Alexander Bek in 1943. Two primary sources that represent the October and November fighting in the Battle for Moscow in 1941, but from two different perspectives, a blockbuster movie one and a classic literary one. The research question of this thesis consisted of three questions: how can the nearly collapse of the Soviet state by Unternehmen Barbarossa (June-December 1941) historically be explained? How is its overarching symbol, the heroic story of Panfilov’s 28, presented in the war movie ‘28 Panfilovcev’? How do in comparison contemporary firsthand accounts of Red Army soldiers reflect to this heroic picture? This thesis will examine the heroic story of Panfilov’s 28 from its early roots of a newspaper article to its modern day presentation in a blockbuster movie, catapulted to the mass consumers in the large cinemas of Moscow and Saint Petersburg. The conclusions of this research of the story Panfilov’s 28 and its political use of the past will make a contribution to the academic debate of the disastrous early war months for the Soviet Union in 1941 as well as in understanding the movie ’28 Panfilovcev’ as an example of present day Russian cultural policy.Show less
Making sense of Ukrainian history, let alone its politics, has a never been an easy thing to do, but when history and politics came together in the issue of Holodomor, the matter became utterly...Show moreMaking sense of Ukrainian history, let alone its politics, has a never been an easy thing to do, but when history and politics came together in the issue of Holodomor, the matter became utterly complicated. Known to have been an artificial famine that plagued mainly the southeast of Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine in 1932-1933, Holodomor had emerged at the centre of public debates when the State of Ukraine recognized it as the Ukrainian genocide in 2006. This thesis examines why the understanding of Holodomor transformed into a genocide under President Yushschenko. The famine has always been a controversial issue: it was silenced under the Soviet Union, in the post-Soviet Ukraine it was not much spoken of either. The Ukrainian diaspora, however, deemed it a genocide all along, and awaited its moment to import this matter back into Ukraine. This moment evidently arrived with Yushchenko’s victory in the Orange Revolution. In the following I am trying to understand how the understanding of Holodomor as a genocide manifested itself in Ukraine, and what it meant for the Ukrainian identity. I have approached the issue from three different perspectives: its significance in the reading of first hand accounts of the famine; its popularity with historians and historical narratives; and its role in the political life of Ukraine and nation building. Hereby I have analyzed diaries, historical works, presidential decrees, various secondary literature, many more. Evidently it has become my conclusion that the understanding of Holodomor as a genocide brought little historical significance in the way it was deployed by Ukrainian scholars and members of the diaspora. Instead its “added value” lay with the political claims to a distinct Ukrainian national identity, which had nevertheless failed to prove useful to the Ukrainian public.Show less
This thesis investigates the relationship between the Russian tsarist state and the four most important Russian Christian sects, the Khlysty, Skoptsy, Dukhobors, and Molokans, in the period 1801...Show moreThis thesis investigates the relationship between the Russian tsarist state and the four most important Russian Christian sects, the Khlysty, Skoptsy, Dukhobors, and Molokans, in the period 1801-1881. First the developments of the Russian Orthodox Church and the tsarist state following the Russian Orthodox Church schism (raskol), which gave rise to Russian religious dissent, are discussed, before moving on to an in-depth assessment of the history and beliefs of the four sects mentioned above. In the second part of the thesis the attitudes of the three tsars that ruled Russia between 1801 and 1881, Alexander I, Nicholas I, and Alexander II, are clarified, before the views of the sectarians on the policies of the three rulers are considered. It is then argued that these rulers, and Nicholas I specifically, vilified the sectarians as class of (imaginary) enemies as part of their state formation policies. In practice this meant the (forced) expulsion of many of the sectarians to the fringes of the Russian empire. The sectarians themselves, in turn, developed tools to cope with these conditions, and in some cases in their new role as frontier colonists became the epitome of Russianness in the multi-ethnic regions of the empire. This thesis therefore not only pays attention to the changing political situation of tsarist Russia in the nineteenth century and the state views on sectarianism, but also to the ways in which marginalized groups outside the Russian Orthodox Church reconciled their religious and ethnic identities with the demands of the state.Show less
