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Our series on 30 years since the fall of the Soviet Union. A page of recent history which has become a very sensitive political issue, its teaching, especially from the Stalinist period.
From our correspondent in Moscow,
One Wednesday afternoon in Moscow, a class visiting the city’s gulag museum: “ The first thing you see here at the entrance is what you also see first when dealing with the totalitarian system: doors. These are the doors of ministries, offices, prison doors and labor camps. »
Konstantin Andreev, the head of the museum’s training center, designates thick doors for teenagers, most often made of metal with locks and chains. The class is silent, this is not always the case: ” One day a young man came with his class in a suit, tie and Komsomol pin on his chest, that is to say a pin of the Union of Communist Leninist Youth. I take the guided tour, I talk about Stalin, the camps, and show him his disagreement. I can see it very well, and I spend a lot of energy explaining. After the visit, he came to ask me: “Why do you hate the Soviet regime so much? Why are you talking about it like that?” I looked at his pin and said, “You know, it’s so that you have the freedom to wear this pin or not to wear it.” »
School books to “create patriotism”
Barely 20% to 30% of the 12th graders visiting this museum know what gulag and personality cult were like, says Konstantin Andreev. The responsibility would be to be found in particular in history as it is taught, and in particular since the establishment of new textbooks in 2012, according to the professor of history Elena Dordjieva.
« On the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, for example, it is written that it “made it possible to avoid war between the Soviet Union and Germany”, she explains. But nothing is said about the consequences of this pact on the Baltic peoples, on their deportation. And then there is also a problem with the stated objective of the authors of this manual: to create patriotism. But the trend right now is false patriotism. Patriotism is love of the country, not love of government. To love your homeland, you have to study its history objectively. And for that, we must speak openly about the dark pages of history. »
Last spring, the sanctions for the ” dissemination of notoriously false information about the actions of the Soviet Union during World War II Were up to three years’ imprisonment.
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