These three volumes contain the winning works of the All-Russian Historical Research Competitions for upper-grade students, “Individual in History: 20th Century Russia,” held in 1999–2000, 2001–2002, and 2002–2003. These competitions represent attempts to respond to the crisis in history teaching and historical research that began after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.^[1]
Vera Kaplan, Liubov Ermolaeva, and Pinchas Agmon have studied this problem. As Agmon explains, the reforms have led to a “transition from totalitarianism to democracy” and to “humanitarization, humanization and student centered teaching.”^[2] On the one hand, the competitions have shown the evolution of post-Soviet historiography, which, since dropping Marxist interpretations, has started to focus on the everyday life of society.^[3] On the other hand, they have shed light on the different phases of the renewal of history teaching in Russian schools in the past decade. This has included the drawing up of new programs and history curricula; the publication of new materials; and intense debates on the new conception of history teaching in the magazine Prepodavanie istorii v shkole (Teaching History in School). Pupils have thus stopped studying historical facts from the Soviet-era perspective^[4] of “class struggle,” and started carrying out research on the history of everyday life in their families or regions.
These competitions were held after the publication of new history textbooks (A. A. Danilov and
L. G. Kosulina for the 9th grade 1995;^[5]I. I. Dolutskii for the 10th grade, 1994; and V. P. Ostrovskii and A. I. Utkin for the 11th grade, 1995),^[6] which mirrored the process of de-ideologization of history that is typical for post-Soviet academic research. The history of everyday life written by children clearly illustrates one of the main results of the methodological renewal of history teaching in post-Soviet Russia.^[7]
As Kaplan highlights, by “shifting the emphasis away from a political history of great events, some texts actually created a ‘history from below,’ an approach that was quite a novelty for Russian textbooks. In an attempt to avoid the schematization that plagued Soviet history textbooks, authors now sought to recreate an image of a period rather than propose models, schemes and tables by which to study it. Almost all the new textbooks devoted to modern national history included tasks and questions that related directly to the students’ family histories and the history of their towns, thus linking national, personal and local history (kraevedenie). Meanwhile, the focus on social history and the inclusion of elements of historical anthropology developed an empathic, personal relationship with history.”^[8]
The leitmotif of these competitions is definitely the crucial role played by remembrance in individuals’ historical knowledge and in individuals’ relationship to great historical events. The first competition “Individual in History” was organized in March 1999 by the Russian society Memorial, the Council of Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Education, and the Chair of Regional History and Ethnography of the Oral History Center of the Russian State University for the Humanities. The competition was aimed at arousing the interest of upper-grade students in the history of everyday Soviet life based on the memories of the older generation.
The first volume presents the 41 works – out of a total of 1,651 submitted from 425 Russian cities – that won first and second prizes, and some that won third prize. For the jury – composed of Arsenii Roginskii, Sigurd Schmidt, and Irina Shcherbakova – this project implies more than a mere historical knowledge of events: indeed, it works toward fostering the preservation of family and local history. Roginskii declares that this competition is very important for Memorial because no democratic country can be built “without the historical and judicial awareness of its citizens.” Schmidt highlights that often the topics presented are not even studied in school; for Shcherbakova, they demonstrate the role played by Russian history in the culture of the first generation that has grown up in relative freedom. The works deal with “the repressions and collectivization; the Great Patriotic War as well as minor conflicts; and the history of towns, villages, local monuments, cemeteries, and destroyed churches or monasteries. The works differ in genre: from scientific research, to historical work, [and finally] a family saga” (Chelovek v istorii. Vyp. 1. P. 12).
The second volume includes the best 22 out of 2,643 works of the Third All-Russian Historical Research Competition (2001–2002), the main focus of which was recapturing the memories made possible by the merging of different generations. “The 20th century is increasingly distant from the fifteen- and seventeen-year-old generation,” explains Shcherbakova. So the central theme of this collection is the “linking role that teachers play between different generations.” The volume is divided into 10 chapters presenting case studies focused on the crucial problems of Soviet history as reconstructed from letters, personal archives, and interviews: the terror of the Cheka of the 1920s, the orphanages for Spanish children brought up in the Soviet Union, the orphans of World War II, the military battles for Minsk, Kaluga, and Smolensk, the extermination of the Jews, the Partisan movement, the communal apartments (kommunalki) of the 1920s to 1980s, family genealogy, teachers as victims of repressions, the campaign of dekulakization among non-Russian ethnic groups, special deportees, life in Novosibirsk in the 1930s, and the culture of a provincial Soviet sovkhoz.
The thread of memories continues in the final volume reviewed here, representing the results of the Fourth All-Russian Historical Research Competition for upper-grade students (2002–2003). The cover image of the book, showing armored trains, military convoys, and freight trains, and dating back to the 1920s and 1930s, symbolizes the Russian history of the past century. Accordingly, the works deal mainly with the population’s endless traveling and roaming across the huge Soviet territory. Memories are enriched by photographs, letters from the front, and diaries relating memories of deportations to the Gulag camps or to Germany: “this has shown us the real individual, the one who has suffered.” For Roginskii, these works represent a new way of providing historical sources rather than new historical knowledge. Indeed, while in the other competitions pupils tried to reconstruct the “blank pages” of Soviet history, this time they attached great importance to the language of terror and its social role: “the authorities provoked complaints; the authorities forged national hatred by moving the population or by providing privileges for some people and keeping others in semi-primitive conditions; the authorities destroyed the countryside and exacerbated hatred among the peasants; the authorities ruined families and ignited hostilities; the authorities humiliated and terrorized people, cutting them off social life.” On many occasions people reacted to these countless forms of violence with action or words: “in this collection the Soviet Union is presented as a Tower of Babel in which, after all, people try to resume friendship and family relations, and to help others, including their enemies.”
To sum up, these three volumes describe not only the suffering caused by the violence and unfairness of a totalitarian system but also some lesser-known aspects of World War II, attesting to the price paid by the population for the great patriotic victory of the Soviet era. Although all of the collections deal with similar topics, each year increasing attention is devoted to the complexities of oral history as a method that plays a crucial role in both historical knowledge of the most important events of the 20th century and “remembrance education” as one facet of historical learning in the new post-Soviet secondary schools.