Amending Soviet and Russian history in school programs has helped to impose a positive image of Josif Stalin and this conclusion is easily derived – after all, he led the Soviet Union to glorious victory and liberated Europe from the scourge of Nazism.
According to earlier textbooks of the 1990s, Stalin was “a beast, a tyrant, an inept commander” whose battlefield successes were won at the cost of sacrificing millions of young men offered up for cold-blooded slaughter. Stalin, according to those books, headed a ‘criminal regime’.
In 1991, with a new Soviet law – the “Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples” – accusations of collaboration were withdrawn and deportations condemned.
The current text has been co-authored by the Minister of Culture and Putin’s nationalist presidential aide, Vladimir Medinsky. He’s known as a promoter of Soviet ideological indoctrination.
