Russian President Vladimir Putin (center) at a meeting with delegates of the Russian Conference of Social Sciences Teachers at his residence near Moscow on June 21, 2007. Also pictured are Larisa Gazalova (right), a teacher of history from Vladikavkaz, and Alexander Chubaryan (left), the director of the Institute of General History of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Photo: ÈÒÀÐ-ÒÀÑÑ
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Don't Wait for Favors from History
// Russian President Instructs Social Sciences Teachers
Russian President Vladimir Putin met yesterday with the delegates at the All-Russian Conference of Social Sciences Teachers. Before the press left the president and the teachers on their own to continue the discussion, Kommersant special correspondent Andrei Kolesnikov was on hand to hear some of the philosophical thoughts that Mr. Putin had to share with the delegates.
The twenty-six delegates arrived at the presidential residence outside of Moscow around an hour before their meeting with the president of Russia was due to begin. Piling out of a bus that had drawn right up to the door, they hurried into the guest house as if they were afraid that they might already be a bit late.
Ten minutes late, however, they began to timidly pop their heads one by one out of the door of the residence, drawn by the bright sunshine in the courtyard.
In fact, the stern presence of the president was the one who ended up running late.
I asked one of the delegates, Ivan Vnukov, a teacher from Moscow, whether he likes the new history and social sciences textbooks. Many teachers are objecting to their contents, despite what I'm sure is their desire to hold the idea of patriotism as close as possible to their hearts.
"There is something that needs to be done, of course," acknowledged Ivan Vnukov. "A textbook needs to be colorful, for example."
"Anything else?"
"In general, my impression is positive. After all, in the end someone needs to start working out ideology from above… I see that you like the phrase 'from above'… Well, that's understandable… But anyway, someone should…"
"There are a lot of defects," signed Svetlana Shubenina, a teacher of history and social sciences from Tyumen. "But you understand that for us, these textbooks are still a safety net…"
I grasped that the teachers are feeling pretty unsure of themselves. And the meeting with the president was also obviously a safety net. They were hoping to hear some important words about life, politics, and fate – and to remember them.
And hear them they did.
Mr. Putin told them that the existing textbooks "sometimes abstractly and, lightly speaking, contradictorily illuminate events… The textbooks are lagging behind the pace of life!"
And should, obviously, overtake it.
"And it's too bad," continued Mr. Putin. "Modern Russian society needs deep ideological investigations. Unfortunately, that is often subordinated to the demands of the moment, to the current situation. We don't need to act in an opportunistic manner; we need deep, fundamental knowledge."
His words had not yet given the teachers what they so desperately needed – a firm moral and ideological orientation. In fact, it was confusing the already complicated situation in which they found themselves after it emerged that modern historians have more than one point of view on current events and that the only thing linking these points of view together is the understanding that the events are historic.
"There's mush in society, and there's mush in teachers' heads," said the president to the teachers.
The teachers, who were listening attentively, readily agreed with him. Before each of them lay tidy stacks of methodological literature that they had intended to use during their conversation with the president. The book on the table in front of Leonid Polyakov, a teacher from the Higher School of Economics, was "President Putin's Plan." Clearly, Leonid Polyakov, to whom Mr. Putin yielded to the floor after finishing his own remarks, intended to give the president a rundown of its contents.
But then I realized that a new font of quotations was gushing forth right in front of us.
"You are right," emphasized Leonid Polyakov, "there's mush in everyone's heads! Speaking in Cold War terms (this obviously being the most accurate characterization of the current situation) we have ideologically disarmed ourselves. In 1990-1991, we rejected Marxism and communism like so many scientific theories."
It was difficult to tell from Mr. Polyakov's face whether he was sorry about that or whether he was trying to be glad about it. It became clear from his subsequent remarks that the first possibility was much more likely.
"And what did we get instead?" he continued. "We got some shaky, abstract ideology of universal values! We adopted the words 'freedom,' 'democracy,' 'market,' 'human rights,' 'civil society'… It's just like giving children alphabet blocks but not teaching them how to spell words… That's how they were given to us, and so far we've been stacking them and have gotten into this situation, where someone is looking at us from a distance…like we're in school…or not even in school, but in kindergarten!"
I later checked whether Mr. Polyakov, as it said on the list of participants in the meeting, is really chairman of the department of political science at the Higher School of Economics. What I found confirmed my worst fears: yes, he is.
"Take an example from that same democracy," he continued. "They said to us: you have rejected communism and are building democracy, and we're going to judge you on when and how you build it! We need to change that point of view and develop our own language and understanding of the fact that the principles of democracy are universal…i.e., Russian political culture… Without that adjustment, we won't get anywhere…"
During his speech I had been trying to make sense of what he was saying and maybe even interpret it in Mr. Polyakov's favor. Maybe Mr. Polyakov was saying all of this not because he really thought that way, but because he thought that's what Vladimir Putin wants to hear. But I couldn't really believe that, because Mr. Polyakov didn't give me a single reason to. His voice got more sonorous and even more sincere as he continued to speak.
"We students!" he said, with a bitter smile on his lips. "How much can we take?! We, a country, a huge country that has done the impossible, we're all in school, and anybody from 'Freedom House' can put a check mark by our name and say, 'you're in 161th place!'"
Towards the end of his speech, Mr. Polyakov moved on to the constructive part of his remarks.
"In essence, what kind of ideology are we creating?" he asked, clearly all torn up by the knowledge that he had been required to take up this difficult and thankless task only because no one could do it better than he and if he didn't do it, no one else would. "A national ideology!"
Mr. Polyakov considers it natural to extend that into a "national patriotic" ideology, the foundations of which, as he acknowledged, have already been formulated by the commander-in-chief himself. And it was obvious that Mr. Polyakov was grateful to him for doing so.
But Mr. Putin was also grateful to Mr. Polyakov.
"You are right, of course," he said, "that some are in the position of teachers, that is true. Which means that these people are appropriating the right to teach and want to continue that…"
No names were mentioned, but everyone knew to whom he was referring. These people, desperate, it seems, to teach us even just one thing from Mr. Polyakov's list and tired of waiting for us to teach ourselves, have decided at the very least to install their missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic.
"No one can take away from us our distinctive national character, our traditions!" declared Vladimir Putin with the look of a man being deprived of those things at that very moment while beating at the villains' hands and condemning them: "And in that sense, we do have something to learn! These traditions are at the genetic level… And our religions are adapted to exist in a single territory and under a single sky… In essence, tolerance is in our blood…"
"It is important for our students to perceive the link of times and lands," said Oksana Gaman-Golutvina, one of the authors of a new modern history textbook. "History punishes a failure to learn its lessons… Whoever controls the past controls the present and the future… As everyone knows, the battle of Waterloo was won on the athletic fields of Eton… We need our own Etons…"
"I would ask that these foreign molds be left behind," replied Mr. Putin sharply, "with regard to elite education. I immediately…feel a sense of the inaccessibility of that education…"
It was already understood that any comparison of Russia with the West irritates the Russian president, so it had been an unwise move to make.
"I have another comment," continued the Russian president, "regarding what you have already said, which I will tell you once the press has left…"
The delegates smiled understandingly, and I reflected on the fact that there are still things that the president of Russia is ashamed to say in front of journalists. Or maybe it's the other way around: there didn't used to be such things, and now there are.
In any case, it was even more surprising for me to contemplate what thoughts the president could possibly be hesitating to express. After all, he had already calmly said things that he should have been ashamed of.
"Many people writing our textbooks receive foreign grants," said the president in the same irritated tone. "They dance whatever jig ordered by the people holding the purse strings!"
The delegates became animated. Within a few minutes, they were all competing to question the respectability of publishers who print books like "We'll Take the [Russian] National Exam Without a Problem!" and "24 Hours Until the Exam." They talked about labels that certain historians-for-hire are selectively gathering special facts to fit…
"This leads to confusion among children!" cried Marina Yerokhina, an associate professor at the University of Pskov.
Vladimir Putin, who, unlike the delegates, probably remembered that the press was still in the room, said, "still, today we need to not impose the point of view that the authorities consider correct… We need to help students formulate their own points of view…"
I am sure, however, that it will be very difficult to resist the temptation to give that kind of help.
Vladimir Putin illustrated his thoughts with examples. In his opinion, if "it were written that Great Britain suffered 300,000 casualties in WWII, and we suffered 30 million, then a historian could write whatever he wants in textbooks and draw whatever conclusions he wants…" "Factual material needs to be laid out grammatically," he said. In other words, Vladimir Putin called on historians to work on sources with a the care of a jeweler rather than clumsily.
His words found a warm echo in the hearts of the delegates.
"Children desperately need a positive present and a positive past!" exclaimed Tsarytsino Educational Center head Yefim Rachevsky. "And they need the truth!"
It appeared that he had put an impossible task before the assembled delegates. But that was only at first glance. Mr. Rachevsky told everyone how this problem can be resolved using examples from his school.
"They were studying traffic jams on Kashirskoye Shosse, where we're located," he said. "We took satellite pictures from Google, counted everyone, came up with a model… The prefect then gave us a bus!"
"After that?" asked one of the delegates.
"Of course!" laughed the director.
The moral of the story was that something positive can be found even in a situation as hopeless as traffic jams on Kashirskoye Shosse.
"But the traffic jams didn't decrease?" asked Mr. Putin, who clearly didn't need the positive as much as the rest of the participants in the meeting.
"We need positive instructions!" concluded Mr. Rachevsky.
Vladislav Golovanov, a teacher of history and social sciences from Yakutia, tried to illuminate the point: "For me, history is a living and flowering nature reserve! But at some point the wardens who were guarding it left."
He paused theatrically to give everyone a moment to appreciate the metaphor. The delegates gradually began to laugh.
"Continue!" cried Mr. Putin in the same theatrical tone, jolting him into action.
It emerged that poachers had taken over the nature reserve. And now the occasional student approaches Mr. Golovanov to ask whether the USSR really attacked fascist Germany.
"The government needs to get back to its nature reserve!" continued Mr. Golovanov. "How much can we flagellate ourselves?! A child needs to feel that he is part of a winning team! Even small children are cheered by the positive!"
Mr. Putin answered Mr. Golovanov, but it seemed to me that he was really just using the moment to say something that was on his mind.
"Not only does democracy not contradict the idea of the state," he declared, "it is a means of organizing the state… Yes, there were terrible pages in our history, remember 1937… We cannot allow ourselves to forget that… But in any case, we did not use nuclear weapons against a civilian population… We did not pour chemicals all over people… We cannot allow guilty feelings to be foisted upon us! Let them take a look at themselves first!
Apparently, it seemed to me, he had decided after all to say what he had been planning to save for later, after the journalists had left the room. He just couldn't contain himself any longer.
Andrei Kolesnikov
All the Article in Russian as of June 22, 2007
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