Russian Education Minister Sergei Kravtsov, during a visit to the region of Karachai-Cherkessia this month, agreed to revise a section of a new high-school history textbook that had provoked a stormy reaction across the North Caucasus, the head of the region, Rashid Temrezov, wrote in a September 23 post on Telegram.
The new textbook was coauthored by nationalist presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky, who served as culture minister in 2012-20, and has been criticized for emulating Soviet practices of ideological indoctrination. Among other things, the widely criticized textbook minimizes Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's brutal deportations of many ethnic minorities -- including Chechens, Karachais, Ingush, Balkars, Kalmyks, Meskhetian Turks, Crimean Tatars, and others -- from their traditional homelands as collective punishment for allegedly collaborating with Nazi German occupiers during World War II. The result was a demographic catastrophe in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed and an enduring historical trauma.
The accusations of collaboration were officially withdrawn and the deportations condemned with the 1991 passage of the Soviet law on the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples. In 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin also signed a decree on the "complete rehabilitation the repressed nations."
Nonetheless, the textbook's single paragraph on the topic repeats the Stalinist accusations of treason, saying the deportations were carried out "on the basis of cases of collaboration with the occupiers."
As a result of the collective punishment, "not only bandits and collaborators were repressed, but many innocent people as well," the textbook concedes. "The deportees endured many misfortunes and depravations. Justice was restored to them after [Stalin’s death in] 1953." The text then compares the deportations to the U.S. wartime internment of Japanese Americans.
"A working group comprising the heads of all the regions whose peoples were repressed and under the guidance of the Education Ministry has already been working for more than a week on this matter," Temrezov wrote. Its views "have been conveyed to the author of the textbook, Vladimir Medinsky, who has agreed with them…and expressed a willingness to correct it."
Salt On Old Wounds
Since the academic year began on September 1, the new textbook has been roundly condemned in the North Caucasus.
Ali Totorkulov, chairman of the Russian Congress of Peoples of the Caucasus, denounced the book for spreading "old Stalinist slander" and "once again insulting millions of Russian citizens who lost from 30 to 50 percent of their populations in the deportations and at the front [in World War II]." He described it as "a land mine placed under the unity of the peoples of Russia."
"Every year we commemorate this solemn event, remember the criminal deportation, and mourn the innocents who were destroyed," he wrote. "Why are they pouring salt on these wounds?"
In Ingushetia, the TsORI civic organization urged the regional legislature to investigate the textbook for allegedly "inflaming ethnic enmity" and to form a standing body to review educational materials in the future.
Beslan Tsechoyev, a former mayor of Magas, the capital of Ingushetia, wrote on Instagram that the textbook was "offensive and unjust" and called on Medinsky to apologize.
In Chechnya, regional parliament head Magomed Daudov wrote on September 23 that the textbook had "caused a wave of outrage among representatives of the repressed peoples of the U.S.S.R." Kremlin-backed Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov had ordered the removal of Medinsky's textbook from the schools, he added.
Daudov's post was later deleted without explanation.
