The Great Patriotic War in the History Textbooks of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus: Modern Discussions and Methodological Problems

Abstract

In the modern world, textbooks, manuals, and school programs are critical tools of the state policy of memory. The Great Patriotic War has become one of the central myths of Russia and one of the pillars of Russian identity and therefore has taken a significant place in these tools. This article aims to review the literature on the Great Patriotic War in Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian history textbooks issued between 2005 and 2013. The main trends in the research methodology are highlighted: its movement towards the problems of social and political sciences, linguistics, and psychology and the growing interest in modern methodological approaches to the analysis of educational texts. The feature that the pieces have in common is the desire to understand the mechanisms of the memory policy and the formation of collective memory in textbooks, the development of the methodology of narrative analysis of textbooks towards covering the entire spectrum of methodological and didactic tools, deepening their analysis and improving the quality of research. The development of methodology in this field can be assessed as unsatisfactory: researchers often have to develop their model of textbook analysis, and the terminology and models used differ significantly from each other. The methodological perspective we have proposed is based on a synthesis of quantitative and qualitative methods and can be a structural basis for constructing a textbook analysis model. Consequently, we have developed a mechanism for creating tables of content analysis, lists of personalities in history textbooks, their historical events and phenomena and major historical events and phenomena, and working with methodological and didactic tools.