Vladislav Kononov, executive secretary of the state history textbook series and an adviser in the presidential administration, gave an interview to Kommersant in which he answered questions about the “ideology” of the unified textbook. Key statements:
Different history textbook series “were beneficial to publishing lobbies.” Variation among textbooks, he said, “harms the unity of the educational space.” “We do not have another history, just as each of us does not and cannot have other parents <...> We do not have an alternative multiplication table.”
Starting next school year, the unified state history textbook series will be introduced everywhere. Four history textbooks for high school, he said, “we made in three months.” “The first textbooks were sincerely and fiercely criticized only by foreign agents <...> Well, mainly foreign agents.”
“No factual errors were found in the textbooks.” At the same time, he said, constant editing of textbooks is normal practice. “This process is endless in a good sense.”
In his view, the Unified State Exam is secondary to the content of the subject itself. “The exam is not keeping up with the textbook. It will be reconfigured.” For students who answered the exam incorrectly because of the textbook, “there are appeals, there are various ways to prove one’s point of view.” He also called the federal history curriculum secondary, since it does not align with the textbooks: “The program requires revision. This falls under the authority of the Ministry of Education.” “Ultimately, the moment will come when there are no contradictions anymore and everything corresponds to everything else.”
Kononov called Medinsky’s programmatic article the “theoretical foundation” of the state textbooks. “The entire ideological context of the textbooks is to treat the past of the fatherland with respect and love <...> If you begin to hate the history of the country, then you have no future as its citizen.”
“There is a clear, understandable criterion for evaluating a statesman: what he came into office with and what he left with. If Gorbachev became the head of the Soviet empire, and then the empire ceased to exist, draw your own conclusions.”
“The last decades have not yet had time to become history,” but “history lessons should give an idea of what is happening right now”: “What exactly might a parent disagree with there? With the goals and objectives of the special military operation? <...> Why should a state school transmit a point of view different from the state one at all?”
In his opinion, a mandatory history exam for everyone is unnecessary, but those who want to study humanities should “take not this synthetic social studies, but the history exam.”