Stalin's History Curriculum

Conveniently for Stalin, a reform of the history curriculum would not only improve the student’s education about their mother country, it would also allow Stalin to impose his ideology and his heroic character on the students so that they would become passionate and supportive of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union as a whole. One of the primary methods of reforming the Soviet History curriculum was through the development of a new history textbook that would replace the old one, as this was one the sources of Stalin’s primary criticism of the Bolshevik textbooks. Thus, with the mission of developing a new history textbook to be used in Soviet schools, the Politburo, which was the executive committee for the Central Committee of the Communist …show more content…
For example, he deleted the passage stating that Ivan ordered the massacre of Kazan’s population and over emphasizing the accomplishments of Ivan and Peter. Moreover, these tsars weren’t glorified only in the textbook; throughout the Communist propaganda system, Stalin ensured that Ivan IV and Peter the Great were portrayed exclusively in a very positive light, despite Soviet historian’s, Militsa Nechkina, critique that honouring Ivan the Terrible as such was reminiscent of ‘bourgeois historiography’. However, Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great were very significant for Stalin. Robert Tucker, Stalin’s biographer, believed that Stalin modeled his leadership style and the policies he evoked on Ivan and Peter’s policies. In fact, Ivan’s Livonian Wars (1558-1583), an expansionist policy to control the Baltic Sea through the Livonian Code and gain access to Western Europe, at the expense of Lithuania, were used to justify Soviet future expansion in the Baltic region in 1939. Additionally, Alexei Tolstoy’s fictional characterization of Peter the Great needed to be revised four times in order to align with the current state of the Soviet government. Thus, in 1917, Peter was depicted as a greedy and tyrannical individual, who was meant to resemble a version of Lenin, who, due to some ideological conflicts later in Lenin’s term, was clearly one of Stalin’s earliest enemies. In 1929, Peter was adapted to be a statesman-type individual, as Stalin was just emerging into power following the death of Lenin in 1924. In another version in 1931, Peter’s accomplishments were praised and by 1938, after being charged for being too frugal with his representation of Stalin, Peter was identified as a national hero. In the progress from 1917 to 1938, Peter’s coarseness diminished and his positive attributes were