The question of how to write modern Russian history textbooks started a discussion in Russian society far beyond academic circles. Two details in particular ignited the sudden interest in the recently released handbook, titled “A Book for Teachers: The Modern History of Russia, 1945-2006.” First, the book was publicly presented one day before President Vladimir Putin’s meeting with history teachers, where the president spoke about the need for history classes that would make schoolchildren “proud of their motherland.” Second, the book included a whole chapter on “sovereign democracy,” a semi-official codeword for Putin’s model of governance, which Putin himself criticized once by saying that the word democracy needed no modifiers.

“During the last few weeks, I keep getting phone calls from all over the world asking if I want to return our schools back to the Soviet times,” said Anatoly Utkin, one of the handbook’s authors and professor at the U.S.A. and Canada Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. “I keep saying no, but I really don’t know why I am being suspected of such things. Probably, a part of our media which thrived during the 1990s and is now being sidelined by history, is trying to force this sort of a discussion on our society. They use our book, which is not a school textbook at all, as a pretext.”

During the last two weeks the press thoroughly investigated the story. More importantly, public opinion centers conducted polls amongst Russians asking them questions raised by this discussion.

According to an opinion poll conducted by VTsIOM, 56 percent of respondents think the work of authors of school textbooks should not be financed by Western grants. Moreover, 52 percent prefer the old practice of having one officially approved history textbook to the current approach of having a selection of five to seven textbooks for every school year, from which a teacher can choose.

Diversification of history textbooks was the main trend in high school education during the 1990s and early 2000s. According to VTsIOM’s poll, 72 percent of Russians who grew up in the Soviet period had difficulty answering the following question: “What was it that you did not like in Soviet history textbooks?” Only 6 percent could remember “excessive ideological zeal” and other, graver sins of communist propaganda.

In fact, these figures give much more reason for concern than the initial story which so inspired both journalists and sociologists.

The investigation by Kommersant Vlast weekly magazine and newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta revealed that initial reports about the book signaling a return to Soviet view of history were exaggerated. The book, written by a group of authors, is not a textbook for students and is not a required reading for anyone. The initial print run totaled 10,000 copies; it was only “recommended” to teachers among dozens of other books on the subject.

“I just don’t understand what the whole fuss is about,” said Anatoly Utkin. “I recently wrote a book on the conflict of civilizations and it was also recommended. There was not a single word about it in the media. Why is there so much interest in this book? I know there are rumors that the presidential administration was behind the book’s publication. But I can assure you that I did not receive any orders from it. I wrote what I thought.”

It should be noted that the president’s administration did not, in fact, give its approval to the book. The publication was unveiled at the All-Russian Conference of Social Science Teachers, some of whose participants did meet Putin the following day. The book came for some criticism, however, by Putin’s aide Dzhokhan Pollyeva, a veteran presidential aide since late President Boris Yeltsin’s times.

“Different chapters of the book were written by different authors with a varying level of professionalism, so the book needs to be evened out,” Pollyeva was quoted by Nezavisimaya Gazeta as saying.

As a result, the two most scandalous authors of the book, Alexander Filippov, the head of the team of authors, and Pavel Danilin, who wrote the chapter on sovereign democracy, were not even present at the meeting with Putin the following day, during which the president uttered his much quoted words on Russian history.

“As far as the problematic pages of our history are concerned, they were a reality,” Putin said on June 21. “But they were a reality in the life of any state! And in fact we had less of them than some others, and they were not as horrible as those inscribed in the history of some other countries. Yes, we had awful pages: let’s remember the events that started in 1937, let’s not forget them. But other countries had even more horrible things. At least we did not use nuclear arms against civilian population… We did not have such black pages as Nazism. We should not allow anyone to force a feeling of guilt upon us – let them think about themselves.”

The fuss in the media was probably created by the fact that both Filippov and Danilin, in their book as well as in their subsequent interviews, strangely echoed the president’s line of reasoning almost word for word.

“I think Russia has a lot of things to be proud about in its past,” Filippov said in an interview to state-owned Rossyiskaya Gazeta soon after the scandal erupted. “Even during the most awful and the most bitter pages of its history Russia revealed a unique ability to preserve itself as a sovereign state… Until recently, Russian history was an object of a propaganda offensive from both inside the country and abroad. This attack pursued two goals. The first one was to prove that in the whole course of its history Russia deserved a place only on the periphery of world politics, that it has no place in the pool of the so called civilized nations. The second one was to prove that Russia, as a successor of a totalitarian regime, is doomed forever to repent for this regime’s real or invented crimes.”

In Filippov’s view, the motive of this propagandist attack was strictly pragmatic: “To inject Russian society with an inferiority complex and a feeling of historic guilt and then use these feelings for resolving some very material problems. We can see examples of such ‘solutions’ in some of the countries of the CIS and the Baltics.”

In his mention of the CIS and the Baltic states, Filippov was probably referring to the “orange revolution” in Ukraine, which brought to power pro-Western president Viktor Yushchenko, whose team accused Putin of meddling in Ukraine’s affairs by meeting Yushchenko’s rival, prime-minister Viktor Yanukovych, at various official ceremonies.

“During the 2004 presidential elections in Ukraine, Russia supported the candidacy of then Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych,” Filippov writes in his book. “He supported a program of closer ties with Russia and advocated giving Russian language an official status in Ukraine. His main rival was Viktor Yushchenko, known for his anti-Russian initiatives, which included, among others, a call to join NATO. Yanukovych was the only candidate who could really challenge Yushchenko. This made Russia’s choice obvious.”

During his meeting with the teachers, Putin lamented the absence of detailed accounts of Russian history in the period after 1991, so the book can been seen as a form of supply to meet the president’s demand. But an expert’s eye can quickly discern certain discrepancies between the official “line” and Filippov’s own patriotism. “The account of events is basically accurate, but it contradicts the official Russian version of events in Ukraine in 2004,” said Kirill Frolov, the head of the department for Ukrainian studies at Moscow-based Institute of CIS Countries. “Officially, Moscow was neutral and Putin rejected all accusations of interfering in Ukraine’s internal affairs or supporting any of the candidates.”

This excess of enthusiasm for those foreign policy moves, which the Kremlin does not like to publicize, can explain the presidential administration’s criticism of Filippov’s book.

The same excess reveals itself in the chapter on sovereign democracy, written by Pavel Danilin. A young expert with pro-Kremlin Gleb Pavlovsky’s Foundation for Effective Policy, Danilin has no graduate degree in history, but he compensates for this by revealing himself to be a more ardent supporter of sovereign democracy than the president himself.

“The term ‘sovereign democracy’ is often opposed because people say that democracy does not need adjectives – it is either there or it is not,” Danilin writes. “But if a national economy is dependent on foreign capital, imports, or market contingencies, such a consumer-country cannot defend its interests. In this way, sovereign democracy presupposes one’s own innovative national economy and the ability to produce certain substances which would be strategically important for other countries.”

The irony of the situation is that President Putin himself was one of the persons who said that democracy does not need qualifying adjectives, although during his recent press conference he called the discussion about sovereign democracy “useful.”

When the press started to attack Danilin and Filippov, Danilin vehemently defended himself on his Live Journal blog. This resulted in more publicity and, reportedly, some ire from the Kremlin. In July Danilin stopped answering reporters’ questions and left on a vacation.

That may mean that the book will not get as much support as was expected. However, Filippov does not despair. In an interview with Rossyiskaya Gazeta he said that he received a commission to write a new Russian history textbook which can be used by eleventh grade students in the fall of 2008. History may prove him right.