Russia is increasingly using so-called ‘history’ studies as a method of indoctrination and, in occupied parts of Ukraine, as a way of trying to obliterate Ukrainian identity. The Russian education ministry has just announced that schoolchildren will, from 2027, have to take an oral exam in history, with this becoming a prerequisite for obtaining the so-called ‘state final certificate’. Given that the supposed ‘9th grade history curriculum’ includes such titles of sections as the supposed ‘Reunification of Crimea and Russia’, it seems safe to assume that ‘the oral exam’ will be used to check that the children, including those from occupied parts of Ukraine, have absorbed the ‘Russian world’ propaganda that they have been fed.
The official line, as announced at a meeting of the Russian interdepartmental commission on ‘historical education’ on 3 March 2026, was, predictably, rather different. Russian education minister Sergei Kravtsov claimed that the exam, which would serve as admission to the ‘state final certificate’, would test “how the school student thinks, their thinking process”.
The meeting was also addressed by Vladimir Medinsky, adviser to Russian leader Vladimir Putin and head of the Russian military history society, created by Putin to “consolidate the forces of state and society in the study of Russia’s military-historical past and counter efforts to distort it”. Medinsky has also played a very active role in producing the single school ‘history textbooks’, which blame Kyiv and the West for Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, call Russia ‘a country of heroes’ and write about the so-called “reunification of Crimea and Russia” without once mentioning Russia’s invasion and annexation of the peninsula.
Medinsky stated that the new exam was being introduced on Putin’s instruction in order to provide a smooth transition from the previous social studies exam to a ‘history’ exam. The 9th-grade exam, he added, would be held in the form of a ‘discussion’
The claim is that “school students will have to answer problem issues which will define whether the student understands the sense of historical process. That will help them learn to defend their point of view, argue with various opinions and form their own attitude to historical figures and events”.
All of this might seem quite uncontroversial had the same representative of the education ministry not gone on to stress that the exam material would “correspond to the content of the state textbooks on history”. The latter, courtesy of Medinsky and Co. can be described in many ways, but not as works of historical scholarship.
The section of the 9th Grade ‘textbook’ on so-called “contemporary Russian history” is closer to fiction than fact, and in essentially total conflict with internationally accepted accounts of the events in 2014, as well as up to, and including Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Russia’s invasion of Crimea in February 2014 is claimed to have been a “peaceful protest”, which did not involve the deployment of a single Russian soldier. According to this version, there was no annexation, just an ‘appeal’ from the parliaments of Crimea and Sevastopol, following a supposed ‘referendum’, asking “to join” the Russian Federation.
Worth noting that even Putin’s own ‘Human Rights Council’ acknowledged that the turnout of the so-called ‘referendum’ held at gunpoint had been much lower than reported, as was the supposed support for ‘joining Russia2 (see: Myth, ’observers’ & victims of Russia’s fake Crimean referendum).
That, however, is not the fictitious version which teachers are encouraged to present and which the students will have to repeat.
It is not just that ‘alternative versions’ are not accepted as ‘correct’. They can get you prosecuted in Russia or occupied territory and sentenced to many years imprisonment. The current Russian regime’s war against history and replacement of education with propaganda have been accompanied by an ever-mounting arsenal of administrative and criminal charges against those who tell the truth about historically provable events. Although the situation and the methods became far more brutal in 2022, they begin back in 2014, with several prosecutions and at least two real sentences under a surreal new article of Russia’s criminal code (Article 280.1 § 2) which came into force shortly after Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea. The punishment for what are claimed to be “public calls to actions aimed at violation of the Russian Federation’s territorial integrity” via the Internet was soon used to silence criticism of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Russian Tatar activist Rafis Kashapov, for example, was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment over four social network posts, criticising Russia’s annexation of Crimea and military aggression in Donbas.
The scope now is considerably broader, with teachers, parents or students likely to face anything from administrative charges for supposedly ‘discrediting the Russian army’ to criminal charges and a long prison sentence for supposed ‘military fakes’, i.e. the truth about Russia’s war crimes in Bucha, Mariupol and other parts of Ukraine.
See also:
Ukraine ‘began the war against Russia’ in Moscow’s official school history textbook
Russia did not invade Crimea in new school textbooks edited by Putin adviser
Crimean children taught that Russia didn’t invade Crimea and that Ukraine was an accident
