Russia and Belarus have established a historical commission and plan to co-author textbooks
New stages of cooperation have been outlined in the Memorandum of Understanding, which includes the creation of a joint Russian-Belarusian history commission. The parties have pledged to jointly protect historical truth, and soon there might be shared history textbooks for schools and universities.
The solemn signing of the document took place at the Museum of Modern Belarusian Statehood. The signatories were Igor Sergeyenko, the head of the Administration of the President of Belarus and the chairman of the Republican Council for Historical Policy, and Vladimir Medinsky, an assistant to the President of Russia and the chairman of the interdepartmental commission for historical education.
A key provision of the Memorandum is the creation of a fundamentally new international body—the Joint Russian-Belarusian Commission on History. Its working structure will be the Expert-Consultative Russian-Belarusian Council on History, established in 2023 at a forum in the Russian capital. Russia and Belarus will jointly defend historical truth and the memory of the common past of the two countries, engaging in educational, expert, and advisory activities.
Sergeyenko noted that Russian and Belarusian specialists in the field of history are currently cooperating more actively than before, organizing various events together. He emphasized that such activities are a defense of the truth about historical periods traversed hand in hand by Russians and Belarusians. He noted that now an additional impulse will arise, including for perpetuating the memory of unjustly forgotten heroes.
Vladimir Medinsky is confident that the signing of the Memorandum will create conditions for more active cooperation between historians and the implementation of new interesting projects. Scientists already have experience in this area, such as within the framework of the International Association of Institutes of History of the CIS countries and the Association of Belarusian-Russian Historians “Union Initiative of Memory and Reconciliation.” Medinsky called the common history of Russia and Belarus “colossal” and promised that the interaction of historians would be supported administratively and financially.
Signing of the memorandum / Photo: sb.by
A few days later, it became known that Russia and Belarus had already agreed on the writing of unified textbooks for secondary and higher educational institutions, where events of the times of the USSR and the Russian Empire will be considered from a common perspective. This was announced during a meeting of the program commission of United Russia by Boris Gryzlov, Chairman of the Supreme Council of the party and Ambassador of Russia to Minsk.
Historians, with whom a GORUS correspondent spoke, perceived Moscow’s and Minsk’s initiatives with optimism but noted that some aspects of joint work need to be approached carefully.
“To align the educational space is, of course, necessary. This is an important goal. But at the same time, it is necessary to keep in mind certain aspects of this process. Even representatives of academic science differ in their assessments of certain events. In the case of textbooks, it is doubly difficult to align everything. Pedagogues, people working in schools, and those who represent how to better convey material should definitely be involved in their preparation. Moreover, I am talking not just about a textbook – before its preparation, it is necessary to define the conceptual apparatus, fill in the blanks, about which there is no consensus even in the academic community. It’s about some kind of common educational and methodological complex, which should be created correctly,” said Natalia Selyukina, Executive Director of the Historical Memory Foundation.
According to Vitaly Zakharov, a professor at Moscow State Pedagogical University and a doctor of historical sciences, Russians and Belarusians are kindred, fraternal peoples, allied nations, so the creation of both a commission and a common textbook is undoubtedly a necessary and important endeavor.
“It is worth looking at our history through the prism of common roots. It is also essential to remember that at a certain stage, a significant part of the territory of the former Old Russian state ended up as part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania—lands that are now part of Belarus, Ukraine, and the Russian Federation. Therefore, joint study of Russian and Belarusian history will make the understanding of the historical process more comprehensive and multifaceted. In addition, the work of the commission will help protect historical truth from tendentious distortions that unfortunately often occur today,” said the historian.
As Leonid Vardomsky, head of the Center for Post-Soviet Studies at the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a doctor of economic sciences, noted in a conversation with GORUS, the creation of a common commission is undoubtedly a constructive initiative.
“It often happens that the same facts are interpreted differently, which creates certain difficulties. The commission’s activities and work on a unified textbook will help us develop a standardized approach to historical events. Today it does not exist. The same historical figures can be assessed differently, hyperattention can be paid to some events and too little to others. This creates some absurdities. What this can lead to in the long term can be seen from the example of Ukraine,” he remarked.
According to Leonid Vardomsky, that is why Russia and Belarus decided to look at the historical process with the same eyes and bring it to a common denominator.
“This is, in general, logical. We have a single Union State. And history has a colossal influence on ideology, on people’s self-awareness,” noted the head of the Center for Post-Soviet Studies at the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Natalia Selyukina sees significant potential in the creation of the historical commission.
“As for the commission, I have a very positive attitude towards the fact that coordination is taking place at the highest level on this issue. This gives more weight to everything related to history. Speaking of specific wishes, it would be desirable for more attention to be paid in every sense to archival work. It is also necessary to synchronize activities in the field of commemorating the victims of Nazism, creating memorials. This is historical memory. We must preserve it for ourselves and as a reminder to foreigners trying to distort historical reality,” she concluded.
In recent decades, the spread of black Russophobic myths has become one of the key aspects of the information war waged by Western countries against Russia and an essential means of driving wedges between Russians and their fraternal nations. One hopes that the creation of a joint historical commission between Russia and Belarus will be a step towards establishing effective protection of the mass consciousness of our peoples from attempts at manipulation from outside.
By Svyatoslav Knyazev