ABSTRACT
President Vladimir Putin visited the Russian State Library in Moscow on 27 November 2003. A history textbook edited by Vladimir Petrovich Dmitrenko was criticized by Prime Minister Mikhail Kasianov in a Cabinet meeting in August 2001 allegedly because the book barely mentioned Putin and entirely overlooked Kasianov himself. Half a million tenth and eleventh grade high school students had used a history textbook written by Igor Dolutskii, National History, 20th Century, for ten years since 1993. Dolutskii and Nikita Zagladin offer their readers divergent interpretations of The Great Patriotic War, 1941–5, as the World War was known in the Soviet Union. The Yeltsin government was, from the outset, committed to perspectives on history that were at diametric variance with those of the just departed Soviet past: de-communization in place of the dialectic, plurality instead of the deadening hand of uniform interpretation.
