ABSTRACT
For much of the Soviet period, party authorities endorsed a single, mobilizational view of USSR history that was supported not only by academia and the censor, but by official mass culture, public educational institutions, and state textbook publishing. Indeed, it was not until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 that the society’s traditional reliance on an “official line” and a handful of prescribed textbooks gave way to a much looser system in which a variety of ideologically-diverse titles could vie with one another within a newly competitive public school textbook market. The curricular diversity of this new period was epitomized by the fact that at the turn of the twenty-first century, some 100 different history textbooks enjoyed official approval from the Ministry of Education and Science for classroom use.1
