In Belarus, a state commission has been established to rewrite textbooks on humanities subjects, including history. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya’s Advisor on Education and Science, Pavel Terashkovich, explains why the state is doing this and what consequences it may have:
“The creation of a state commission on the ‘preparation of textbooks in the humanities and social sciences’ shows that the process of rewriting history — which has never stopped throughout Lukashenka’s rule — is now being put on an almost industrial scale.
And it is not only history that will be rewritten. Belarusian and Russian literature, and even geography, have come under scrutiny. One of the best domestic geography textbooks for 9th grade has apparently also come under attack.
What is especially telling is that the regime is no longer even trying to hide their intentions: they openly state that textbooks must be aligned with the ‘content of the ideology and the principles of the historical policy of the Belarusian state’.
Rewriting history is not something extraordinary in itself. But dictators have a particular obsession with it. Slobodan Milošević was personally involved in rewriting textbooks, filling them with propaganda clichés and accusing neighboring nations of harboring an age-old irrational hatred toward Serbia. Under Saddam Hussein, Iraqi schoolchildren studied how he had supposedly saved the country from the Jews and brilliantly defeated first Iran and then even the United States in 1991.
As for the rewriting of Belarusian history, a strengthening of the ideas of the ‘Russian world’ seems entirely predictable. It is no coincidence that Lakiza, the Director of the Institute of History of the National Academy of Sciences, is also a representative of the Russian Military Historical Society — the same organization headed by Medinsky, which plans to fill our country with monuments to the heroes of imperial and Soviet history.
And to my former colleagues who claim that Russification is somehow better than Polonization, I want to say this: your names will remain in history. But not engraved in bronze on granite — rather as something foul-smelling that neither you nor your descendants will ever be able to wash away”.
