Russian Textbooks Erasing "Ukraine" References

As was briefly noted yesterday, there are reports of a sinister Russian move to expunge all but the most necessary references to Ukraine and Kyiv from Russian textbooks, something that started after Russia's first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and has accelerated over the past two months. When Russia's latest invasion occurred, one of Russia's oldest and largest publishers of school textbooks was directed by the Kremlin to remove "inappropriate" references to Ukraine and Kyiv from all textbooks:

"After the war in Ukraine broke out, the staff of Prosveshchenie (literally, Enlightenment in Russian) was tacitly ordered by the management to reduce the number of references to Ukraine and Kyiv in Russian school textbooks to a minimum, said three editors of the publishing house. All of them asked for anonymity; the request to remove 'inappropriate' references to Ukraine was conveyed at a «confidential» meeting. Moreover, they explain that every Prosveshchenie employee has to sign 'a great number of non-disclosure agreements' or risk immediate firing.

According to the editors, since the war broke out, anyone taking an anti-war stance-signing petitions, posting on social networks, or participating in protests-can also be fired. 'We are a publishing house that prints books that influence the minds of the younger generation. Please refrain from using social media to voice a point of view that is different from the official one,' one Prosveshchenie employee recounts the management's position."  (our emphasis)

Appropriate references to Ukraine and Kyiv in the minds of the Kremlin propagandists are in the context of when Ukraine was subsumed in Russia / Soviet Union:

"It is particularly challenging for those who work on history textbooks: removing references to Ukraine and Kyiv without compromising the quality is often impossible, so editors have to work around with wording alterations to play 'safer.'

'But if possible, it is better not to mention Ukraine at all. Now the textbooks mention Kyiv mostly in the context of Kyivan Rus and the liberation of the city during the Second World War,' one editor says.

He insists that the context is important: 'We are free to describe how the Soviet army saved Kyiv, but independent Ukraine is out of the question.'”  (our emphasis)

The effort by the Russian fascists to erase Ukraine's identity, by the decimation of its civilian population, its culture and institutions is a form of genocide, as defined by the United Nations, which is comprised of two elements:

1. A mental element: the 'intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such'; and

2. A physical element, which includes the following five acts, enumerated exhaustively:

Killing members of the group

Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group

Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part

Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group

Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group"

Russian thug Putin is clearly well underway as far as the physical element; now evidence of the mental crime is coming out, if only in the Orwellian textbooks that Russian children will be studying.

(photo: Let the brainwashing continue. Sam Klemens)