Teaching and remembering the Great Patriotic War in Soviet schools
Résumé
This chapter explores how the Great Patriotic War was taught and commemorated in the Soviet primary and secondary schools. The first section analyzes the final year history textbooks as an example of the “master narrative” of the war. The second part is dedicated to elementary school books, such as primers and readers. The third part gives an overview of extracurricular activities focused on war history and memory, widespread in the 1960s–1980s. The chapter demonstrates that in the USSR, war memory construction and its multiple symbols were instilled by various means from the very beginning of schooling.