History of Medieval Asia in Academician Ye. Kosminsky’s “Stalin’s Primer”

Abstract

Soviet textbooks of world history rarely attract the attention of researchers. However, this category of sources can shed light on various aspects of the development of historical scholarship, education, and culture. New school textbooks were instrumental in ensuring the overall success of Stalin’s educational reforms of the mid-1930s. Academician Ye. Kosminsky's textbook of medieval history for grades 6 to 7 of secondary school was certainly innovative. He was the first to offer a world history course that covered the Middle Ages in both Europe and Asia, as well as the medieval history of the peoples of the USSR. It became a “Stalin’s primer” — a classic model textbook for the Soviet mass school. (Sections devoted to the history of Asia also appeared in Kosminsky’s textbooks published in the late 1940s to early 1950s.) Kosminsky was forced to prove his loyalty to the regime through promoting the ideological postulates of “Marxist theory” and propaganda of pan-Slavism, anti-Westernism, and anticlericalism. He established a “hierarchy” of Eastern peoples. The “progressive” role among them was assigned to the non-Russian ethnicities of the USSR, led by the Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, and the peoples of Soviet Central Asia. The author included the Arabs, Indians, and Chinese among the “advanced” peoples of the East. As for nomadic peoples (the Huns, Mongols, Manchus), as well as the Ottoman Turks and Japanese, they were for the most part judged negatively. The initial experience of teaching the medieval history of Asian countries and peoples proved difficult, mainly because of the impossibility of squeezing the civilizations of Asia into the Marxist theory of socio-economic formations. Kosminsky had to adapt the historical realities of the Middle Ages to the political and ideological tenets and requirements of Communist party censorship. The textbook also suffered from noticeable structural deficiencies. As a result, countries and nations “disappeared” from the historical context, a broad range of facts and phenomena were distorted, and the living fabric of socio-political and cultural developments in medieval Asia was disrupted.