The history of medieval China in Soviet textbooks for secondary and higher school in 1930–1950's

Author(s):  O.V. Telushkina, Dostoevsky Omsk State University, Omsk, Russia

Issue:  Volume 45, № 3

Rubric:  Topical issues of world history

Annotation:  The restoration of the teaching of history that began in the Soviet Union in the 1930s led to the need for a number of educational publications. Their content was to correspond to the conception of the historical process that was forming in Soviet historical science in those years. The integration of the history of China into this concept gave rise to the need for its clear formational periodization. This process was combined with a course toward the "normalization" of the history of the East, which was supposed to confirm the idea that the countries of this part of the world in their development have passed the same stages as the European countries. Researchers who created the "Soviet textbook" on history, faced the need to quickly summarize the discussion assessments and heterogeneous information. Often this led to schematic descriptions of the social system and the appearance of internal contradictions in the texts. Although Soviet scientists managed to combine an array of factual information and a methodological template for describing the stages of social development by the mid-1950s, the results of their writings were severely criticized by their colleagues

Keywords:  historiography, Soviet textbooks, history of China, Middle Ages, medieval East, history teaching

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