This article reconstructs the historical narrative of the Second World War in Russian middle school textbooks published after the year 2000. The author shows how textbook narratives are linked with official Russian politics of history, which aim to "manage" the memory of the war and contribute toward the standardization of Russian…

Is it structure or the selection of knowledge that makes writing historical narrative so difficult? Where does a conceptual focus on change, or causation, come in? James Ellis set out to explore the challenges his Year 9 pupils faced in writing historical narratives about change. Inspired by the work of Orlando Figes, he put together a scheme of…