The public has always had a keen interest in textbooks on history. Despite all the differences among textbooks on national histories, most countries have a similar focus: the task of shaping the new generations' positive image of their own people in its long or short history, while not disregarding any sinister, dark, at times frightful pages of its past. When it comes to Russian history textbooks, in the past twenty years or so they have undergone a radical renovation. The former mono-ideology has given way to the pluralism of views and approaches. Conflicting opinions in Russia on how to view Russian history in general, and the role of Stalin in particular, raise the issue of how to treat painful subjects in school textbooks. As a key goal of education is to inspire students, it is understandable that Russian textbook authors, like those in other countries, may prefer to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. In this article, the author stresses that the the new conception of the state's educational standards for history must include as a central postulate the idea that the chief purpose of history education is to form people who are patriots and citizens of their country, whose position will determine Russia's present and future.