The Russian Education Ministry's recent decision to review the country's history textbooks follows the recent ban of a book that had been popular with many Russian history teachers for its thought-provoking approach. This weekend, in yet another move, the Kremlin is due to receive a report on the "patriotic content" of textbooks. The trend has teachers worried about the temptation to revert to comfortable, Soviet-style "truths" -- and even some of the historians charged with vetting new texts appear to be having second thoughts...

[T]eaching has once again become difficult, for a different reason -- the moves by Russian authorities to scale back what they saw as the liberties taken by new history texts.

One such text is Igor Dolutskii's "National History, 20th Century," which served as a textbook for half a million students across Russia over the past 10 years, and which has now lost its Education Ministry seal of approval.

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