Armenia removes references to ‘Russian annexation’ from history textbooks after Moscow criticism

Armenia’s Education Ministry has announced that it was removing mentions of Russia’s annexation of Armenia from a history textbook following criticism from Russia’s Foreign Ministry.

Armenia’s announcement came after the Russian Foreign Ministry on 15 August criticised a chapter in an eighth-grade history textbook titled the ‘forceful annexation of eastern Armenia by Russia’.

The Russian Foreign Ministry post included an online page of the textbook with ‘FAKE’ stamped in red on the chapter they were criticising. They said that the contents of the chapter were ‘extremely questionable’, that its title was ‘provocative’, and that the history of the South Caucasus in the 18th and 19th centuries were presented in a ‘distorted form’.

They also argued that Russia’s annexation of Armenia had a ‘colossal significance for the future restoration of Armenian statehood’, and stated that referring to the treaty of Turkmenchay as ‘annexation’ was liable to ‘trigger shock in any historian’. 

The treaty saw Qajar Iran cede eastern Armenia to the Russian empire in 1829.

‘Questioning the special role of the Russian Empire, and subsequently the USSR and Russia, in the formation of today’s Armenia means going against well-known facts’, they said.

The Russian ministry went on to accuse the West of ‘rewriting’ history.

‘We are talking about another shameless attempt to rewrite our common history. In the best traditions of Western propaganda and political engineering, white is called black with the “light hand” of certain Armenian figures who are especially zealous in trying to curry favour with their sponsors.’

The following day, Armenia’s Ministry of Education stated that it was reviewing the chapter and removing the word ‘annexation’ from its title, based on complaints they had received from Sputnik, a Russian state news agency.

‘We have received alerts expressing these worries and concerns, after which work was carried out with the author’s group’, said Tamara Sargsyan, the head of the ministry’s Public Education Department, during a press briefing.

‘It was suggested that we review that approach, and the author’s group revised the wording of that subtitle and adjusted it to the wording we have in the curriculum of the subject Armenian History’, she said, stressing that Sputnik only appealed for changes in the chapter’s title, and not its contents.

This was not the first time a history textbook sparked controversy in Armenia; in January, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan proposed to change the name of a school history subject, Armenian History, to the History of Armenia; a change from ‘Hayots’, a word derived from Armenia’s ancient name ‘Hayq’, to ‘Hayastani’, the name of the modern Armenian state. 

At the time, Pashinyan argued that Armenian History implied the ‘absence of statehood with episodes of the existence of statehood’, while the History of Armenia ‘implies a history of statehood with episodes of the absence of statehood’.

[Read more Change of school history subject title stirs controversy in Armenia]

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