SCHOOL TEXTBOOKS OF NATIONAL HISTORY AS AN INSTRUMENT OF THE MEMORY POLICY OF THE SOVIET STATE

Background. The problem of the influence of state policy on the development of historical education in the Soviet school, as well as the content of school textbooks on the history of the USSR, is updated. The reasons for the transformation of school historical education in accordance with changes in political attitudes, stages of development of Soviet society, the change of leaders of the country, conceptual approaches in historical science are considered. The purpose of the study: to identify factors that allow us to consider Soviet school textbooks on national history as an instrument of memory policy. Materials and methods. The source base of the research is school history textbooks published in Soviet Russia and the USSR in 1917-1989, curricula, the diary of the historian S.A. Piontkovsky, memoirs of the author of the history textbook of the USSR V.D. Esakov, presented in the form of an article, materials of the periodical press (the magazines "The Struggle of Classes", "The Marxist Historian", "Teaching History to Schools"), as well as resolutions of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, the Ministry of Education / Education of the USSR, considered on the basis of historical-descriptive (as the main), historical-chronological, historical-systemic, historical-comparative, problematic and other methods of historical research. Results. To achieve the goal, the following were studied: legal acts defining the target guidelines and structure of the education system, including history; the content of school textbooks on Russian history, which underwent numerous changes in connection with instructions received "from above"; controversial issues of Soviet historical science, reflected in the content of textbooks; stages of development of historical education in the country, the features of which were associated with political changes; pages of biographies of textbook authors, allowing us to see their relationships with the authorities, their attitude to the processes taking place in the country. This allowed us to draw conclusions that at each stage of development of Soviet society, school history textbooks were used as conductors of state policy, as an instrument of memory policy and a mechanism for interaction between the authorities and the education system, as a factor influencing the minds of the younger generation and a means of controlling the mentality of historians - authors of textbooks, as a mass book that subjectively assessed the past and provided guidelines for the future.