Li Bennich-Björkman and Sergiy Kurbatov's edited volume examines the ways in which post-Soviet history textbooks treat the collapse of the Soviet Union. As the volume demonstrates, Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Moldovan official narratives of this key event manifest divergent models of sovereignty, statehood, and national identity.

The four respective contributions work with samples of officially approved school and university-level history textbooks, published between 1991 and 2012. Drawing upon content, narrative, and discourse analysis, the essays elucidate patterns in the presentation of the perestroika period and its aftermath, situating these in the broader politics of history education. In Russia, the dominant narrative foregrounds the continuity and identity between Soviet and Russian statehood. In their treatment of Soviet collapse, textbooks skirt the emergence of a new political entity (the Russian Federation), and instead focus on the transition to a liberal democratic order. In stark contrast, Ukrainian textbooks recount this period as the overthrow of the Soviet colonial oppressor by the masses, awakened to their national identity. This narrative deemphasizes regional and ethnic differences in Ukraine's protest movement, and accentuates the Otherness of the Soviet leadership and its communist ideology. In Belarus, official discourse is caught between the competing demands of legitimating the new nation-state and defending the Soviet legacy (which, in part, Belarusian institutions continue to uphold). Accordingly, textbooks narratives are ambivalent: the fall of the Soviet Union is viewed negatively, as are the nationalist forces that helped bring it about, but the creation of an independent Belarusian state is presented in neutral or positive tones. In Moldova, assessments of the past are not so much ambivalent as they are divided: some underscore the country's “Romanian” identity, while others point to Moldova's uniqueness. Textbooks espousing the former view celebrate the republic's national revival and independence achieved in the wake of perestroika. Exponents of the latter present a more nuanced view of Soviet collapse, lamenting the fracturing of Moldova's historic ties with Russia. At the same time, as the volume demonstrates, alternative narratives are not always structured agonistically. In Russia, for instance, regional history textbooks provide accounts that run in parallel to the dominant discourse. In Tatarstan, the focus is on the grassroots revival of national culture facilitated by Soviet collapse, while in Chechnya, on the intensified struggle between local elites in the new power vacuum.

Previous studies of post-Soviet textbooks have typically been drawn to their treatment of the most controversial, hyper-politicized subjects (such as Stalinist crimes or the events of the Second World War). This volume, by contrast, demonstrates the value of examining other textbook narratives, beyond the shifting battlegrounds of contemporary “memory wars.” As the four essays convincingly argue, discourses surrounding the fall of the USSR remain foundational to the (official) self-understanding of post-Soviet states. At the same time, the contributors are careful to point out that the narrative patterns identified represent only the most general trends; exceptions abound. The textbook scene in each of the four states is very diverse: cut across by jurisdictional, linguistic, and regional divides, catering to different (school or university) audiences, and marked by the idiosyncrasies of individual textbooks (which are complex and often quite balanced). At minimum, this should serve as a warning for other scholars not to infer “the official position” on a given historical subject from a few passages in a single textbook.

Indeed, the sheer diversity of textbook narratives, even in the more authoritarian post-Soviet states, is one of the volume's most surprising findings. But does this pluralism reflect a compromise between different elites? Or does it represent a “catch-all” strategy for communicating with diverse demographics? Or, alternatively, does it suggest the relative autonomy of history education, which remains partially insulated from the short-term vagaries of domestic and international politics? If the latter, is this the result of the leadership's weak political resolve, or of its relative disinterest in history education? Addressing these issues is key to fully situating history textbooks, and their narratives of Soviet collapse, in the context of post-Soviet memory politics.

Promisingly, the edited collection facilitates further work on these and related questions. The contributions provide excellent introductions to the institutional organization of history education, while the appendices conveniently list textbooks approved and recommended by the respective ministries of education. This volume will be of interest to those examining post-Soviet education, memory politics, and the construction of new national identities.