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Russian MP proposes to remove Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago from school curriculum

Dmitry Vyatkin, a Russian MP from the United Russia party, has proposed to remove “literary creations that have not withstood the test of time” from the school curriculum as he spoke to TASS.

He used The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn as an example of one such book.

“As the historical analysis of The Gulag Archipelago, which is still in the curriculum, but I believe not for long it is, has shown, Solzhenistyn made up many of the details there. Historians checked those facts. He was trying to get an award for covering his own motherland in mud,” Vyatkin said.

He also added that legislators were not going to “rush things up” but were planning on “restoring the historical justice for the Soviet books that cultivate patriotism and preserve the historical memory”.

Vyatkin believes that books like The Young Guard by Alexander Fadeyev and The Hot Snow by Yury Bondarev should be returned to the curriculum.

Update

Olga Kazakova, the head of the State Duma Committee on Enlightenment, says removing The Gulag Archipelago from the school curriculum “is out of the question, as it has always been”.

She also noted that The Young Guard by Alexander Fadeyev has indeed returned to the curriculum following “a joint initiative by the United Russia Party, the Ministry of Enlightenment, and the teachers’ community”.

Kazakova added that removing titles from, or adding to, the school curriculum, is “a lengthy and complex process; such decisions are not made based on someone’s private opinion”.

Vladimir Putin backed the return of certain creations by Soviet authors into the mandatory school curriculum earlier, names including Konstantin Simonov and Alexander Fadeyev.