The final chapters of the 9th-grade history textbook are highly politicized, reflecting the perspective of the current government and the Civil Contract party (CP). It is pointless for the Minister of Education and Science to deny this. The rude and arrogant attitude toward journalists, so typical of today’s Civil Contract elite, is of course unjustifiable.
To illustrate why the journalist’s question at the press conference was absolutely legitimate, one can conduct the following exercise: when a change of power occurs (bad news for CP members—it will happen sooner or later), will the same be written about the 2018 revolution as is written in the textbook today? Certainly not. The assessments will change, and unfortunately, they will be just as politicized as they are now.
Revisions are inevitable. And, as with all previous revisions following a change of power, they will not be made for the sake of “historical truth” or “academic integrity,” but rather to serve the newly created political conjuncture. What that will look like is difficult to predict. Yet I can make one forecast with absolute certainty: the transformation of “Armenian history” into the “History of Armenia” for political reasons will definitely be reversed, because this “innovation” is both unscientific and illogical. As for judgments about which political figure or leader was right or wrong at any given moment, in my view such assessments can never be stable or permanent in historiography.
Take, for example, the Armenian efforts to build a state in the 20th century. It is obvious that these attempts—by the Dashnaks, the Communists, and the ANM—had both positive and negative aspects. Depending on how the government of the moment views these three currents, it tries to discredit one, or sometimes all of them together. For instance, Pashinyan, for understandable reasons, is particularly interested in discrediting the Armenian National Movement and, more broadly, the Third Republic. As for the next leader of Armenia, it is impossible to predict with whom or with what he or she will have a problem.
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This leads us to the main question: is it possible to create a non-politicized school textbook? I strongly doubt it, though historians may be able to provide a more precise answer.
Another, perhaps naïve, question for specialists: is it not possible to end school textbooks with the declaration of independence in 1991, and for now refrain from writing about subsequent developments?
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
