Author's Column / Авторская колонка

Не так давно net.abimperio.net сообщал о переписывании в Украине глав школьных учебников по истории после смены политического климата в 2010 г. и общей коррекции образа России в учебных пособиях. А до этого, до прихода пророссийских групп на политический олимп, Министерство образования и науки Украины оказалось в неловком положении противоположного характера, присовив статус учебного пособия для вузов книге "История украинского права" Ивана Гриценко, в которой русский язык назывался "убогим" и отрицалась связь между русскими и украинцами на генетическом и даже антропологическом уровнях. Действительно, в процессе создания новых национальных нарративов и их фактической кодификации прослеживается влияние политической конъюнктуры во многих государствах, бывших республиками исчезнувшего с карты Советского Союза.

Tomasz Kamusella
University of St Andrews

The Fraternal Curtain was alive and well a decade after the fall of communism, the vanishing of the Soviet bloc and the erasure of the Soviet Union from the political map of the world. Hundreds of kilometers to the east of the line of the vanished Iron Curtain, this fateful Fraternal Curtain is obstinately still there today, two decades after the Berlin Wall was dismantled and the high-tech barbed wire fences were removed from the line of the Iron Curtain.

That Iron Curtain had separated the two blocs from Rostock to Trieste, running along the line of the German-German border, then the Czechoslovak-West German one, continuing between Austria on the Western side and Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia on the other, with a short Adriatic section overlapping with the Italian-Yugoslavian frontier. How true that ‘for things to remain the same, everything must change.’ The Fraternal Curtain faithfully remains with us, as an unquestioned, integral part of nature, forgotten by people and by the mass media.

Tomasz Kamusella
University of St Andrews

What we really despised were Soviet films, and the only ones that were even worse than them, from Romania or North Korea, though at least they were mercifully rare. Soviet movies filled most of the television’s ‘programmatic’ offerings. It was the same in the cinemas. Most days of the month the films came from the Soviet Union or from the communist bloc countries; the deal was that each month a single Western (usually American) film was allowed...