How do UK teachers approach diversity in Russian and Soviet History? Survey Responses (June-July 2026)

In June 2026, I launched a survey with teachers who taught Russian and Soviet history at GCSE (KS4) and A-Level (KS5). The survey ran until July 2026 and gathered a total of 52 responses.

Its primary aim was to establish how UK teachers thought about and approached teaching diversity and 'decolonising' the curriculum in this area of history.

The findings, from this perspective, are interesting. Although this is a relatively small sample of UK teachers which might not be considered fully representative, it indicates that:

1. Many teachers are concerned with a perceived lack of diversity in the KS4 and KS5 curriculum for teaching Russian and Soviet history.
2. A considerable number are actively taking steps through their own teaching and extra-curricular activities to address this.
3. However, a number of barriers remain to teachers who might want to increase the diversity of content and/or 'decolonise' their curriculum, most notably the pressure of public examinations and a lack of time and resources. 

All responses were taken anonymously. They have been reproduced here, with additional analysis. All care has been taken to preserve the anonymity of respondents in their answers.

This is part of a larger research project looking into the resourcing and teaching of Russian and Soviet history particularly from the perspective of diversity and 'decolonising' the curriculum.

To Settle and Civilise? Roma and Soviet Nationalities Policy

One of the most remarkable and counter-intuitive developments in the early Soviet Union was the promotion of nationalism.

From the early 1920s onwards, formerly oppressed ethnic groups were encouraged to develop a national consciousness by fostering their own cultures, languages, and indigenous political leaders. Just so long, of course, as they didn’t stray from the official dogmas of the Communist Party.

The policy, known as indigenisation (or nativisation), was encapsulated by the mantra ‘national in form, socialist in content’. While nationalism in much of Europe after 1918 therefore veered towards the political far right and fascism, in the USSR it became indispensable to Communist ideology.

Large national groups were given their own territories, where their language was given official status and local elites given power to manage state and Communist Party affairs. In many places, this process assumed the name of the national groups themselves (thus, indigenisation in Ukraine became Ukrainianisation, and so on). Even under Stalin in the late-1930s, where whole ethnic groups were placed under suspicion and national elites purged in the face of the supposed threat of ‘bourgeois nationalism’, the policy was never actually reversed.

Beyond ‘A Male Dominated Society’: Interrogating the Concept of Patriarchy in Russia and the USSR

Big words with big meanings are powerful – if you know how to use them.

Among the biggest, and most frequently used, of these words I’ve found students using is ‘patriarchy’. Behind the word lies a highly complex concept, which students tend to reduce to the startling simple formula of ‘a male dominated society’.

Like all simple formulas, this has a very large element of truth to it. Like all simple formulas, it also overlooks the inherent complexity of the concept.

From the perspective of Russian and Soviet history, what did patriarchy look like in practice? Here, I’ll pick up on three elements of a dynamic patriarchal society that come through clearly in this context.

"But what really IS the value of a source?" Getting A-Level Students to Approach Sources Like Historians

Some parts of teaching History can feel a bit soulless.

This has been my impression of teaching primary sources for some time. At best, it can feel like a rather run-of-the-mill exercise in identifying relevant features in order to have students write something of merit for their exam. At worst, it can feel like having students blindly groping around for anything they can attach at least a bit of coherent knowledge to.

Recently, I've started to worry that some of our A-Level students really have no idea what a primary source is to a historian or why a historian even bothers with them. Asked in their exams to identify content, provenance, and tone, they approach the exercise in a tick-box manner, dutifully plodding through often lively and fascinating documents in order to tell us who wrote them and what they did, what that kind of source might focus on, a contemporary event or two, and what bits of their contextual knowledge they know about the main points raised.

Part of my concern here is stylistic. Writing about sources like this seems stilted and lifeless. But mostly, my concern is methodological. I just don't think that any historian would begin to approach sources that way.

There's loads of great writing on approaching sources, which I don't want to simply summarise here. Instead, I'd like to briefly sketch out a general approach to sources which is hopefully both methodologically valid (i.e. mirrors the kind of thinking historians actually engage in) and practically deliverable (i.e. can be used in the classroom).

In broad terms, my proposed approach hinges on two questions:

• Why do historians actually use sources?
• What language allows them to analyse sources?

I doubt much if any of this is very original, but it might provoke some thought and discussion (and I'd love to know your thoughts on it, too!).

A-Level History Coursework: 8 Traps Students Fall Into (and 8 Ways to Avoid Them)

Writing an extended piece of coursework, or non-examined assessment (NEA) as part of A-Level History is no easy task. In fact, it's probably the trickiest single thing A-Level History students have to do. If students are to succeed, they need to know what to look out for. So do we, as their teachers!

Here are 8 of the most common traps that I've seen our students fall into over the past few years and 8 ways to avoid them.

                        

(The accompanying examples are all hypothetical and are meant to illustrate good practice to students only. They are not directly relevant in context to our NEA topic of the Crusades.)

This post is available as a downloadable document here.