Holocaust Memorial Day Trust Prohibits Discussion of Gaza (Again): One Teacher’s Response

Over the past two years, a number of teachers and educators have watched with alarm and frustration as the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (HMDT) has sought to quash discussion of atrocities in Israel and Gaza as part of Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD).

The HMDT has now reiterated its guidance that it “does not recommend” any discussion of Israel and Gaza. Its guidance, which can be found in full here, raises several arguments in support of this position, including that:

• “There are many diverse and strongly felt opinions on current conflicts taking place around the world, and it is important to be clear that HMD is neither a time for commenting on current conflicts, nor for decisiveness.”
• The purpose of HMD is, rather “to commemorate the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, and the millions more murdered under Nazi persecution. It is also a day to recognise that prejudice still exists within our communities and to learn and commemorate where persecution led in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.”
• “Opening a discussion or making statements on the conflict [in Israel and Gaza] at an HMD event will be almost certain to divide and upset the audience – whereas HMD seeks to bring people together with a shared purpose. Further, it will take the event further from its central purpose of commemoration of the Holocaust.”
• “Focusing on the situation in Gaza at an HMD event while making no reference to other global conflicts risks appearing one-sided.”

I’ve written twice to the HMDT this year, ahead of HMDT 2025 and again ahead of HMDT 2026 to raise a number of concerns and objections. These have not been in any way addressed by the HMDT’s reissued guidance.

Instead of revisiting old letters, here I’ll offer a critique of the reissued HMDT guidance.

I hope this might offer some constructive thoughts from the perspective of a teacher with an interest in commemorating the Holocaust and other instances of genocide since 1945.

This post is not designed to be any kind of definitive “final word” on the matter, but instead a working through of some of my ongoing thoughts.

In particular, I hope it might be of use to other teachers and educators in a similar position when considering options for commemorating HMD 2026 with young people.

Telling Stories at A-Level: Chekhov, the Cholera, and the Contempt

Stories, it seems, are in vogue in the History classroom.

And for good reason. Telling a gripping tale, as Christine Counsell has recently advocated, can grip students’ imagination, revealing through memorable examples key parts of the bigger picture in a way which can inspire and enthuse.

Yet, as Claire Holliss and Jim Carroll (2025) have also noted, the use and purpose of story telling does require some careful thought, and can – despite our best intentions – lead to some surprising and frustrating outcomes.

I hadn’t been aware of Claire and Jim’s work on story telling at KS5 until this past summer, when Claire presented it at a brilliant session of the Schools History Project (SHP) conference. But by that point, I and colleagues had also been starting to think about how and why to tell stories at KS5 to students.

The Soviet Union at War: Contested Chronologies of World War Two

Dates of events might be considered objective facts, open to neither debate nor contestation.

Yet periodisation – that is, setting the start and end dates of a particular time period in history – is very much a matter of interpretation. Indeed, where the historian (or history teacher) chooses to begin or end a historical period can determine not just the length of the period in question, but also its meaning and significance.

This is made clear in the case of the Soviet Union’s Second World War by Mark Edele’s excellent 2021 overview, Stalinism at War.

The Baron’s Cloak: A Study in Dynamic Continuity?

In my previous post, I made the case for a more dynamic understanding of historical continuity. Having tried to illustrate what this might look like in practice, I now want to turn to one story in particular. That story is told in Willard Sunderland’s The Baron’s Cloak.

This brilliant book details the extraordinary and troubling life of Baron Roman Feodorovich von Ungern-Sternberg, an eccentric mystic, reactionary nationalist, and ruthlessly violent Russian nobleman of Germanic origins. It follows Ungern’s life, from his birth in Graz to his family’s settling in Estland (modern-day Estonia) via Georgia, through his stuttering induction into the Russian army before the Great War to his career as a military commander in the anti-Bolshevik White movement during the Russian Civil War.

The book can be read in a several different ways: as a riveting story in its own right, as a tale of competing nationalism and radicalisms, as an exploration of huge upheaval and change. In Sunderland’s own words, it is “a study of the Russian Empire told through Ungern’s life” (p. 5), especially in its final years, as it collapsed and was then (partially) reconstituted by a new Soviet state.

However, reading this book, I found it to provide a highly stimulating narrative of dynamic historical continuity.

Here, using several short excerpts, I’ll retell key parts of the narrative in order to draw out some of the examples of continuity it seems to reveal. As I go, I’ll return to the diagrams of historical “paths” which I provided in my previous post, illustrating how I think the excerpts illustrate these.

What happens when “nothing happens”? Rethinking continuity as a dynamic process

 

Claire Holliss was kind enough to offer her thoughts and critique on an earlier draft of this and the subsequent post, which were significantly improved by her generous and insightful comments.

A decade ago, I was given the recommendation to read Willard Sunderland’s newly published book, The Baron’s Cloak. I should have set aside the time to read it then. Better late than never, though. A decade later, I’ve finally gotten round to doing so.

Subtitled A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution, the book is a masterclass in microhistory, telling through the life and experiences of one man the story of the Russian empire as it lurched into the Russo-Japanese War, 1905 Revolution, First World War, Revolution of 1917, and Civil War. That man is Baron Roman Feodorovich von Ungern-Sternberg.

Baron Ungern-Sternberg, shortly before his execution in September 1921. Credit: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Responding to SHP 2025: Part 2, Claire Holliss on Stories at A-Level

The 2025 Schools History Project (SHP) conference was, as ever, a highlight of the teaching year and a stimulus for all sorts of thoughts.

Inevitably, the best workshops at such an event are those that leave you with more (interesting) questions than answers.

In these two posts (including my last one, on Arthur Chapman’s presentation on stories and narratives), I’m going to try to formulate some coherent thoughts in relation to two really excellent sessions in particular, both of which sent me away with a number of very interesting questions. The second post, here, discusses Claire Holliss’ workshop on stories at KS5.

 

Sometimes, new directions in pedagogy develop their own momentum and give rise to new orthodoxies and (near-)universally accepted wisdom. When this happens, it’s important to take a step back and evaluate the evidence to establish how sound that wisdom actually is.

This is what I understood Claire Holliss’ fantastic SHP 2025 workshop to be honing in on.

In her very clear-minded, critical, but open discussion of using stories at KS5, Claire gave a well-deserved nod towards some very interesting and valuable work done on integrating stories into classroom teaching. She then asked how far doing so would actually benefit teaching History at KS5.

Claire’s work links to an ongoing research project, involving the selection and use of specific stories in her own teaching. This was also of interest to me, as our department has also been starting to develop stories in our own KS5 teaching of Russian and Soviet History (I’ll explore this a bit below).

Responding to SHP 2025: Part 1, Arthur Chapman on Narratives

The 2025 Schools History Project (SHP) conference was, as ever, a highlight of the teaching year and a stimulus for all sorts of thoughts.

Inevitably, the best workshops at such an event are those that leave you with more (interesting) questions than answers.

In the following two posts, I’m going to try to formulate some coherent thoughts in relation to two really excellent sessions in particular, both of which sent me away with a number of very interesting questions. The first post, here, discusses Arthur Chapman’s workshop on stories and narratives.

What is a story? This deceptively tricky question lay at the heart of Arthur Chapman’s workshop.

Here, I want to pick up on one issue in particular which was discussed during that workshop. It’s an issue which has prompted a number of very interesting questions and got me thinking again about stories, narratives, and arguments.

That issue is: narratives as historical interpretation.

Language and Substantive Concepts: Part 3 – Turning Students into Sceptics

This is the third of a three-part post focusing on what I term, following Caroline Coffin, the “language of history” and substantive concepts.

After the first post set out a broad theoretical framework, and the second post proposed approaches to foreign-language terms as substantive concepts, this post argues that we should aim not just to teach students to use substantive concepts but also to question and critique them.

I’ll be presenting on this topic with colleagues at the upcoming Schools History Project (SHP) conference in Leeds in July 2025, so this is also a first attempt to set out and develop a broad methodological approach to this work.

Questions, comments, and criticisms are very much welcome!

 

George Orwell once argued, “The worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them.” If language is there "for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought, let the meaning choose the word, not the other way about." (Orwell, quoted by Brubaker and Cooper, 2000)

Accepting uncritically the words others give us is to surrender to them. It means us and our world being defined by others in their terms. Mastering and manipulating words to our own ends means we can define ourselves and our world in our own terms.

In that case, words in the classroom hold enormous power. They give us, the teachers choosing the words and how to use them, power. They can also give our students, if they can master those words for themselves, power.

In relation to substantive concepts – those weighty conceptual terms we use to group together different phenomena the past – we have a responsibility to not just teach our students concepts, but also to invite them to question and critique those concepts.

The Night Before: Last Minute Tips for AQA Paper 1H (23 May 2025)

The night before the exam... A room full of nervous students. What advice to you give?

It’s tempting to “throw the kitchen sink” and bombard students with everything they could possibly need to know. But at this late stage, I don’t think there’s much to be gained from this – what knowledge they have now is basically what they’ll have tomorrow morning, and anything else they might want to recap and revise they’ll be much better doing at home by themselves (or, preferably, they’ll get an early night and good sleep).

I’m also not a fan of predictions. It’s a serious risk that trying to second-guess the exam writers will send students off on the wrong scent.

Instead, I’ll suggest here a more targeted, concepts- and skills-focused approach. The brief resource to accompany this can be found here.

 

Language and Substantive Concepts: Part 2 – Speaking in Tongues

This is the second of a three-part post focusing on what I term, following Caroline Coffin, the “language of history” and substantive concepts.

After the first post set out a broad theoretical framework, this post aims to set out an approach to teaching a specific sub-category of substantive concepts: foreign-language terms.

I’ll be presenting on this topic with colleagues at the upcoming Schools History Project (SHP) conference in Leeds in July 2025, so this is also a first attempt to set out and develop a broad methodological approach to this work.

Questions, comments, and criticisms are very much welcome!

 

Language and Substantive Concepts: Part 1 – Weighty Conceptual Terms

This is the first of a three-part post focusing on what I term, following Caroline Coffin, the “language of history” and substantive concepts.

It aims to set out an approach to teaching substantive concepts by explicitly engaging with the linguistic structures of the historical discipline. I’ll be presenting on this topic with colleagues at the upcoming Schools History Project (SHP) conference in Leeds in July 2025, so this is also a first attempt to set out and develop a broad methodological approach to this work.

Questions, comments, and criticisms are very much welcome!

“Just Write More Essays”? Rethinking Strategies for Deliberate KS5 Writing and Exam Practice

With so little time to play around with in lessons, what can we do to help prepare students with their essay practice and exam preparation?

This year, rather than the blanket instruction to “just write more essays”, I’ve begun to hone in on particular elements of essay planning, writing, and the deconstruction of questions in order to make the best use of our remaining classroom time.

Cities, Railways, and Revolutions: Drawing the Links

In the late-Tsarist period, an urban revolution hit Russia. Major cities exploded in size. The population of St. Petersburg, the imperial capital, trebled from just over 500,000 in 1864 to 1,500,000 in 1900, rising to 2,500,000 by 1917.

It wasn’t just Russia’s capital city that was on the rise. By 1917, approximately 20 percent of the population of the entire empire lived in cities. Some of the most remarkable examples of city growth took place in Siberia, a traditionally underpopulated (by Slavic Russians, at least) region of the empire. And it was here, especially, that another factor came into play. Transportation.

The February Revolution Reconsidered: Part 2, An Undemocratic Revolution

The February Revolution of 1917 developed its own rich political mythology. Untangling this from the realities of events is one of the key challenges facing History teachers instructing students in this topic today. This is the third of a string of three posts on the February Revolution that attempts to do so.

In my last post, I suggested that the February Revolution – often seen as a largely peaceful event – actually involved very significant violence.

In this post, I’ll propose another interpretation which I think has been underplayed and largely submerged beneath another myth. That myth is that the February Revolution was a fundamentally democratic moment in Russian history. By contrast, the interpretation I’ll propose is that February 1917 in many ways heralded a distinctly undemocratic series of developments, developments which, set against a standard of free, universal, and inclusive politics, fall considerably short of democratic ideals.

The Provisional Government of 1917, in its first iteration. "Elected by the revolution"? Credit: public domain, via Wikimedia commons.

The February Revolution Reconsidered: Part 1, A Violent Revolution

In my last post, I challenged two myths of Russia’s 1917 February Revolution which removed Tsar Nicholas II from power: that it was “spontaneous” and “leaderless”.

Over the next two posts, I’ll put forward two rather different interpretations. Both are commonly overlooked when teaching the Russian Revolution. Both, however, deserve serious attention.

In this first post, I’ll examine the case for the February Revolution being a violent event. This directly challenges a common myth that February was peaceful, especially when compared the previous outbreaks of revolutionary unrest, such as 1905’s Bloody Sunday massacre or the 1912 Lena Goldfields massacre.

In fact, February 1917 witnessed considerable violence. This took several forms, including killings of protestors; bloody reprisals against military officers and police; public disorder and mob justice; and iconoclasm.

The "Spontaneous" and "Leaderless" Revolution: Two Myths of February 1917

In a matter of days at the end of February 1917 (dated to the "old-style" Julian calendar), the 304-year-old Romanov dynasty was suddenly and spectacularly overthrown. The February Revolution set in motion a series of fundamental transformations which would shape Russian, European, and wider world history for decades to come. It would also develop its own mythology, key elements of which survive today in standard textbook retellings of the events.

Crowds in Petrograd burn the Tsarist royal insignia during the February Revolution. Credit: Karl Karlovitch Bulla (1853 - 1929), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Myths have their uses in History, in particular to reveal the biases and beliefs of the societies in which they are found. But myth telling (and retelling) itself rarely makes for good History.

This post examines and appraises two enduring myths of the 1917 February Revolution: that it was "spontaneous" and that it was "leaderless". Both have long pasts in different historiographical trends. Both contain a seed of truth. And both are fundamentally misleading as to the actual events of February 1917.

From Big Picture to Fragments and Back Again: Building Sequencing into KS5 Revision

If students don’t know the story of their course, do they really understand what they’ve studied at all?

This deceptively complex question has occupied much of my thinking as we approach A-Level revision season.

It’s tempting to view “knowing the story” as a question of “knowing stuff”. So long as students have revised the details, they know what happened overall. And if they know that, they therefore know the story.

But having lots of detailed knowledge does not necessarily mean students can zoom out and see how it all fits together. Plenty of diligent students end up mastering the finer points of their courses only to find themselves lost in a sea of information (or, to mix metaphors, unable to see the wood for the trees).

This was the situation one of our A-grade students found herself in last year. In a fit of anxiety, she asked me how on earth she could pull all the information together so she knew the sequence, chronology, and meaning of the many events she had studied. Thankfully, this student was self-aware enough to raise her concerns two months before the exam (rather than two days before). We had time to develop an approach. And, broadly speaking, it worked. She mastered the story of the course, was able to recognise and remember how everything fitted together, and got her grade A.

This post explores a series of solutions we developed ahead of last year’s A-Level exams and have continued to work on ahead of this year’s exams as I’ve gone back to refine revision strategies. In what follows, I’ll present this as an integrated approach that might also help your students as they approach final A-Level history exams. This fits into a series of posts (see here, here, and here) since last year on this blog which have explored revision strategies and techniques.

Comrade Stalin, Destroyer of Nations? Approaching the Complexities of Soviet Nationalism(s) in the 1930s

Given the avowed internationalism of the communist movement, it’s surprising how favourably Soviet politicians viewed the idea of nationalism.

As I’ve previously written, in the early 1920s the Soviet Communist Party had decided – after much internal wrangling – to embark on a policy of promoting national identity amongst the non-Russian peoples of the USSR. National cultures, including language, dress, and literature, would now be promoted amongst non-Russian peoples, especially inside their own designated territories within the USSR. Non-Russians would be actively promoted as Communist cadres within the Soviet state.

This policy reversed the old Tsarist policy of Russification, in which Russian cultural and ethnic identity was imposed on non-Russian ethnicities in an imperialist attempt to assimilate and control. It also reversed much Marxist thinking which had anticipated that, with the construction of socialism, national identities would wane and be superseded by class.

From the 1930s, however, important aspects of these policies appeared to be shifting. Our school textbooks commonly indicate a swing away from the promotion of minority, non-Russian nationalisms, and back towards the kind of Greater Russian chauvinism seen under the Tsars.

According to one textbook, “Stalinist policy in the 1930s veered towards greater centralisation and less tolerance of the ethnic groups [of the USSR] as he [Stalin] sought to create a single ‘Soviet identity’. Nationalism meant Russian nationalism and the leaders of the different republics that formed the USSR were purged as ‘bourgeois nationalists’ if they deviated from the path laid down in Moscow.”

Another, summarising Stalinist nationalities policies after the Second World War, states even more baldly: “Stalin was as keen on Russification as the Tsars.”

Was he?

Of Gods, Demons, and Devils: Popular Religion and Church Power in Imperial Russia

When Belarussian-born US journalist, Maurice Hindus visited the USSR in 1929-30, he expressed his amazement at the transformation of peasants’ beliefs. After interviewing young people in one village, he noted, dumbstruck, that “peasant boys and girls should not even know what a rusalka was!”

Hindus’ account, given in his memoir Red Bread (1931), can be read as an attempt to explain how the Russian revolution was transforming the Russian peasant from a superstitious, pre-modern being rooted in backward beliefs into an enlightened citizen. Yet the reference to rusalkas – water-nymphs long believed to inhabit rural rivers, lakes, and ponds – can be read in a rather different way. In revealing the non-belief in these magical creatures of local youth, Hindus was also offering a glimpse into the recent past of what might be called Russia’s “popular religion”.

Hindus recalls that “in my days, children…were afraid of the rusalkas…who were supposed to be the lost souls of drowned girls… With the very milk of our mothers we imbibed the notion that there was no resisting the rusalkas.”

The rusalkas were, in fact, only one rather strange and surprising aspect of the religious world of Russian Orthodox peasants, a religious world which was (for most peasants) Orthodox Christian but which maintained its own idiosyncrasies. This world would be understood by many writers and academics at the time and afterwards to constitute one of “dual faith”, in which ancient pagan and Orthodox Christian faiths coexisted. But the idea of “dual faith” has fallen out of favour since the 1990s, as historians have begun to reconceptualise the Christianity of Russia’s peasants.

Ivan Kramskoi, Rusalki (1871). Credit: Wikimedia Commons. 

In this post, I’ll consider what this peasant Christianity looked like by the early 1900s and this means for one question in our teaching of Russian history in particular: the power of the Orthodox Church in late-Imperial Russia.

Spoken Dictionary and Pronunciation Guide

“Saying it right” is a particular challenge for teachers of Russian and Soviet History.

However familiar we are with the content and concepts of this area of study, the language – from people and places to the names of individuals and organisations, belief systems, and ideas – can often seem alien.

The purpose of this spoken dictionary and pronunciation guide is to provide teachers with accessible and accurate pronunciations for that language.

It comprises over 200 words, giving a brief definition and anglicised and Russian pronunciations for each.