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.

 

Roma and the Civilising Mission

Some of the most striking aspects of this policy were revealed in its application to smaller ethnic groups. For many, especially those who were not settled (i.e. nomadic travellers) or not European in ethnic origin, Soviet nationalities policy turned into a kind of civilising mission more commonly associated with European colonial empires, to raise the supposedly inadequate ‘cultural level’ of 'backward' peoples.

In this way, as historian Sheila Fitzpatrick suggests, it fitted into a broader aim of civilising those ‘backward’ groups who had failed to develop the adequate cultural traits needed to build socialism.

Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism (1999)

While backwardness was seen as a problem for the Soviet Union as a whole, some people were considered obviously more backward than others. The Soviet Union was a multiethnic state, but the ‘friendship of peoples’ that linked its different ethnic groups together was often represented in terms of an elder brother, Soviet Russia, leading and teaching younger siblings. The Muslim peoples of Soviet Central Asia and the reindeer-herding ‘small peoples’ of the north, regarded as the most backward of the union, were archetypal beneficiaries of the Soviet civilizing mission. But ethnicity was not the only determinant of backwardness. Peasants were backward compared to town-dwellers. Women were backward, generally speaking, compared to men. The Soviet civilizing mission was raising the cultural level of all these backward groups.

 

A supposed need to ‘civilise’ was seen as particularly important in the case of Soviet Roma, known officially in the USSR as ‘Gypsies’ (tsygane). Having long faced persecution in Russia, Roma were predominantly nomadic and were widely considered by Communist officials to be (with the possible exception of Kazakh nomads) the USSR’s most ‘backward’ people.

The nomadic culture of the Roma makes it hard to know exactly how many lived in Russia and the USSR. In 1897, the first all-Russian census recorded around 44,500. In the first Soviet census of 1926, 61,234 were officially recorded. The real numbers were likely far higher, even if census takers were unable to accurately record them. Most Roma moved around regularly, although several thousand were settled on farms and in cities by the 1920s.

The Roma presented Soviet officials with problems which tested their nationalities policy to its limits. Firstly, as a nomadic group, they had no territory of their own. This problem was of course not unique to the Roma. Diaspora nationalities, perhaps most obviously Jews, also posed the question of where exactly their Soviet homeland might be. But the situation was aggravated in the case of the Roma. As a predominantly nomadic group, any kind of territorialisation demanded they first settle on the land.

Secondly, the culture of the Roma did not obviously fit into official Soviet understandings of national culture. Romani language had many different dialects, making it difficult to know which language might be officially recognised. In any case, only around 64 percent of Roma actually spoke a Romani language at all.

Romani traditions also jarred with Soviet aspirations for a settled, productive, socialist population. Their nomadism, along with persistent allegations of the criminality and lack of work ethic, brought scorn from Soviet officials, who accused the Roma of leading ‘parasitic’ lives that contributed nothing to the economy.

As historian Brigid O’Keeffe, the leading authority on Soviet Roma, notes, this placed them in an invidious position.

Brigid O’Keeffe, New Soviet Gypsies (2013)

Gypsies’ stereotyped livelihoods – fortune telling, begging, crafty horse-dealing, or horse-thieving – represented […] a still greater moral and financial investment in their Soviet transformation into modern citizens. The sedentarization [i.e. settling on the land] of Gypsies and their transformation into farmers, moreover, was an investment that many Soviet officials doubted would produce anything but the most negligible returns. Soviet officials perceived the distinctive service nomadism of Roma as still more backward, irrational, and deviant than even the pastoral nomadism practiced by Kazakhs and other minority peoples in Siberia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus.

 

New Soviet ‘Gypsies’

Nevertheless, Soviet nationalities policies – however patronising and dismissive they might have been towards the Roma – provided some ambitious Romani individuals with an opportunity to fashion themselves into new national representatives. Energetic, literate, and politically savvy activists took up the challenge. In 1925, they established the All-Russian Gypsy Union. With government backing, they set up schools and cultural organisations to promote national consciousness.

A Romani Cyrillic (Russian character) alphabet developed in 1926 aided the publication of journals and books for Roma, while the ‘Romen’ theatre founded in 1931 promoted the supposed development of Roma from ‘backward Gypsies’ into enlightened Soviet citizens. These cultural initiatives opened up new spaces for Romani activists, most prominent amongst them the writer and playwright, Alexander Germano, himself a leading member of the Gypsy Union.

Romani activists had one foot in two worlds: Roma and Soviet. In the early years of Stalin’s rule, the journalist Maurice Hindus visited the USSR and encountered a large ‘Gypsy’ encampment where he was introduced to an activist and the director of a local Romani club, Rosa. From the city of Smolensk, Rosa came from a settled Romani family and was able to articulate her ambitions for the Roma in the language of Soviet nationalities policy.

Recording his conversation with her in his brilliant (if deeply flawed) memoir Red Bread, Hindus relays both Rosa’s passion for Romani culture and her hopes that the USSR would modernise her people. Her words (however accurately they may have been recorded) seem to highlight a dilemma Romani activists saw in the ‘modernisation’ of the Roma.

Maurice Hindus, Red Bread (1931)

I was too good a revolutionary to allow myself to be affected for long by sentimental misgivings. I realized of course that these Gipsies might have joy, but sorrow they could not escape. […] No, I thought, there was no hope for them in vagabondage — no salvation in their resistance to science and knowledge. Deliverance, I felt convinced, could come only through enlightenment, through productive work, through becoming part of this great society of laboring citizens that we are building in Russia. My task then was clear – to help civilize and modernize these eternal wanderers, to bring them in touch with all the advanced thought of the world, so that they could enjoy all the fruits of this thought.

 

Roma and the Limitations of Soviet Nationalities Policies

It proved difficult to transform Romani life in practice. Despite laws passed in 1926 to encourage Roma to adopt a settled lifestyle and in 1928 to provide them with land, many refused to abandon their nomadic lives. A handful of Romani collective farms (kolkhozy) were established under Stalin in the 1930s.

But by this point, the Gypsy Union no longer existed. In February 1928, citing its failure to change Romani ‘conservative culture’ and its own organisational weaknesses, the Soviet government shut down the Gypsy Union. Undeterred, Union activists would continue their work to develop Romani culture and identity.

By 1939, official census data suggested over 88,000 Roma lived in the USSR. Soviet nationalities policies had hardly transformed Romani life, even if it had forced the Roma to adapt to a new Communist reality. But with war now looming, a new and existential threat faced Roma life and traditions.

To be continued…

 

Further Reading

David M. Crowe, A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia (2^nd ed.), Palgrave Macmillan (2007)

Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s, Oxford University Press (2000)

Maurice Hindus, Red Bread: Collectivization in a Russian Village (forward by Ronald Grigor Suny), Indiana University Press (1988; first published 1931)

Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939, Cornell University Press (2001)

Brigid O’Keeffe, The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise, Bloomsbury (2022)

Brigid O’Keeffe, New Soviet Gypsies: Nationality, Performance, and Selfhood in the Early Soviet Union, University of Toronto Press (2013)

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.

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?

Making the Political Personal: Bergelson’s Birobidzhan

Huge thanks to Ed Durbin for his feedback on an earlier draft of this post! This is another rather long read. If you’d prefer to download it and read offline, a PDF copy can be found here. A lesson text resource and PowerPoint presentation accompany this post, and can be found here.

What makes stories in History powerful?

A few weeks ago, I suggested in a post on Trotsky that the personal is political in History teaching, by which I meant that those individuals whose stories are told in our lessons are given enormous power over our narratives.

Now, I’d like to reverse the equation to suggest that we should try to make the political personal.

What I mean by this is that, rather than telling the history of politics and power through state policy and statistics, we should try to tell it through the words and experiences of individuals who lived through, were impacted by, and in their own ways helped shape it.

These stories are, I believe, powerful. They can both bring potentially dry History to life and empower people whose experiences deserve to be told, but are often overlooked. At the same time, I will argue that the power of individuals’ stories also lies in the ways we choose to narrate them.

There’s nothing particularly original in what I’m suggesting; and I’ll flag up a number of important works by other History teachers and educators to show where my thinking is really coming from.

At the same time, I also want to take the opportunity to bring to light a fascinating and almost entirely overlooked story. This is the story of the Jewish homeland no-one has heard of: Birobidzhan. And it is also the story of one of its most prominent proponents and activists, a long-forgotten Yiddish writer called David Bergelson.

We Need to Talk About Leon: Trotsky and the Dilemmas of Representation

A huge thanks to Claire Holliss for her thorough and careful critique of an earlier draft of this post. This draft is certainly fuller, and better, for her thoughts! It is also very long – if you would prefer to download it as a PDF and read offline, a copy can be accessed here.

 

As the feminist slogan goes, “the personal is political”. This strikes me as doubly true when thinking of representation in History teaching.

Firstly, our personal decision, as teachers, about who we give representation to in our teaching grants certain groups and individuals from the past the power and right to be seen and heard. This is of course not only political in a sense of abstract interpersonal power relations, but also in that it has become highly politicised, by groups and campaigns today who actively contest over which people should be included in the History curriculum.

Secondly, and more directly relevant here, when we select individuals to represent a wider group from the past in our History lessons, we grant those individuals remarkable power. Think about it for a moment: almost always posthumously, and certainly without their knowledge, these individuals in effect are authorised to speak, and even act as proxy, for others whose experiences we consider similar to theirs.

This means that we need to talk about representation. Beyond just which groups we encounter in History teaching (which is certainly important), whom we empower as representatives of those groups by giving weight and voice to their life stories and identities really matters. (What I mean by “representation” and “identity” is explained in a short post-script at the bottom of this blog post.)

For this reason, I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with the prominence of one individual in our course textbooks.

Problematising Pogroms: Reassessing Antisemitic Agency in Russia, c. 1881-1921

By the beginning of the 20^th century, Russia was the most antisemitic country in Europe. The hatred of Jews was manifested more violently and more frequently than anywhere else in the continent, through regular outbreaks of pogroms.

Why? While we might be tempted to blame an arch-reactionary, Jew-hating government under the last Tsars, we should also be wary of simplistic, monocausal explanations of Russian antisemitism and pogroms. On closer examination, the picture is much more complicated.

Finding the national in the communist: Soviet ethnic policies in the 1920s

A second teach of a topic can always help clarify thoughts, as can a good book.

This week, I finally returned to a part of our A-Level Russia/USSR course that has fascinated me, and had sparked considerable debate amongst our outgoing Year 13s – Soviet nationalities policy.

Brigid O’Keeffe’s fantastic recent book, The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise has helped clarify and challenge my thoughts over the past year. The book is aimed primarily at undergraduate students but gives a superb introduction to any teachers wanting more context and clarity on this topic. It builds on a number of other works, notably including a seminal 1994 article by Yuri Slezkine and ground-breaking 2001 book by Terry Martin, which are referenced below.

This summary narrative, which provides the basis of this independent reading resource for students, is drawn from the ideas in one of the chapters in Brigid O'Keeffe's book. It aims to provide another way in which the questions of class and ethnicity could become conflated in a socialist state, something I explored in a previous post.

The Empire Strikes Back? How Ethnic Violence Became a Part of Soviet Communism

At the height of the Great Terror (c. 1937-1938), Stalin’s secret police began systematic campaigns targeting certain ethnic minorities in the USSR. Poles, Latvians, Estonians, ethnic Germans, Romanians, Greeks, Afghans, Iranians, Chinese, Bulgarians, and Macedonians were arrested en masse, deported, or executed.

According to official statistics, 335,500 people were arrested and almost 250,000 killed in what became known as the National Operations. These were not soldiers, spies, or traitors; they were ordinary civilians. Before the Second World War, this was a high-point for repression of ethnic minorities in Russia and the USSR.

This event is almost as troubling analytically as it is morally. As Marxists, Soviet Communists should have (and generally portrayed themselves as doing so) judged socioeconomic class to be the principal identity determining treatment by the state.

When we teach Russian and Soviet History, it makes (some kind of) sense to explain to students that the USSR targeted the “rich” peasant kulaks, the bourgeoisie, and the old nobility. By contrast, campaigns targeting ethnic minorities seem distinctly out of place. It was in the Tsarist Russian empire before 1917, after all, that repression against non-ethnic Russians was committed as part of “Russification” campaigns.

So why did a Communist state target its ethnic minorities? It's tempting to view this as a return to age-old imperial policy, embodied in the Russification and persecution of Tsarist Russian Empire. But Soviet ethnic violence had its own logic and patterns of development.

This post traces Soviet ethnic violence back to the Russian Civil War and the little-known case, studied by historian Shane O'Rourke, of the Terek Cossacks, simultaneously linking this policy further back to the Tsarist imperial legacy and forward to the Stalinist "National Operations".