In spring 1993 an official in the Russian Ministry of Education responsible for humanities education explained that future elementary and secondary school history textbooks would ‘eliminate all the excesses of our old history writing’ and would emphasise a more harmonious view of the Russian past. When pressed further, the official promised that class struggle, wars, and revolutions generally, and the first half of the twentieth century (the Soviet period) in particular, would receive far less attention than they have in past curricula in favour of a more prominent place for nineteenth-century ‘civilisation’, by which he meant Russian culture and religion. One of the aims in the new privileging of the nineteenth century was to integrate Russian history into greater world historical processes and deemphasise what had been previously trumpeted in textbooks as the uniqueness of the Russian experience. For this official, and for many other historians and citizens of the post-Soviet states, the Soviet period has become an aberration of Russian and human history. Rather than grapple with the painful facts of Stalinism, its origins and consequences, they prefer ‘a more harmonious view of the past’. Indeed, a widely articulated desire to escape from the tragedies of the twentieth-century history has been one common response to the revelations about the Stalin period that have emerged since 1985 and to the debates about the meaning of those revelations.