The battle for the future shape of Russia’s education system is now in full swing. Not only is the Kremlin increasing its control over what it considers the correct version of the past, there are also signs of a gradual ideological return to promote the glorification of Joseph Stalin.

In 2015 the 70th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany was celebrated in grand style. During that time, a larger than usual number of Stalin monuments was erected in several cities especially in south-western parts of the country upon the proposal of the communist party. The communists’ call came after a 2014 law passed by the Duma introduced a criminal penalty for rehabilitating Nazism and criticising Soviet activities during the Second World War. The law stipulates up to five years in prison for “lying about history”. Similar steps have been taken with regards to teaching history in schools.

The history of Ukrainians in the Far East is slowly coming to an end. It is a story of colonisation in the Russian Far East, attempts to maintain identity in unfavourable conditions and a fantastic colonial idea with humble attempts to implement it.

In Hej Sokoły (Hey, Falcons), the Polish-Ukrainian song from the mid-19th century written by Tomasz Pandura, the author yearns for “green Ukraine” – the Ukrainian steppe. The bilingual song is known to most Poles and almost as many Ukrainians. However, few people know that at a later stage the term “Green Ukraine” (written with capital letters) came to describe the territory in Russia’s Far East where, at the end of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century, a significant number of Ukrainians settled. The areas of Amur and Primorskaya oblasts, where many Ukrainians lived, were called Zeleny Klyn. The term “Green Ukraine”, however, contrary to Zeleny Klyn, conveyed not only the ethnographic meaning but also the national aspirations.

The question of revolution, particularly the "colour revolutions", is something that fills the Kremlin with fear and paranoia. This is how attitudes towards 1917 are now being shaped. I would not be surprised if we hear one narrative on 1917 which labels it a “coloured revolution" – carried out with foreign aid, to destroy the wonderful country of Russia.

In Russia, there is no definite and clear position on 1917. The new democratic Russia, which emerged in 1991, had undergone a notable transformation since then and therefore we cannot speak today of those ideological postulates that were used to assess the 1917 revolution during the 1990s. At that time, historiography in Russia freely developed and evaluated the event as one that started the construction of the totalitarian system and repressive state. After all, the ideas that underpinned 1917, in many ways, were both totalitarian and repressive in nature. In order to understand this, it is sufficient to read the documents that form the Marxist-Leninist doctrine. And it is enough to read the communist party manifesto in order to see what a world built in accordance with this recipe would look like.

Today, we see a completely different picture. It is not complete nonsense, because there are certain signals. For Russian historians today, 1917, along with many other issues, constitute what is called “difficult issues in history”. An attempt to create a single, unified textbook in Russia also runs into problems.

Since the late 19th century much has been published about Central Asian Jews who came under Russian – and later Soviet – dominance and who became commonly known as the Bukharan Jews. Yet, it is only now when there are almost no Jews left in Central Asia that the study of Bukharan Jews has seriously started.

In the 16th century, Polish Protestantism began to flourish and this tolerance brought European civilisation many noble thinkers, including Jan Hevelius, Kazimierz Siemienowicz, Józef Naronowicz-Naronski and Krzysztof Arciszewski.

In the post-Versailles era, Polish leader Józef Piłsudski proposed to the authorities of Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus to forge an Intermarium union for the survival of their states. Piłsudski risked and pushed forward an intellectual speculation on how to strengthen subjectivity and sovereignty of the “young” states in games between major powers. From the perspective of time, this speculation can hardly be defined as a real-life success.