Who are we bringing up?
A downtown Kyiv bookstore sells exercise books – presumably approved by the Ministry of Education – with pictures of Stalin, Lenin, and an assault rifle and the inscription “Nothing pacifies better than a Kalashnikov gun”
With September 1 just a few days away, The Day visited one of Kyiv’s many school fairs and… saw exercise books with a picture of Stalin and Lenin. They lay among various stationery items on the ground floor of the Chytai-horod bookstore in the very center of the capital. A store seller commented on this as follows: “All the exercise books on sale have been approved by the Ministry of Education (!), and we acquired them just to broaden the range of items.” Besides, he continued, they are designed not for junior schoolchildren but for senior pupils, who already know history, as well as for collectors and people who take interest in that era. Yet the exercise books’ glamorous exterior – with a vertical red-letter Latin text against a silver background – shows that they are intended to cater to the tastes and likings of young people.
The exercise books’ imprint says they were “manufactured at the request and under control of the Russian private limited company Alt by the Polisvit publishers in Dnipropetrovsk.” Incidentally, there was another, now less interesting, exercise book next to the abovementioned ones. The red cover depicts a Kremlin star and a Kalashnikov assault rifle. All this bears the caption: “Nothing pacifies better than a Kalashnikov gun.” As the child psychologist Yulia Ulianova explained to The Day, “It is wrong to place a picture of weapons on the products intended for children.” It is putting it mildly…
Does the Ministry of Education really certify and approve exercise books like these? If not, how do all these “artworks” with pictures of butchers and weapons on the cover make their way to the market? The Day has officially requested the Ministry for Education, Science, Youth, and Sport to clarify this situation.
Incidentally, there was a similar situation with exercise books in late November last year. The media reported on a Ternopil stationery shop that sold, among other things, “Glamorous Leaders” series school exercise books with the pictures of Stalin, Lenin, Fidel Castro, and Mao Zedong. The exercise books were taken off the shop shelves almost immediately at the Ternopil City Council’s demand. But some people do not seem to have drawn proper conclusions from that story. It is now the question of not only the attitude of governmental controlling bodies, but also the civic position and responsibility (or at least conscientiousness) of Ukrainian business.
Incidentally, last April Moscow shop shelves displayed “Great Names of Russia” series exercise books with a portrait of Stalin. Tellingly, they triggered a negative reaction of the Russian public. For example, the Civic Chamber condemned the popularization of Stalin, and one of its members, Sergei Volkov, equated the picture of Stalin on exercise books with that of the swastika. Yet they were not taken out of sale. And now they can be found in Ukraine, where nobody seems to be against this.
