Sergei Lavrov is confident of the CSTO’s unity in approaches to assessing history

In an interview with four Russian radio stations, Sergei Lavrov, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, drew attention to the development of common approaches by member nations of the Commonwealth of Independent States to the period of being a single state and methods of teaching about it.
According to Sergei Lavrov, “there is no need to give nationalists an excuse by dwelling on certain complicated stories from our common history.” “Nevertheless, this history, in the end, in a number of cases, helped all the peoples living in this vast geopolitical space to create the foundations of their statehood,” stresses the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation.
Sergei Lavrov called for an effort “with due understanding of the newly-independent states’ desire for self-assertion” to avoid immoderate assessments “which clearly and deliberately play into the hands of ultra-radicals and nationalists.”
The Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs recalled that in 2021 the Russian Federation initiated the establishment of a commission (association) of scholars within the CIS and that one of its main activities will be to “discuss matters of our common history.”
“I do not think there will be unified history textbooks,” said Sergei Lavrov, “but there will certainly be plans for textbooks reflecting a consolidated point of view, a diversity of points of view but with an aim to constructively consider all these issues.”
The Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation drew attention to the work of a relevant Russian commission on the Second World War which includes historians from Germany, Poland and Lithuania, “and, in a number of cases, they produce unified documents.”
He also expressed confidence that “within the framework of the Commonwealth a similar mechanism will work much more constructively, given the proximity of our states and our membership in many organizations: the EAEU, CSTO and SCO.”
As you may recall, the CSTO Parliamentary Assembly, in accordance with the 2021–2025 CSTO PA Action Plan on Approximation and Harmonization of National Legislation of the CSTO Member States is developing Recommendations on the Formation of Common Approaches of the CSTO Member States to the Development of Measures to Counteract External Destructive Attempts to Revise and Distort the Historical Events and Outcomes of the Great Patriotic War and Second World War and the Methods of Teaching Their History.