Description
The legacies of the Cuban Missile Crisis are manifold. From lessons for scholars of Foreign Policy Analysis to recent discoveries of previously unknown facts by historians of US-Soviet relations, the crisis has proved time and again a major juncture in international politics. Yet, the memories of this crisis, as they have been articulated by political and societal actors in Putin’s Russia have often been at odds with these now familiar accounts. Our paper will investigate the ways in which the history of the crisis was interpreted in Russian high school history textbooks and state history exam in the run-up to Russia’s war against Ukraine in 2022. Analysing two sets of officially approved textbooks (all textbooks approved by Russia’s Ministry of Education for the academic years 2014-15 and 2021-22) and official practice exams between 2008-2022, we will identify the ways in which Russia’s state-endorsed historical narratives interpreted the origins of the crisis, delineated Moscow’s options, assessed its decisions and evaluated its outcomes. We will then discuss the implications of these narratives for Russia’s contemporary foreign policy by tracing how the memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis relate to ideas about the limits of the possible in Moscow’s international behaviour
