Abstract

This article deals with the 75-year period of writing textbooks on the history of Southern and Western Slavs in the Department of History at Lomonosov Moscow State University. The first textbook was conceived in 1947 and published in 1957. It resulted from the fruitful researching and teaching of the members of the Department and the Institute of Slavonic Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Theoretically, it testified to the victory of the Marxist-Leninist concept in the University Slavic Studies. The preparation of the second textbook took place against the backdrop of a heated debate on the replacement of the former discipline with the history of the countries building socialism. For the first time the article introduces the archival materials relating to the preparation, course and decisions of the interuniversity conference of historians in the area of Slavic Studies (February 1962). This allowed us to reveal the attitude of the entire Slavistic community of the USSR to the concept of the second edition. The completely new textbook came out in 1969. However, a signifi cant part of its print run was destroyed for purely political reasons. This fact is little known even to the scholarly community. Another textbook in the form of a course of lectures on the history of Southern and Western Slavs appeared only ten years later, in 1979. Its 13 000 copies were distributed by the Department to 58 universities of the USSR. 20 more years were necessary to prepare a new textbook. In 1998 it appeared in two volumes and was reprinted in 2001 and 2008. A current view of the Slavic history from antiquity to 2019 is presented in the just published standard textbook in three volumes (September 2022). The emergence of this particular version was predetermined by the very logic of the history of the Slavic peoples, as well as the necessity for application of its authors’ educational and methodological approaches and a fresh look at the discipline.