Besides the educational environments, state laws and community rules the educational media, especially schoolbooks may and really play a crucial role in promoting inclusion and exclusion. There is a wide repertoire of such ways of playing in/exclusion in the history of education and history of educational media themselves. In the paper we will focus on the Russian emigrants’ elementary textbooks created by Russian Émigrés themselves for their children taken with them from the homeland after 1917.

The events of 1917-1921 created the Russia as such and the Russia abroad where dissidents had been pushed to. The émigré Russia emerged in Turkey, Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, the Baltic countries, China etc.; and education was set up for children taken out of Russia. Thus begins the double history of two Russian cultures and patterns in education (the Soviet Russia and the émigré Russia).

Each country, each city was a special case in the history of émigré everyday life, feelings, mentality, education and publishing. In the Baltic countries the emigrants were included in larger Russian population of the previous citizens of the former Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire. In Czechoslovakia, Serbia and Bulgaria we see bigger of smaller official state supports towards Russian emigrants as émigrés. In Berlin of Paris the Russian emigrant communities were newly born like in Slavic countries and more independent than there. In every locus the conditions of the boundaries between majority and émigrés were different. Even within every locus the boundaries of inclusion (to what? émigré enclave or local native community?) or exclusioin (from what? émigré enclave or local people?) had been constructed in different ways and with different accuracy and clearness. An interesting criteria to recognize such boundaries is the emigrant publishing for education.  

Russian émigré textbooks set themselves a double mission: to help children prepare for the return to their homeland, and before that, to find “Russia” around and in them. The task was to teach memory of the homeland, to gather the culture, (re)construct it and pass the ‘Atlantis’ the adults lost to the future generation. The task of setting roots in the new land was deemed either secondary or not warranting attention.

It would be particularly apt and important to consider elementary textbooks. Against the background of everyday life in a foreign-language environment, those books served children brought from Russia and born in exile as their first conduit to be included into their lost homeland memory and a shield against a new neighborhood to be excluded from the host country. While a dialog with the native past was set up, a dialog with the present was consciously pushed out of textbooks; if such a dialog did slip in, it only happened through an “oversight” in those parts of a textbook where rational control did not apply. The group politics and textbooks worked on the exclusion from the strange non mother tongue neighborhood and on the inclusion into the warm neighborhood émigré enclave as a more homeland than the Soviet Russia. But the ex/inclusion was not absolutely and one typical case of this complicated interplay of in/exclusions will be told about in the paper in details.

If we want to learn what textbooks Russian émigrés used to teach their children, we will not find a clear-cut answer. Mostly first émigré studies on Russians after 1917 expressed the opinion that there were no particular schoolbooks created by emigrants (Basler 1983; Mchitarjan 2006). Few special studies of the books repertoire and schools of the Russian emigration demonstrate that the world of textbooks was not limited to reprints of previous pre-1917 editions or occasional materials to teach like newspapers etc. (Kratz 1987, Sedowa-Terenya 2013, Kosinowa 2016, Shewchenko 2017). Toward the wide spectrum of various theories of exclusion/inclusion of different migrant groups from/into their social, cultural, educational etc. environments we would like to add a theory of cultural transmission in socio-cultural minorities in a foreign cultural environment to our discussion (Mchitarjan & Reisenzein, 2013-6). We would like to make a focus on the educational activities of minorities and look at cultural transmission going on with cultural impeding at the same time. One can trace the last within the emigrant textbooks very well. The theory mostly says about culture-transmission motives minority groups have got very strong to transmit their culture to the next generation. We would like to argue that such way was and is also because of the rejection of the majority culture by émigrés and the efforts not to allow any important contacts with it. The main methods used in the study are the slow hermeneutical reading; content, canon and visual analysis. The paper will show a spectrum of textbooks and focus on the textbook that typify the reconstruction of the pedagogical routine of the first years of emigration – the primer “Chochu chitat [I want to read]” published by Ewgeniya Akinfiewa in 1922 in Berlin.

By deep minute studying individual editions, one can see the special “(non)dialog” that contributed to severing inclusion interplay by textbooks in Russian printed in the 1920s in non-Russian states. In the case of (e)migrant communities textbooks can perpetuate marginalisation, protecting the group as a cocoon from cultural diffusion and assimilation. In Russian emigrant textbooks of the 1920s this cohesion strategy is supported and strengthened by representation of external environment as hostile and in-group environment as humane and safe. We can trace it in the book’s design, on the selection of the stories offered to children to read, and on the sequence in which the stories were arranged. The textbooks’ authors let slip at least some latent notes of the contemporary émigré life problems in the present while reconstructing the eternal past. Tracing the nature of individual publications, we observe important processes that could serves as a foundation for future typology of émigré textbooks like a kind of mirror towards boundaries with outside domestic neighbors and ties within emigrants themselves inside. In the context of actual abruption of cultural continuity with the home culture the strategy of putting the family model and mother tongue to the center of emigrant society was mostly used. Instead cultural transmission between minority and majority we have to say about the model of intergenerational cultural transmission within families which is based on a child’s urge to the solely “our” ethnic and confessional values and norms, recommended by adults according their childhoods spent in the lost homeland. Therefore, emigrant textbooks didn’t “allow” children to be included in local networks of dominant culture, but preparing children excluding from it for inclusion into their own culture, exported and kept educationally unbreakable as more as possible.

Basler, F. (1983) Die deutsch-russische Schule in Berlin, 1931-1945: Geschichte und Auftrag. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Feidel-Mertz, H., Hammel, A. (2004) Integration and formation of identity: Exile schools in Great Britain. In: Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 23: 71–84. Hatton, T., Leigh, A. (2011) Immigrants assimilate as communities, not just as individuals. In: Journal of Population Economics 24: 389–419. Kosinowa, O. (2016) Traditsiya mezhkulturnogo wzaimodejstviya w sphere obrazovaniya rossijskogo zarubezhya na territorii Kitaya (1898-1945) [Intercultural communication in Russian émigré education in China]. Moskwa: Moskowski Gumanitarnyj Uniwersitet. Kratz, G. (1987) Russische Verlage in Berlin nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg // Beyer T. ;Kratz G.; Werner X. Russische Autoren und Verlage in Berlin nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg. Berlin: Arno Spitz: 39-141. Kwast-Welfel J., Boski P. and Rovers M. (2008) Intergenerational value similarity in Polish immigrant families in Canada in comparison to intergenerational value similarity in Polish and Canadian non-immigrant families. In: Zheng G, Leung K, Adair JG (eds.) Perspectives and Progress in Contemporary Cross-Cultural Psychology. Available at: http://ebooks.iaccp.org/xian/, 193–209. Mchitarjan, I. (2006) Das “russische Schulwesen” im europäischen Exil. Zum bildungspolitischen Umgang mit den pädagogischen Initiativen der russischen Emigranten in Deutschland, der Tschechoslowakei und Polen (1918–1939). Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt. Mchitarjan I. (2009) Bildungspolitik für russische Emigranten in Deutschland (1918-1933). In: Bildung und Erziehung, 62Jg., H.1: 71-88. Mchitarjan I. and Reisenzein R. (2013) The culture-transmission motive in minorities: An online survey of adolescents and young adults with an immigrant background in Germany. In: ISRN Education (International Scholarly Research Notices). Vol.2013. Mchitarjan I. and Reisenzein R. (2014) The importance of the culture of origin in immigrant families: Empirical findings and their explanation by the theory of cultural transmission in minorities. In: Geisen TH, Studer T and Yildiz E (eds.) Migration, Familie und Gesellschaft. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Pronin, A.A. (2016) Rossijskaya emigratziya w otechestvennykh dissertatsionnykh issledovaniyakh [Russian emigration in the PhD thesises]. Diss.doktora ist nauk. Chelyabinsk: GosPedUni, 2016; Raeff, M (1990) Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of Russian Emigration, 1919–1939, New York: Oxford University Press. Schönpflug, U. (eds) (2009) Cultural Transmission. Psychological, Developmental, Social, and Methodological Aspects, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shewchenko, E. (2017) Russkaya Schkola w Emigratsii [Russian School in Emigration]. Moskwa: Iris. Sedowa, E., Terenya, Yu. (2013) Uchebniki dlya nachalnykh klassow kak sredstwo natsionalnogo vospitaniya w Russkom Zarubezhye “pervoj wolny” [Elementary schooltextboos as a way toward Russian national education in exile], in: Uchebniki detstva. Moskwa: RGGU: 116-141.