This summer, a debate erupted over multiperspectival history teaching. The claim quickly took on a life of its own that this approach supposedly seeks to gloss over difficult aspects of Estonian history, avoid sensitive topics and ultimately blur our national identity. Maarja Vaino articulated this concern forcefully in an ERR daily commentary, and a few days later, history education specialist Mare Oja and history teacher Tiina-Mall Kreem refuted the claim, drawing on classroom practice and the substance of the methodology.

It is strange to watch this debate, if only because I wrote quite unequivocally in Õpetajate Leht in 2015: "The aim of multiperspectival history teaching is to teach history as an academic discipline, not to use history as an ideological tool." Eleven years later, I have no reason to take back a single word of that sentence.

Multiperspectivity does not mean that facts no longer exist, that occupation is "one opinion" and deportation "another perspective." Nor does it mean that a teacher should declare every family legend equal to historical research.

There may be multiple perspectives, but that does not turn an event that occurred in the past into multiple events. A student's task is to learn to ask who is speaking, when they are speaking, what a claim is based on, what is left out of the account and how different people experienced the same event. Source criticism helps us get closer to the truth.

Multiperspectivity is not relatisvism

For Estonia, this has a very practical dimension — even one of national security. Russian state propaganda consistently uses narratives about World War II as a tool of contemporary politics: the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states is called "liberation," preserving the memory of occupation is labeled "rewriting history" and actions by the Estonian state are repeatedly portrayed as manifestations of "Nazism" or "Russophobia." These messages are amplified by propaganda outlets, social media networks and all manner of information channels used in hybrid warfare.

If we want young people in Estonia to be able to resist such narratives, it is not enough to tell them, "That's false — remember that!" A young person who has mastered the source criticism used in historical scholarship has a much stronger moral backbone: they can examine the secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the events of 1940, the legal continuity of the Republic of Estonia, sources documenting the repressions and the political situation in 1944 and explain why the word "liberation" does not adequately describe what happened in Estonia. Which is better for Estonia's security: a student who reproduces information dictated by someone else or a student who can independently dismantle a propaganda myth?

We rightly want young people from ethnic minority backgrounds to develop a strong Estonian civic identity and to value the Constitution's aim of ensuring the preservation of the Estonian nation, language and culture through the ages. A young person with Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian or Tatar roots does not have to give up their ethnic identity or family history to do so. In fact, civic identity is stronger when it can honestly accommodate an understanding of where one's family came from and what it has lived through.

What do Narva's young people really think?

During the 2024/2025 school year, I asked 10th- and 11th-grade students at Narva Estonian High School to anonymously write down their thoughts about commemorating and glorifying World War II, engaging in sensitive dialogue and how schools should teach the subject. I received responses from 36 young people in total. This is not a scientifically representative study, but rather a teacher's thermometer showing what kinds of historical memory students bring into the classroom.

The responses include views that clearly align with an Estonian civic identity. One student considers it important to "celebrate the freedom we have today." Another writes: "It is our shared past and we cannot simply ignore it." A third describes the aim of history education as learning "how propaganda can lead to mass destruction" and understanding the value of democracy and human rights. These are by no means the responses of a homogeneous "Russian memory community." They are the thoughts of school students in Estonia.

There are also comments that clearly reveal the influence of pobedobesie*. "My favorite holiday is May 9," one respondent writes. Another: "Victory Day. A kind of holiday." In the strongest response, restrictions on celebrating May 9 in Estonia in the way it has traditionally been observed are even compared to taking religion away from a believer.

Another student would like to learn at school "what good Russia has done for other countries and people." One young person acknowledges that before Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine, their family hardly celebrated May 9 at all; they simply knew that such a day existed. The fact that Europe Day is also observed on May 9 came as a great surprise to them.

Several comments reflect family histories that are uncomfortable in the Estonian context. One young person, for example, says that their grandfather is a World War II hero and that his portrait hangs in the Moscow Kremlin.

There is no point in hiding these statements or passing moral judgment on their authors. For a teacher, they are instead information indicating a point where family memory, the Soviet-era victory myth and today's Russian propaganda environment have become intertwined.

But most of the responses contain shades of gray. And it is precisely within those shades of gray that real teaching takes place. "It is important to commemorate not 'victory' in general, but your own family's story." "We should commemorate not the fact that someone won, but the fact that the war ended." "It is important to commemorate humanity and the end of the war."

Even more telling are the responses to the question of how to engage in dialogue without hurting anyone. Phrases that recur include "speak calmly," "avoid accusations" and "listen to the other person," but also "stay silent," "don't talk about it at all" and "ask first whether it is OK to talk about the subject."

This shows that young people still perceive World War II and May 9 as a living conflict. The RITA-Ränne study reached the same conclusion as early as 2020: tensions surrounding sensitive topics decrease when students are given an opportunity to express their thoughts and feelings and make sense of them through classroom discussion.

Shades of gray are real life

In Narva, one encounters a phenomenon that may seem paradoxical from the outside. A student may speak of the Soviet era with great nostalgia and may not initially see it as an occupation, yet on March 25 stand sincerely and solemnly at the Memento Mori memorial to the victims of the Stalinist regime, wearing a blue, black and white ribbon. In the student's mind, there may be no contradiction between the two.

For us as historians, the contradiction is obvious. In a student's family history, however, a grandmother's stories, nostalgia for a Soviet childhood, condemnation of the deportations and respect for the Estonian state can coexist quite comfortably.

A nationally minded history teacher might get angry with such a young person and wonder: How can you not understand? Or perhaps it would make more sense to ask: Why does your family remember the Soviet era this way? Who in your family lived in Estonia at the time? What did 1940 mean for the Estonian state? Who was deported and why? What do the documents say? Scolding the student would merely soothe the teacher's wounded feelings. Asking critical questions could give Estonia a citizen who has reached their own conclusions.

The same applies to the word "liberation." If a student's family has roots in a Belarusian or Ukrainian village where the German occupation authorities killed civilians or in Leningrad, where the family survived the siege, I have no right as a teacher to forbid the student from saying, "The Soviet Army liberated my grandfather's home village from German occupation." In that family's historical experience, this may be an accurate statement.

But the next question is whether the same word is appropriate for Estonia in 1944. It is not, without a very important qualification. The German occupation ended, but the independence of the Republic of Estonia was not restored; Soviet occupation rule returned. The same army, the same stage of the war, but a different national and family context. Understanding that distinction is precisely the kind of historical thinking that multiperspectival history teaching seeks to develop.

'Don't talk nonsense!'

I have an embarrassing teaching memory about this. I was working at what was then Tartu Aleksander Pushkin School, now Jogentaga School. A cheerful fifth-grade boy announced in class, based on what his grandfather had told him, that Tartu had needed to be bombed during World War II because there were fascists there. Before the professional history teacher in me could hit the brakes, the Tartu native in me got there first. "Don't talk nonsense!" I snapped at the boy.

The boy was usually enthusiastic, curious and talkative in class. After that, he shut down for weeks. I may have had grounds to challenge his claim on the facts, but pedagogically, I lost the argument in a matter of seconds. Being right does a teacher little good if the student closes the door.

What should I have done? Asked questions. When was Tartu bombed? Who bombed it? Whom did his grandfather call "fascists"? Where did his grandfather live during the war? What sources can we use to establish who was in Tartu at the time and what the purpose of the bombing was? That does not mean giving in to the child. It means taking his claim from the realm of family history into the realm of historical inquiry. That is exactly what multiperspectival history teaching does.

Cultural sensitivity does not mean abandoning the Estonian state's historical experience for fear that someone might be offended. Cultural sensitivity means understanding the experiences that shape the student who comes into our classroom and knowing how to build a path from there toward an evidence-based understanding of history. Empathy is not justification, listening to a different perspective is not the same as accepting it as correct and multiperspectivity is not a ceremonial parade of multiple "truths."

Estonian national identity does not grow stronger when students memorize the correct phrases and repeat them on a test. It grows stronger when young people understand why the Estonian state was established in 1918, why the events of 1940 are called an occupation, why the deportations were a crime, why the memory of the Soviet victory may genuinely be painful and sacred to their family and why that family memory does not give Russia the right to rewrite Estonian history.

* The Russian pobedobesie is a derogatory neologism used by critics to describe the exaggerated "cult of victory" that has developed in Russia: the ritual glorification and militarization of victory in World War II and the use of that legacy to justify contemporary aggressive policies. The term is a play on the Russian words pobeda ("victory") and -besie ("madness, frenzy"; cf. besit'sya, "to rage").

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