The Cold War in the Soviet School: A Case Study of Mathematics Education

This article is devoted to certain aspects of the cold war reflected in the teaching of mathematics in the Soviet Union. I will deal specifically with direct manifestations of the cold war, not with the teaching of mathematics during the cold war in general. My aim is not to present a comprehensive examination of school programs in mathematics offered during the period in question; nor is it necessarily to demonstrate how these programs reflected the ambition to win the arms race. I am interested in examining direct expressions of ideology, including how the teaching of mathematics was used (or intended to be used) to convey to students on the one hand an image of the enemy and on the other a sense of national superiority. The characterization of certain phenomena as manifestations of the spirit of the cold war and aggression toward other countries remains a complicated matter in Russia. Contemporary Russian textbooks (Durmanova 2003) note that the long-accepted defini-