The educational component of this project has proven itself to be very challenging. In total, there were well above 300 unique descriptors for well over 2,000 elements that were deemed worthy of describing. When compiling each of these descriptions, the amount of information that we decided to provide amounts to over 10,000 words – roughly about 40 pages of pure background knowledge. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a great deal of unexplained geographical information that children would have known about either from simply living within the USSR or from a corresponding geography course. There were quite a few people that the book would teach the reader about that did not need an explanation, but we still deemed necessary to describe in case the reader forgets anything when reading an entire textbook. Chapter 14, for example, is dedicated almost entirely to the Central Asian emperor Timur. However, Timur is not mentioned again until chapter 41 in an offhanded remark. Therefore, the popups do not only serve as context, but also aid in the refreshment of previously learned information.
In addition to producing an interactive version of this textbook that is accessible to a less narrow audience than it was written for, we have performed quantitative analysis on the frequency of "propagandistic phrases" throughout the text. Given that the textbook is chronological, this allows us to see what time periods contain the most influential language.
In 1938, the US's Institute for Propaganda Analysis identified seven mechanisms of administering propaganda, with precise strategies on how to identify it. Our goal was to remain objective about propaganda analysis, though none of us are experts with this concept. We believe that this information is important from an educational standpoint, because typically when someone has no basis of knowledge on any given topic, they are more likely to accept all new information at face value. Therefore, it is both important to the researcher to determine how the Soviet Union talks about history and for the reader to think critically and avoid the absorption and potential reproduction of any harmful ideas.