Rewriting Russia's history: publisher Frances Pinter is helping Russia meet its vast need for up-to-date school-books.

Henry Ford irreverently held that `history is bunk', but millions of Russians might be forgiven if they agreed with him. A whole generation were brought up on school textbooks which reflected Marx's and Lenin's interpretation of history. So how do today's Russians go about setting the record straight? How do they provide their school-children with books that give a more honest history, or teach economics as if capital and markets mattered?

A World Bank study last year found that Russia is short of 150 million textbooks. `The reason for the shortage is part and parcel of the immense chaos there is when a system undergoes the changes that Russia is undergoing,' says British academic publisher Frances Pinter, who took part in the study. The World Bank team interviewed Education Ministry officials, teachers, economists, librarians and planners.

Since last August Pinter has headed up a separate initiative to set in train the production of vast quantities of new books for Russia's secondary schools. She and her colleagues have criss-crossed Russia, visiting local governments, printers and publishers. Already 1.5 million books have been published--24 titles in history and social sciences, written by Russia's best academics. Print runs have varied from 25,000 to 250,000 for each title. Now Pinter is looking to the provision of books for higher education.

Controversially for some, the operation is being sponsored by the Soros Foundation. George Soros made millions on currency speculation which effectively forced Britain out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. His philanthropic activities, including the funding of this publishing venture, have been branded by extreme right-wing nationalists of the Zhirinovski camp as American propaganda. Pinter counters that the Russians who have benefited, including the Education Ministry, are only too grateful for this financial support from the West. Russian teachers, impressed by the content and quality of the new books, have told her, `We wish we had these when we were at school.' The British media, she adds, made much of how Soros gained his money, `but says far too little about how he spends it'.

Pinter first met Soros in 1991, when he was looking for somebody to run the publishing arm of the new Central European University, based in Budapest, which he set up. Oxford University Press advised Soros to approach Pinter. Her credentials were ideal as the founder of Pinter Publishers, one of Britain's respected academic book houses, and chairperson of a working party on central and eastern Europe at the British Publishers Association.

She and Soros turned out to have other affinities: both come from Hungarian Jewish families and are American citizens, though Pinter has lived in Britain since gaining her PhD in international relations at London University in the early Seventies. When they first met, she recalls, she gave him all her ideas for setting up an academic publishing house for a continent emerging from totalitarianism. `He disagreed with all of them,' she says. Six months later he asked her to set up the press.

Her vision for the new publishing house was to `go for quality not quantity. We wanted to be the first port of call for any author that wanted to publish research on the region, and for any reader who wanted to read about central and eastern Europe.' The first title, The Privatization Process in Central Europe, won a major US publishing award as Choice magazine's `outstanding academic book of the year'. The university press is now publishing 15 to 20 titles a year, in English only, with print runs of up to 5,000.

It was from this new post in Budapest that Pinter was seconded to join the World Bank study on Russia's textbook needs. Returning from Moscow she reported her findings to Soros. `You must go back there at once,' he urged. It was a Friday, and she was looking forward to a long-deserved holiday with her husband. But the following Monday saw her on a flight back to Moscow. `The urgency for writing new books was pressing because of the ideological bias of the earlier textbooks,' says Pinter. `Whereas you could have pupils share a mathematics book, there is no point in having people share out-dated, wrong history texts.'

But how to find the authors? Any new texts could hardly be imposed by foreigners. Russia's Education Ministry had already helped the Soros Foundation to run a competition to find the best Russian scholars. They submitted some 1,000 manuscripts, of which 400 were printed in test runs of 5,000 to 10,000 copies, to get `a comprehensive evaluation' from teachers. Twenty-four of these were chosen by the Ministry and Soros's experts for publication.

Pinter's travels have taken her as far as Kamchatka, on the Bering Straits opposite Alaska, visiting a number of Russia's 89 oblasts or county governments, as well as to the former Soviet Republics of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. With Russia's move away from central planning to a more federal system the oblasts are now responsible for financing local education.

`Many of the oblasts have enough money to pay for textbooks,' explains Pinter, `but they are just not being produced because nobody has the working capital in the right place.' There was a need to jump-start the whole process. The World Bank was limited by its mandate, but Soros was in an ideal position to help. So far he has invested $2.5 million in the project. Once the books are published they are sold at cost price to the schools, because, says Pinter, `We felt people wouldn't value them enough if they were free. We do, however, pay for the distribution charges.' Revenue from sales is ploughed back into publishing more books.

Pinter recalls one particular cliffhanger: she had only one day in which to produce $1 million to pay for paper before its price went up by 29 per cent. `Eight Russian publishers took out bank loans to buy the paper, without even a contract with us.'

On a more philosophical note, Pinter believes it will take at least a generation for those who have lived under totalitarianism, with all the compromises involved, to come to terms with their history. `I personally feel that what I am contributing is to give their kids a new start,' she says. Her greatest satisfaction is to see the children's eyes light up when the new books are put in their hands.