More than with facts, history is concerned with their representation. This statement takes a particular meaning in the context of contemporary Russia, where the issue of the political use of the past is tightly connected with the construction of national identity. In order to analyse how the contemporary Russian authorities reassess Soviet history, I focus on school textbooks. Indeed, textbooks largely shape the self and the other, and are a major vector of socialisation. The analysis of recently published school textbooks on the soviet period highlights three dominating tendencies of the actual history narrative : the attenuation of the "dark pages" of Soviet history, the reconstruction of historical continuity and the presence of a strong patriotic dimension. These three elements seem to set the basis of a new Russian national identity.