Little red corner and other symbols: how mathematics was taught in the USSR

Abstract This article deals with the presence of the communist ideology in the textbooks of mathematics written by Natalia Sergeeva Popova used in the Soviet Union in the period of 1930-1950, when textbooks were compulsory material in schools. We start from the texts present in the author's Mathematical books for the first years of schooling, trying to recognize the traces of communist ideology in Mathematical statements and images. We investigated the communist ideology terms and used both content analysis as well as discourse analysis as a research methodology, concluding that the way Mathematics was presented in these books constituted the channel of delivering the dominant ideology in the Soviet Union in the period under study.