STOCKHOLM (AFP)---Swedish Schools Minister Jan Bjoerklund has said he would recommend that the Holocaust and crimes committed in the name of communism in the Soviet Union be mandatory elements of the history curriculum.

He made the statement after a poll, published on Wednesday, revealed that a majority of Swedish teenagers don’t know what communism is and don’t know which countries neighbour their own.

The poll has raised questions about Sweden’s education system.

Ninety percent of teens aged 15 to 20 don’t know which foreign capital is closest to Stockholm, 90 percent don’t know what the Gulag is, and 40 percent think communism has increased prosperity in the world.

"They have a lack of understanding for basic concepts such as dictatorships and democracy, and that is unsettling. There must be a major change in their level of knowledge, and schools in particular must take responsibility," Camilla Andersson, the head of the Information About Communism organisation that commissioned the study, told Swedish news agency TT.

‘Very worrying’

The Schools Minister agreed.

"It is very worrying that Swedish history teaching is so limited. Many people have suspected that there are problems with (students’) knowledge of history," he told TT.

The results of the study, published in daily Dagens Nyheter also showed that 50 percent of the 1,004 teens questioned didn’t know that Berlin was the capital of a country bordering the Baltic Sea, 82 percent didn’t think Belarus was a dictatorship and 43 percent said they thought communism had claimed fewer than a million victims in the 20th century.

Fifty-six percent said they didn’t know if Western market economies were democratic societies, and 22 percent said communism was a democratic social structure.