The article provides a comparative analysis of the description of the phenomenon of counter-revolution in the North American colonies of Great Britain during the war of independence in Soviet and modern Russian textbooks on General history for higher education. The author compares the conceptual and factual basis of textbooks with trends in the development of Russian historiography on this topic. The author concludes that in the Russian educational literature of recent decades, there is a clear tendency to abandon the description of the counter-revolution in the colonial society of America, as well as to reject a radical understanding of the revolution itself. At the same time, Russian authors have always taken a one-sided approach to describing the revolution and its consequences, without examining the parallel events in the metropolis and the essence of its counter-revolutionary response.