Students in Russian schools, starting in the first year, will have weekly classes where they will watch war movies and take virtual tours of Crimea. They will have regular classes on topics such as the geopolitical situation and traditional values. In addition to the traditional flag-raising ceremony, classes will begin to celebrate the national “rebirth” under President Vladimir Putin.
And under legislation signed into law by the leader on Thursday, everyone will be encouraged to join a new patriotic youth movement along the lines of the so-called “Pioneers” of the Soviet Union, with their red ties. The movement will be led by President Putin himself.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian government’s attempts to imbue students with a state ideology have been unsuccessful, according to a senior Kremlin bureaucrat, Sergei Novikov, recently spoke to thousands of professors in an online workshop. But now, in the midst of the Ukraine War, Putin has made it clear that this needs to change.
“We need to know how to infect students with our ideology,” Novikov said. “Our ideological work is aimed at raising awareness.”
With the war approaching five months, Putin’s vast ambitions for the home front are starting to become clear: a wholesale reprogramming of the entire society to end 30 years of openness to the West.
The Kremlin has imprisoned or forced into exile virtually every activist who has spoken out against the war; criminalized what was left of independent journalism; and has been cracking down on academics, bloggers and even an ice hockey player whose loyalty to the nation has been called into question.
But nowhere are these ambitions clearer than in the Kremlin’s race to overhaul the education given to students in the country’s 40,000 public schools.
The nationwide education initiatives, which will take effect in September, are part of a government campaign to indoctrinate students with Putin’s militarized, anti-Western version of patriotism, illustrating the reach of its broad effort to use war to mobilize Russian society and eliminate any potential dissent.
Some experts are skeptical that the grandiose plans are likely to bear fruit in a short time, but even before the start of the new school year, the power of political propaganda to shape the opinions of impressionable children and adolescents was already becoming clear.
For example, a ninth grader, Irina, said that a computer class that was due to take place in March in Moscow was replaced by a state TV report showing Ukrainians surrendering to Russian troops and a class explaining that the only information on the which you can trust is the one that comes from official sources. It didn’t take her long to notice a change in attitude among some of her friends who had initially been scared or confused by the war.
“Suddenly they started repeating everything the television said,” says Irina in a telephone interview with her mother, Liubov Ten. “Suddenly they started saying that it was all deserved, that it had to happen. They couldn’t even try to explain it to me.”
Irina says that when she confronted her friends about the war crimes committed by Russian soldiers in Butcha, they retorted, “This is all propaganda.”
Partly because of her refusal to raise children in an increasingly militarized environment, Ten and her husband left for Poland in the spring.
Teachers were also noticing a change. In the city of Pskov, close to the Estonian border, English teacher Irina Miliutina said that initially students at her school argued heatedly about whether or not Russia was right to invade Ukraine. Sometimes they came to blows.
But the dissenting voices did not take long to fade away. Students began to scribble the letters Z and V —symbols of support for the war, due to the marks that identify the invading Russian armored vehicles — on the blackboards, desks and even on the floor. At recess, fifth and sixth graders play at being Russian soldiers, says Miliutina. “When they don’t like someone, they call him Ukrainian.”
According to activists and reports in Russian news outlets, schools across the country have taken orders. Daniil Ken, director of an independent teachers’ union, shared with the New York Times some orders that teachers would have received and passed on to him.
In one class, students are taught about “hybrid conflicts being launched against Russia”, with a BBC report on a Russian attack on Ukraine and a statement by President Volodymyr Zelensky presented as examples of fake news aimed at sowing discord in society. russian. A quiz teaches students to be wary of any opposition activists in their communities.
“One of the effective measures of hybrid conflict is the promotion of influencers in the local population”, says a prayer that the student must classify as true or false. The correct answer, of course, is “true”.
The new campaign represents an intensification of Putin’s years-long effort to militarize society, stepping up the one-off efforts made by authorities after the invasion to persuade young people that war is justified.
Novikov, who heads the Kremlin’s “public projects” directorate, said that with the invasion of Ukraine in February, teachers were faced with “an urgent task”: “carrying out explanatory work” and answering “difficult questions” from teachers. students.
“While everything is more or less manageable with younger students, older students receive information from a diverse range of channels,” he says, acknowledging government fears that the internet could influence young people’s opinions. A poll last month by the independent Levada Center indicated that 36% of Russians aged between 18 and 24 are against the war, a position held by only 20% of adults.
The Kremlin is working to codify its educational ambitions before the start of the next school year. A draft decree released last month by the Education Ministry shows that Putin’s two decades in power will be enshrined in the standard school curriculum as a historic turning point. At the same time, the teaching of history itself will become more doctrinal.
The decree calls for Russian history classes to include new topics such as “the rebirth of Russia as a great power in the 21st century”, “reunification with Crimea” and “the special military operation in Ukraine”.
And while existing educational guidelines provide that students must be able to assess “various versions of history”, the new proposal says they must learn to “defend historical truth” and “bring out falsifications in the history of the homeland”.
As civil servants, teachers often have no choice but to abide by the new guidelines. Even so, there are signs of underlying resistance. Ken says the Teachers’ Alliance, his union, has been providing legal advice to dozens of teachers who refused to teach political propaganda classes, noting that political unrest in schools is technically illegal under Russian law. In some cases, he says, school principals have simply canceled classes, aware of their unpopularity.
“One has to find the moral strength necessary not to facilitate evil,” says Sergei Chernishov, who is the principal of a private high school in Novosibirsk, Siberia, and has resisted promoting government propaganda. “If you can’t protest him, at least don’t help him.”
