From the first grade, students across Russia will soon have weekly classes with war films and virtual tours of Crimea. They get a steady dose of lectures on topics like “the geopolitical situation” and “traditional values.” In addition to a regular flag-raising ceremony, they will be introduced to classes honoring Russia’s “rebirth” under President Vladimir V. Putin.
And under the legislation signed by Mr. Putin on Thursday, all Russian children will be encouraged to join a new patriotic youth movement in the guise of the Soviet Union’s red-robed “Pioneers” — chaired by the president himself.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian government’s efforts to educate schoolchildren in a state ideology have proved unsuccessful, a senior Kremlin bureaucrat, Sergei Novikov, recently told thousands of Russian educators in a online workshop. But now, amid the war in Ukraine, Mr Putin has made it clear that this must change, he said.
“We need to know how to contaminate them with our ideology,” Mr Novikov said. “Our ideological work is aimed at changing consciousness.”
As the war in Ukraine approaches five months, the huge ambitions of his plans for the home front come into focus: a large-scale reprogramming of Russian society towards end of 30 years of openness to the West.
The Kremlin has already imprisoned or forced into exile just about all activists who speak out against the war; it has criminalized what was left of Russia’s independent journalism; it has cracked down on academics, bloggers and even a hockey player with suspicious loyalties.
But nowhere are these ambitions more apparent than in the Kremlin’s race to overhaul the way children are taught in Russia’s 40,000 state schools.
The nationwide education initiatives, which will start in September, are part of the Russian government’s struggle to indoctrinate children with Mr Putin’s militarized and anti-Western version of patriotism, illustrating the scope of his campaign to use the war to further mobilize Russian society and eliminate any possible contradiction.
While some experts are skeptical that the Kremlin’s grand plans will soon bear fruit, even before the new school year, the potential of its propaganda to change the minds of impressionable youth became apparent.
Understanding the war between Russia and Ukraine better
A ninth-grader, Irina, said that, for example, a computer class in Moscow in March was replaced by watching a state television report on Ukrainians surrendering to Russian troops and a lecture explaining that only information from official Russian sources should be trusted.
She soon noticed a transformation in some friends who were initially scared or confused by the war.
“They suddenly began to repeat everything after television,” Irina said in a telephone interview with her mother, Lyubov Ten. “All of a sudden they started saying that this was all deserved, that this had to be done. They couldn’t even try to explain this to me.”
Ms. Ten and her husband, driven in part by their refusal to raise their children in an increasingly militarized environment, left for Poland this spring.
Teachers are also noticing a change. In the town of Pskov, near the border with Estonia, an English teacher, Irina Milyutina, said that the children at her school initially argued violently about whether Russia was right or wrong to invade Ukraine, sometimes even brawling. went.
But soon the voices of disagreement evaporated. The kids scribbled Z’s and V’s—symbols of support for the war, after the identifying marks on invading Russian armor—on blackboards, desks, and even the floors.
During the break, fifth- and sixth-graders pretended to be Russian soldiers, Ms Milyutina said, “and the ones who don’t like them so much are called Ukrainians.”
“The propaganda has done its job here,” said Ms Milyutina, 30, who was detained in February for protesting the war but has been able to keep her job as a teacher.
She said in a telephone interview that government guidelines to conduct a series of pro-war propaganda classes had arrived at her school in the weeks following the invasion.
Schools across the country received such orders, according to activists and Russian news reports. Daniil Ken, the head of an independent teachers’ union, shared with The New York Times some guidelines that he said teachers had passed on to him.
In one class, students are taught about “hybrid conflicts being conducted against Russia”, with a BBC report on a Russian attack in Ukraine and a statement by President Volodymyr Zelensky presented as examples of “forgeries” intended to stir discord in Russian society. sow. An accompanying quiz teaches students to distrust opposition activists in their own communities.
“One of the effective measures for hybrid conflict is the promotion of influential people in the local population,” says a true-or-false challenge.
The correct answer is, of course, ‘true’.
The new push represents an intensification of Mr Putin’s long-standing effort to militarize Russian societybuilding on the ad hoc efforts of post-invasion officials to convince young people that the war was justified.
“Patriotism should be the dominant value of our people,” said another senior Kremlin official, Aleksandr Kharichev, during last month’s workshop for teachers organized by the Ministry of Education.
His presentation bluntly defined patriotism: “Readiness to give your life for the Motherland.”
Mr Novikov, the head of the Kremlin’s “Public Projects” directorate, said that with the invasion of Ukraine in February, teachers faced “a rather urgent task”: “doing explanatory work” and answering the “difficult questions of students”. .
“While everything is more or less manageable with the young, the older students are getting information through a wide variety of channels,” he said, acknowledging the government’s fears that the internet would influence young people’s minds. A poll last month the independent Levada Center found that 36 percent of Russians aged 18 to 24 opposed the war in Ukraine, compared to just 20 percent of all adults.
The Kremlin is working on defining its educational ambitions for next school year. A proposal for a decree published by the Ministry of Education last month shows that Mr Putin’s two decades in power will be included in the standard curriculum as a historical turning point, while education in history itself will become more doctrinal.
The decree says Russian history lessons should include several new topics, such as “Russia’s rebirth as a great power in the 21st century”, “reunification with Crimea” and “the special military operation in Ukraine”.
And while Russia’s existing standard of education says students should be able to evaluate “different versions of history,” the new proposal says they should learn to “defend historical truth” and “uncover falsifications in the history of the homeland.” “.
As government officials, teachers generally have little choice but to comply with the new requirements, although there are signs of grassroots resistance. Mr Ken says the Alliance of Teachers, his union, has provided legal guidance to dozens of teachers who have refused to teach this spring’s propaganda classes, noting that political agitation in schools is technically illegal under Russian law. In some cases, he says, principals simply canceled classes knowing they weren’t popular.
“You just have to find the moral strength not to facilitate evil,” Sergei Chernyshov, who runs a private high school in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk and opposes promoting government propaganda, said in a telephone interview. “If you can’t protest it, at least don’t help it.”
In September, such resistance could become more difficult, with schools being ordered to add an hour of class every Monday to promote the Kremlin’s version of patriotism. Virtual guest speakers in those classes include Ramzan Kadyrov, the brutal strong leader of the Chechnya region, and Patriarch Kirill I, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church who has called the invasion a just fight, according to a presentation at last month’s workshop.
On the anniversary of the annexation of Crimea in March, the first through seventh grades will take part in “virtual excursions” through the Black Sea peninsula, according to a scheme of the weekly classes posted by the Ministry of Education. In October, the fifth graders and up have a session apparently designed to discourage emigration; the title: “Happiness is being happy at home.”
Also starting in September is the Kremlin’s new youth movement, an idea endorsed by Mr Putin at a televised meeting in April and enshrined in legislation he signed on Thursday.
A co-sponsor of the legislation, legislator Artyom Metelev, said the creation of a new youth movement was long in the works, but the West’s online “information war” targeting young people during the fighting in Ukraine would not allow that measure. made it more urgent.
“All this would have come out without the military operation too,” Mr Metelev, who is 28 and a member of Mr Putin’s United Russia party, said in a telephone interview. “It’s just that the military operation and those, shall we say, actions being carried out in connection with our country have accelerated it.”
Moscow’s propaganda infrastructure targeting children remains much more limited than it was during the Soviet era — a time when young people actively sought out underground cultural exports smuggled in from the West. Mr Chernyshov, Novosibirsk’s school principal, believes the Kremlin’s attempts to sell its militarism to children will now also eventually clash with the common sense of the young mind.
“A 10-year-old child is much more of a humanist than the typical Russian citizen,” he said. “It’s just impossible to explain to a child in plain language why, right now, some people are killing others.”
Alina Lobzina contributed reporting.