Substitute while the actions of the article are loading
RIGA, Latvia – As President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine drags on, Russian teachers are turning to the front lines in an information war designed to turn children into loyal militarized nationalists. Powerful national security chiefs, leading propagandists and hardliners are pushing for radical changes in the education system, while the education ministry is in the background.
Schools have been ordered to hold “patriotic” classes, like parrots on the Kremlin’s line in the war, and teachers who refuse are fired. Textbooks are cleared of almost all references to Ukraine and its capital Kyiv.
Russia’s parliament has rejected the education ministry’s plan to revise history textbooks as unsatisfactory, calling it a matter of “national security” and calling on the head of Russia’s foreign spy service to take responsibility.
And Russia’s powerful security chief, Nikolai Patrushev, a close ally of Putin, has called for radical changes in education as part of the entire government’s efforts to shape loyal citizens from cradle to grave.
Anton Litvin, a father of two in Moscow, had a good home and a good job, but when the government began using schools for propaganda in the war against Ukraine, he left the country. He said he was outraged that his children could be washed away by lessons in “patriotism” and Putin’s attitude toward history. The turning point came when teachers sent home pamphlets urging him to enroll his 8-year-old son for a summer camp at the Young Army, a military youth group set up by the Ministry of Defense in 2015.
“I don’t want my children to join the regime at this young age and be someone’s soldiers to fight peaceful people,” said Lytvyn, who sacrificed his job at a prominent Moscow airline and now stays at home with his father in the Georgian capital. Tbilisi, looking for a new job.
Since 2013, Putin has made changes to the teaching of history as part of a campaign to build a national identity based on the Soviet Union’s role in defeating the Nazis in World War II. But after the invasion of Ukraine, the pace of school change was “like a waterfall,” Litvin said.
“Everything is getting worse. It’s like going back to the Soviet Union, “he said. “Children are learning that war is actually good from the point of view of our government.
Russia’s efforts to militarize students underscore the Kremlin’s long-term ambitions: not only to strengthen Russian support for the war, but to build a generation of young people loyal to Russia’s increasingly totalitarian regime – unlike many Russian millennia today who oppose regime and war.
“They are in hell”: The hail of Russian artillery tests Ukrainian morale
Putin is constantly playing on Russian nostalgia for the Soviet past to justify the war. But his “is not a new Soviet regime,” said Grigory Yudin, a professor of political philosophy at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. “This is much closer to the fascist regime, and what they are doing now is a different kind of propaganda,” he said. “They are trying to actively militarize the children in order to engage them in this war, to engage them in support of this war.
Patrushev, the head of the Security Council, last month called for a major overhaul of Russia’s education system to develop a new “patriotic” generation. He called for the adoption of a comprehensive system for “implementing the state program at all stages of maturation and formation of man as a citizen.”
A key supporter of the invasion, known for his anti-Western rhetoric, Patrushev said teachers were at the forefront of a “hybrid war against Russia”. But many of them, he complained, “manipulated” children and distorted the story. He criticized the history curriculum and complained that the textbooks did not properly reflect Soviet heroism during World War II.
Then, amid complaints that the education ministry had failed, Russia’s upper house of parliament on Thursday called on Sergei Naryshkin, head of the Foreign Intelligence Service and chairman of the Russian Historical Society, to undertake a review of history textbooks as ” the current situation requires a special attitude ”to teaching.
“Today, this is one of the components of the country’s national security,” said Ekaterina Altabaeva, deputy chairwoman of the science, education and culture commission.
She was raped in Ukraine. How many others have stories like hers?
The main effect of the changes in the textbooks and the curriculum is expected after the summer vacation.
“A whole revolution is happening in the Russian education system now, because it has been changing rapidly since February,” Yudin said. He added: “They want to regain control of young minds and they also need these people like cannon fodder.”
Although the Ministry of Education ordered teachers to give patriotic lessons that reflected the Kremlin’s line toward Ukraine, they were sometimes difficult to sell.
A history teacher at a Moscow high school, for example, failed to convince several students in his class, including 17-year-old Nikita.
“I don’t trust my history teacher. He is rather an overly patriotic propagandist, “Nikita said, adding that students do not pay attention to patriotism lessons. The student refused to give his last name to avoid problems at school. “I just got up and left the classroom. Two others did the same. “
But many students are afraid to openly oppose the war, he added. “My friends do not support the war. We try to be careful. For example, I don’t want my classmates to know what my thoughts are. ”
Avoiding shells, mines and spies: On the front with the snipers of Ukraine
For some, mandatory war sessions are a burdensome but inevitable obligation.
“Both teachers and students, I think, understand that this is not a real lesson. It’s not about learning. This is something else, a mandatory event, “said Moscow history teacher Alexander. He said teachers were given guidelines for teaching history, “but what we say is not officially regulated.”
But staff seem determined to restrict teachers’ freedom to decide how to teach history. Just days after the February invasion, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova summoned teachers to meetings instructing them to follow the government’s line in the war.
Some teachers who refused to teach patriotic lessons were fired. Patrushev warned that authorities could target school principals whose students do not have books on World War II or who cannot name Russian war heroes from past centuries.
“History is a subject that the authorities are always trying to use for propaganda purposes,” said Dmitry, a teacher in rural Russia, where most people support the war. “History teachers are much more vulnerable than other teachers.”
Meanwhile, textbook publishers are purging the Soviet-style purge of almost every mention of Ukraine. Following the invasion, the leadership of Russia’s main textbook publishing house, Enlightenment – which means Enlightenment – ordered editors to reduce references to Ukraine and Kyiv, according to an April report by independent Russian media outlet Mediazone, based on interviews with three editors.
One editor said that “we have a task to make it as if Ukraine simply does not exist,” the paper said.
In the devastated Chernigov, the Russian siege left the city with the question: “Why?”
Russia’s textbooks have only a page about the millions of people shot or imprisoned illegally in Soviet times, according to Marina Agaltsova, a lawyer with Memorial, a well-known non-profit organization dedicated to exposing Soviet-era repression that was shut down by authorities last year. .
“If you have just one small spot on the great, glorious history of the Soviet Union, of course, you would think that the Soviet Union is a great country and we all need to return to that state,” she said.
Memorial historian Nikita Petrov said Russia’s insistence that students unequivocally accept the Kremlin’s version of history was “dangerous.”
In the late 1970s, Petrov, then a chemistry student, received a smuggled copy of the Great Terror by British historian Robert Conquest for the Stalin-era purges. Smuggling books on Soviet history were like gold to him, he recalls. He decided that becoming a historian was more important than being a chemist.
“In the Soviet Union, history did not exist as a science. The facts were hidden and not revealed. And people did not know historical facts. They only knew what they were told, “he said.
He spent years revealing the execution of his great-grandfather from the Stalin era. The lawsuits are intended to bury the evidence.
Russia’s law on “foreign agent” now threatens human rights group that survives even Soviet pressure
Putin’s military propaganda is becoming “patriotic” lessons in Russian schools
Add Comment