“It’s not about winning the information war in the West, but not losing it in Russia.” Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of the Russian state broadcaster RT, told Moscow teachers last month at a meeting on the importance of “truthful” information. One piece of advice teachers should pass on to their students: don’t use a VPN connection to watch media banned in Russia anyway, because then you end up with ‘lying information’.
Simonjan assured that it was not her intention to prescribe the lessons to the teachers, but according to independent Russian media, the government is busy doing so. Soon after the invasion of Ukraine, the Ministry of Education sent teachers at Russian schools and universities a list of questions and answers about the “special military operation,” as the Kremlin calls the war.
“Is this a war with Ukraine?” is one of the first questions in the ministry’s patriotic teaching method. The correct answer should be: “There is no war going on with Ukraine, but a special peacekeeping mission to protect people who have been victims of humiliation and genocide by the Ukrainian regime for eight years.”
Intervention was inevitable, according to the prescribed curriculum, as NATO and Ukraine were preparing an attack. “Do you know, for example, that modern missiles can reach Russia from Ukraine in 5 to 10 minutes?” According to the document, Ukraine also had plans to develop nuclear weapons. “That is a direct threat to Russia … to which we could not respond otherwise.”
instill pride
The students are assured that the civilian population is not at risk. ‘Nobody needs victims. But look how dirty the Ukrainian nationalists are: they place their rockets in residential areas to provoke shelling at them.’
To ensure that education staff send the right message, the Ministry of Higher Education announced that there will be a single nationwide method for history teaching in colleges and universities. Teachers were asked to pass on ‘errors, mistakes, falsifications and distortions’ in the existing teaching material. ‘Our teaching material must breathe a spirit that fulfills the most important task: to instill in young people a sense of pride for our history, our culture that is more than a thousand years old and the exploits of our ancestors,’ summed up Minister Valerie Falkov.
Military patriotic upbringing begins in kindergarten. There, children are sometimes decked out with a Z, the sign of the Russian troops in Ukraine, to show ‘their’ support for the military operation. To the chagrin of some parents, primary and secondary school children are also being asked to write letters to ‘the boys’ in Ukraine to let them know that they are behind them. Anyone who does not participate in this quickly falls out of tune in the class.
Not only parents, but also many teachers object to the ‘militarization’ of education and try to avoid the instructions of the ministry. They tell independent media, anonymously of course, how they make the obligatory meal as boring as possible, without going into further detail.
But openly resisting comes with risks. Kjamran Manafly, a 28-year-old geography teacher at a Moscow school, was meduza.io fired for “immoral behavior” after refusing to adhere to the prescribed curriculum.
Shortly after the start of the war, the school’s staff were told by the administration that they were no longer allowed to express their own opinions as government officials. When Manafly announced on Instagram that he did not want to be a conduit for government propaganda, he was fired on the spot. According to the director, he was a traitor who deserved 15 years in prison.
Students who had expressed support for him on social media were instructed to remove those posts. When the dismissed teacher came to collect his things, his colleagues collectively ignored him, apparently for fear of being labeled a traitor themselves.
PatriotiZme
Sometimes students use the war atmosphere that has arisen at school to deal with their teachers. In the southern republic of Dagestan, students chalked the military Z sign on the blackboard in protest against one of their teachers. They complained to the school management that he gave them low grades to punish them for their ‘patriotism’.
A 55-year-old teacher from Penza ran into trouble after two students recorded a conversation with her in which she said that Russia, like North Korea, is considered a pariah by the world. She was subsequently charged with defaming the armed forces, an offense for which she could even face jail time.