Peace Signs: The Troubled State of Russian Education

"War, denunciations, and school visits by Wagnerites deprived her job of its meaning, because teaching these days means conducting propaganda."

These words were posted on Twitter by the daughter of a teacher who quit her job at School No. 12 in the Siberian city of Perm last July. “After that, school became a living hell. She’s been crying almost every day, ashamed of her role in deceiving children. She wanted to keep teaching but was afraid of landing in prison and didn’t want to stop telling the truth about the war.”

Russia’s main educational innovation in 2022 was the institution of weekly lessons on patriotism, “Conversations on Important Topics” (See Russian Life, Winter 2023, p. 34). Teachers were given a list of topics, along with teaching guidelines and resources. For example, a unit devoted to “the memory of genocide against the Soviet people by Nazis and their accomplices” is described thus: “The lesson includes information about concentration camps for children created by the fascists in occupied areas of the Soviet Union. Photographs from the Great Patriotic War and contemporary Donbas are used as discussion prompts.” Meanwhile, the images provided of “concentration camps for children… in occupied areas of the Soviet Union” actually show a concentration camp in Poland and starving children in Greece in 1942. The Donbas images are of a school in Donetsk destroyed during the current war.

Some schools have invited “veterans of the Special Military Operation” to participate in their Conversations on Important Topics. In May 2022, prowar activists in Perm pressured School No. 12 to do just that. The school leadership refused, and the activists complained to the Department of Education, then launched a campaign against the school’s director, Yelena Rakintseva. Parents and students tried to stand up for her. Posters went up outside the school with messages like “We love you! Don’t leave!” But pressure on the director mounted and she was forced to quit. Ten like-minded teachers joined her. This is just one of the higher-profile of many such incidents from across Russia over the past year. School No. 12 has become a symbol of the failure to resist propaganda and the proliferating absurdities within Russian education.

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As the 2023-24 school year approached, Education First Deputy Minister Alexander Bugayev issued an official proposal that “veterans and participants in the Special Operation” should participate in Conversations on Important Topics. The ministry also announced that Fundamentals of Health and Safety – a longstanding element of the Russian school curriculum – was being renamed “Fundamentals of the Security and Defense of the Motherland.” Both the Civil Defense and Natural Disasters Ministry and the Defense Ministry will have a hand in redesigning the course.

In a further step toward the militarization of Russian education, the 2023 school year will see the reinstitution of Elementary Military Training, a class anyone who attended Soviet schools would remember. Students in the higher grades will receive basic weapons training. Whereas in the Soviet era this meant taking apart Kalashnikov assault rifles and putting them back together, now students will be learning how to fly drones and shoot live ammunition.

Another significant change has been the introduction of a unified education plan, “Federal Basic Education Programs,” or FOOP, its Russian acronym. The point of the unified programs is to make teaching uniform and eliminate any deviant interpretations. And some teachers welcome the change, believing that having a single set of textbooks will simplify the educational process.

Meanwhile, the most talked-about textbooks are Russia’s new history textbooks [see Readings, page 4]. While the overall FOOP will be introduced gradually, the new history textbook for 10th and 11th grades was implemented across the country on September 1, 2023 (by tradition, the school year throughout the Russian Federation, and the Soviet Union before it, begins on September 1). In addition to the events of the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, which are, of course, framed by a “patriotic” narrative, the textbook covers the period from 2014 to the present. A special section is devoted to the Special Military Operation and explains “NATO’s devious plans,” “the rebirth of Nazism,” and why the Special Military Operation was needed to put an end to fighting in Ukraine.

Time will tell how this plays out in practice, but it is hard to imagine how any high school history teacher will be able get away with teaching unorthodox versions of events. “I know quite a few historians who’ve paid for their independent thinking,” said Andrei Titov (not his real name), a social studies tutor in the Crimean city of Simferopol. “They were either laid off or sent into retirement, even before 2022. But things have really come to a head since the Special Military Operation. People have had to go underground, in the sense that they have switched to providing private lessons.”

Titov said that the quantity of propaganda in schools has led to tensions and a breakdown in communication. “It takes a few lessons before I can get children to relax even a little, because they don’t feel they can trust any adult… On the day of Prigozhin’s rebellion, one girl shared with me: ‘My mother woke me up today and told me, “get up, civil war has started,” and I told her I didn’t understand anything – what’s going on?’ Then she started telling me that she found some Gypsy on TikTok who could see into the future. At times like that, I don’t even know where to start. Do I say ‘No, none of that’s true?’ But where should people find the truth? I myself don’t know what’s true, and I can’t recommend normal sources – not Meduza or anything else – because they’ve all been designated foreign agents. So, if it becomes known I recommend them – I’d have to answer for that.”

In parallel with the difficulties of accessing reliable information, there is the growing number of organizations the government is creating to promote its agenda. One of these is the youth organization, Forefront Movement (Движение первых), created in mid-2022. Olga Nikolayenko, the curator of extracurricular programs and leader of a discussion group on human rights at a respected Moscow private school said she believes that the Forefront Movement is more pernicious than the new history textbook and other aspects of the pseudo-patriotism being forced on schools.

“I’m not about to say there’s nothing scary about the situation with Conversations on Important Topics,” Nikolayenko said, “but they are, after all, compulsory, and in that sense they’re less dangerous, because compulsion turns people off, especially adolescents. With the Forefront Movement, the authorities are being smarter: there’s no compulsion, there’s bait – monetary prizes, trips – which are particularly important for children from outside the big cities. It’s a slow-acting poison.”

On September 15, 2023, legislators from Putin’s United Russia party proposed giving participants in Forefront extra credit when applying to higher education institutions. That suggests that the decision has already been made, and that the puppet legislators are just trying to make it look democratic. The youth movement is also supposedly not the government’s brainchild but the idea of a girl from Luhansk who was “saved” by Russian soldiers and who asked Putin to bring back the Soviet-era patriotic scouting-type children’s organization, the Pioneers. The Forefront Movement is basically a Pioneers reboot. 

“The president liked the idea. And now a bill has been introduced to the State Duma!” exclaimed Komsomolskaya Pravda, a pro-government newspaper.

For those who lived through the Soviet era, this political theater evokes an eerie sense of déjà vu.

Back in the USSR, the Komsomol (from which the newspaper took its name) was schoolchildren’s next step after the Pioneers, and any student who didn’t join the Komsomol (an abbreviation of Communist Youth League) had practically no chance of being admitted to university. So even though, in theory, high schoolers didn’t have to join the Komsomol, the vast majority did. For now, the Forefront Movement is nowhere near as integral to Russian society as the Komsomol was in Soviet times; in fact it does not appear to be particularly popular. But the authorities are not satisfied with the situation, and the movement’s members are being given more and more privileges.

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Have Russian schools been thoroughly transformed into fascist institutions? Is their purpose now the cultivation of future warriors – indoctrination rather than education? It’s pretty clear that’s what the authorities are striving for, but in a large and bureaucratized country like Russia, it’s difficult to achieve such a transformation without the full support of every link in the chain, from state employees to rank-and-file teachers. And that support does not exist.

Outright resistance isn’t possible, of course, but various forms of covert protest and sabotage are still available. Many teachers devote the extra hour they’ve been given for Conversations on Important Topics to issues not indicated in their teaching guides. There’s no shortage of topics a teacher might choose over patriotic education, from information for first graders about where the bathrooms or other school facilities are, to environmental issues of concern to high schoolers.

Teachers can interpret suggested topics in their own way, since for now the lesson plans are recommendations rather than requirements. For example, on “Theater Day,” one Moscow school discussed the greatness of renowned director Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938), as recommended, but also covered his famous colleague Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940), who was executed during the Stalinist purges. Inventing ways to sidestep governmental guidance has become a sort of sport, bringing back memories of the Brezhnev era, with its bureaucratic doublespeak, when what was written was one thing, while what was done was the complete opposite.

“We’re covering the structure of government,” Andrei Titov said, offering an example, “and I talk about how the presidency is supposed to change hands, that there are such things as elections, and that there are supposed to be a variety of candidates. But in fact we understand that there is one person who has held the same post for many years. Or I talk about the fact that we have a federation, but in practice we all see that everything is decided in Moscow, and the regions have no say. And then I explain to the children that they have to pass these ridiculous exams – there’s no need to argue with the textbook and with common sense.”

Titov explained the importance of understanding what one can and cannot say and of not making outright attempts to change students’ minds. There are other ways of helping them look critically at reality.

“For example, talking about the economic situation,” Titov said, “about Russia’s position in terms of global GDP, I show charts, and some students are really surprised, ‘Oh, we thought that we took up half the world, that Russian produces so much!’ Their sense of Russia’s status comes from propaganda, which says that we are ahead of the entire planet. And I ask, how many private companies do you think there are in Russia? The correct answer is 3 million, whereas in Europe, for example, there are 30 million. I say, ‘What do you think – why is that?’ And we begin to think it through: well, the Soviet past, that’s one thing; people aren’t used to taking on responsibility, it’s easier for them to work for the state. Second, there’s corruption. Next come the high cost of borrowing and the courts, where it’s impossible to defend yourself. We arrive at the conclusion that the state sector takes the lion’s share and it’s hard to engage in business here. So, little by little, I bring them back down to Earth.”

The worst time for opposition-minded teachers is the end of April, a time when schools are preparing to celebrate the May 9 anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Germany in the Great Patriotic War. In Putin’s Russia, this day has long been a celebration of militarism and comes with the popular slogan “We can do it again!” (“можем повторить!”). Still, a particular school can set its own tone for how Victory Day is discussed with students and turn it into a day of solemn remembrance rather than rah-rah patriotism.

“It wouldn’t be right to cancel the remembrance,” said Olga Nikolayenko, “but on the other hand, how should we be discussing it in April 2022? Back then, we took the topic of evacuations and called it “people on the roads of war.” We chose poems and memoirs – the experience of people whose homes and daily lives were destroyed by war, even though they were not fighting, not killing. This really was, on the one hand, a remembrance of what happened and, on the other, information that helps in the circumstances unfolding here and now.”

This year, Nikolayenko devoted her May 9 discussions to how culture and the arts helped people get through the war. Students studied wartime diaries and found passages about the music people were listening to back then, the books they were reading. For teachers, navigating this holiday is an emotional rollercoaster: they have to come up with something related to the topic of May 9 while steering clear of anything shameful, at a time when their country has invaded another and they’re not allowed to talk about it.

“Like it or not, they all have to teach using Aesopian language, unfortunately,” Nikolayenko said. “This is one of the saddest consequences for schools. Nobody discusses the war we have now. This is a story about fear. But there’s another aspect: we don’t always know about the children, their specific family situation. Maybe they have a father off fighting, or maybe in emigration. You can’t know what emotional situation you’re putting an adolescent in. Being an adolescent is hard enough, and on top of that, they’re in today’s Russia.”

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Teachers can be very inventive in how they subtly express their attitudes toward the displays of patriotism they’re being forced to orchestrate. For example, in one public school known for being rather liberal, the school flag is raised alongside the Russian flag. Before 2022, when the raising of the flag at the start of each week became mandatory, the school didn’t even have a flag. It only had an emblem, which was yellow. Parents got to vote on the new flag, and of the choices offered, they picked one where the yellow emblem was set against a blue background. Now, every week, alongside the Russian flag the school raises a flag with the colors of the Ukrainian flag, and in a chat group, parents exchanged emotional comments about how, on September 1, the yellow and blue one fluttered beautifully in the wind, while the Russian one went symbolically limp.

“There are a lot of instances like that,” Nikolayenko said. “Peace-sign pendants and pins – all sorts of things – are very popular among our students. It’s such a universal thing and has such a long history, it’s hard to ban. And teachers even wear blue and yellow earrings. For September 1, we decorated the school with images from cartoons. We set up a display with multiple television screens, and one of them was showing ballet.^* Everyone – adults and children – thought it was funny and posed for pictures of themselves posing as little swans, even though all this is of course quite sad. Thumbing your nose at the regime behind its back and using Aesopian language are harmful to the soul.”

Such antics can be harmful for body as well as soul. There are several well-publicized cases where teachers expressing heretical viewpoints have been the target of denunciations and court summonses. There have also been cases where things children have said entailed serious consequences for their families. One of the most notorious cases was the tragic story of the sixth grader Masha Moskalyova from Yefremov, in Tula Oblast. Her father was sent to a prison colony after she made an antiwar drawing in art class.

So Conversations on Important Topics devoted to Meyerhold’s arrest or clothing accessories with the colors of the Ukrainian flag are safe only in those oases where a certain consensus exists. But there’s always a risk, because that consensus could fall apart at any moment. For example, it was a parent’s idea to invite “Special Military Operation veterans” to Perm’s School No. 12. One teacher who quit gave an anonymous interview to the independent media outlet Mediazona and said about her departure, “We realized that we would now have something many other schools already have, where the academic director, for example, strolls down the hall to listen in on the Conversations on Important Topics, to make sure teachers are telling students the right thing.”

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 There are a just under 40,000 schools in Russia, and fewer than 1,000 of them – about 2 percent – are private. Being private does not automatically imply oppositionist, and public schools are not necessarily pro-government. Still, in public schools, teachers have a lot less room to maneuver. What percentage of public schools have academic directors who “stroll the corridors”? Nobody is tracking those statistics.

Even before the war, parents weren’t thrilled with their children’s schools. A September 2021 survey conducted by the state-run Russian Public Opinion Research Center showed that approximately half of Russians were dissatisfied with schools: more than 50 percent in the more prosperous parts of European Russia and a bit fewer in other regions. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which was accompanied by serious changes in education, it has become as difficult to gauge what people really think of schools as it is to measure their attitude toward the war. Compounding other problems, it is likely that state funding for schools will be cut. According to independent research by Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, in the 2010s, real spending in this area steadily declined. Now that the war is putting ever greater stress on the budget, economists predict reduced spending on all social services.

Parents have the option of home schooling, which has been extremely rare in Russia. During the pandemic, the number of children educated at home increased but still represents fewer than one percent of all students. Yet homeschooling is on the rise, and there are cases where children are officially listed as being home-schooled, while in fact they are part of a network of families that have hired tutors and organized an unofficial private micro-school. However, very few families have the resources, time, and energy to make this work. More often, oppositionist parents try to find their children propaganda-resistant schools. 

The main question worrying parents with access to these bastions of free thought is how long they can survive. And even if they do, they can hardly make much of a difference on a national scale.

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While free-thinking Muscovites photograph themselves against a backdrop of Swan Lake, the vast majority of Russian schoolchildren spent September 1 standing for hours listening to municipal officials touting the superiority of education in Russia as compared to the West.

Russian schools are a perfect mirror of Russian society, the polarization of which has enabled war and dictatorship. A narrow swath of privileged intellectuals is appalled at the criminal violence their country is perpetrating, while people from the provinces join the army as a way out of poverty and to achieve a sense of purpose. Peace-sign-wearing teenagers look down their noses at their peers in Z-emblazoned baseball caps, for whom patriotic youth organizations offer a boost in social status.

As different as these two sets of schoolchildren are, they will both be faced with the degrading experience of compelled accommodation and lies.