“Schizophrenic.” This is how Kristina feels about the Russian school system. The mother of two, who did not want to give her full name, sends her children to school in Saint Petersburg. “When my children come home,” she said, “after certain lessons, I warn them that they shouldn’t take what they’ve been told seriously, that it’s nonsense. Then my own words run around in my head for an hour. I call them back and tell them not to repeat what I’ve just told them, or anything they hear at home, at school.”
Her strategy is validated on an almost daily basis, and not just at school (which, in Russia, runs from the ages of 6-7 to 17-18). The latest case concerns a kindergarten. On February 11, in the Irkutsk Oblast in Central Siberia, a mother was fined 35,000 rubles (€355) for “discrediting the army,” after coming to her son’s school to complain about the abundance of toys evoking military themes. According to her, an educator told her that kindergartens should “offer patriotic education and explain to children that they should not be afraid to die for their homeland.” The court preferred to accept the educator’s version, according to which the mother had criticized the “special military operation” in Ukraine “while looking at the portrait of President Putin.”
Two years of war have not been enough to shake the foundations of Russian society. The shock of mobilization has been absorbed, the economy has held up, the discontented have been silenced, and the poison of the violence is slow to take effect. But if there’s one area in which February 24, 2022, represents a turning point, it’s education.
Right from the start of the conflict, the tone had been set, with the proliferation of staged events using children, notably around the Latin letter “Z,” propelled as the emblem of the invasion. Children in schools and kindergartens take part in flash mobs and imitations of military parades. The militarization of schools, with the appearance of uniforms and dummy weapons, goes beyond the accepted practices of the Soviet era. For adults, it’s a question of proving their loyalty.
‘Discussions on the essentials’
The real work aimed at children will be carried out more insidiously and over time, even though the foundations had already been laid in 2014, particularly in terms of demonizing Ukraine. Education materials adapted to the “special operation” were quickly introduced. Since March 8, 2022, a 40-minute video entitled “Why the mission to liberate Ukraine is a necessity” was simultaneously shown to 20 million schoolchildren.
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