Russia has turned its schools into indoctrination machines

“How did you feel when you committed your first murder?” a pupil in a classroom asks a man in military uniform. The teacher interjects: “These are not murders. This is war.” The officer is unfazed: “It’s the destruction of enemy manpower, you shoot and you don’t know whether he is dead or wounded. Only with a grenade launcher can you be sure.” The exchange took place in October 2024 in a ninth-grade classroom in Vladimir, a city 200km east of Moscow. It was part of a “Lesson of Courage”, a regular event in classrooms across the country since Russia invaded Ukraine. The lessons are part of a massive programme of indoctrination: Vladimir Putin calls the battle for children’s minds a “new front”. “Patriotic education” has entered the curricula of schools and universities. On September 1st it was introduced in kindergartens.” A sovereign education system…is an absolutely fundamental matter,” Mr Putin declared in 2023. Making education “sovereign” has meant rolling back the autonomy Russian schools enjoyed after the Soviet Union collapsed. In 2022 Mr Putin signed a law mandating a “federal programme of upbringing”, so that citizens “know and respect Russia’s…military exploits and labour achievements”. Each week pupils of all ages gather for “Conversations about Important Things”. Scripts are assigned by the Ministry of Education. Most concern Russian scientists, musicians, nature and sport. But about 10% are military, including “Russia: A Nation of Victors” and “The Reunification of Crimea with Russia”. Middle-school teachers are supposed to link the war against Ukraine to the Great Patriotic War, as Russians call the second world war: “Once again, our country must defend not only its territorial integrity and sovereignty, but also the principles of a multipolar world.” In high school they must blame “the collective West” for prolonging the fighting by supplying Ukraine with arms. Visiting soldiers share combat experiences and demonstrate how to pilot drones. This year the government reinstated the Soviet-era subject of “Initial Military Preparation”. “Few take it more seriously than PE,” one teacher says. Reports by independent Russian media outlets find that most pupils are bored by the lectures. Efforts to reintroduce Soviet-style indoctrination are also bringing back Soviet habits of evasion and quiet sabotage. Many parents allow their children to skip the “Conversations about Important Things”. A lawyer in the Urals who had his son exempted says no pupil has been punished for missing them. Students and teachers see it as a burden, says Maria, a chemistry teacher. She lets her pupils use the class time to do homework. When teachers clearly do not believe what they are saying, the result is not fanaticism but doublethink. “Pupils see that lying and pretending is a socially approved norm,” says a parent in the Urals. The indoctrination programmes are crippled by the regime’s lack of a coherent ideology, says an educational psychologist in Krasnoyarsk. The “Russian world”, a phrase often used in Kremlin propaganda, “is not an ideology, because it has no goal”. Consider the Movement of the First, a state-sponsored youth group formed in June 2022, meant to mimic the Soviet-era scouting organisation known as the Pioneers. The Pioneers served as the initial stage of communist indoctrination. The Movement, in contrast, is a simulacrum. Its supervisors say they are often frustrated by children asking what the point of the group is. Unlike the former Komsomol (Young Communist League), it offers no opportunities for social advancement, university placement or foreign travel. The state is trying to make up for its lack of an ideology by cultivating masculinity. Yunarmiya, a military youth group that teaches children to march in formation starting at age eight, claims to have 2m members. Since joining up requires parental consent, its recruiters “are particularly successful in orphanages”, says the educational psychologist. Other patriotic groups are private. The Sarma children’s centre in Irkutsk, in Russia’s far east, was founded by Sergei Terekhov, a veteran of the second Chechen wars. He teaches discipline and military skills to children with behavioural problems, who are often brought by their parents. “We hammer it into their heads: here, you are not Petya, Vasya, or Masha—you are a military unit,” says Mr Terekhov. The effort to make education “sovereign” comes at the cost of lower standards. Foreign exchanges between Russia and Europe have all but stopped (in part due to European sanctions). International Baccalaureate, a Geneva-based charity that administers a widely recognised international curriculum, has been banned as an “undesirable organisation”. Study of foreign languages has been pared back. Instead a new subject will be added from January 1st: “Spiritual and Moral Culture of Russia”. It intends to impart “traditional Russian values” by studying the lives of famous Russians, “including heroes of the special military operation” (ie, the war on Ukraine). The mandatory history curriculum is to be based on an error-ridden textbook by Vladimir Medinsky, an aide to Mr Putin, that calls Ukraine an artificial state. A forthcoming textbook for social studies will be edited by Dmitry Medvedev, a former president and war zealot, and will focus more on geopolitics and less on political institutions. Mr Putin’s war for children’s minds is succeeding mostly at damaging them.