Putin aims to shape new generation of supporters - through schools

MOSCOW • Starting in first grade, students across Russia will soon sit through weekly classes featuring war movies and virtual tours through Crimea. They will be given a steady dose of lectures on topics like "the geopolitical situation" and "traditional values".

In addition to a regular flag-raising ceremony, they will be introduced to lessons celebrating Russia's "rebirth" under President Vladimir Putin.

And, according to legislation signed into law by Mr Putin on Thursday, all Russian children will be encouraged to join a new patriotic youth movement in the likeness of the Soviet Union's "Pioneers" in red cravats - presided over by the President himself.

Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian government's attempts at imparting a state ideology to schoolchildren have proved unsuccessful, a senior Kremlin bureaucrat, Mr Sergei Novikov, recently told thousands of Russian school teachers in an online workshop. But now, amid the war in Ukraine, Mr Putin has made it clear that this needs to change, he said.

"We need to know how to infect them with our ideology," said Mr Novikov. "Our ideological work is aimed at changing consciousness."

As the war in Ukraine approaches the five-month mark, the vast ambitions of his plans for the home front are coming into focus - a wholesale reprogramming of Russian society to end 30 years of openness to the West.

The Kremlin has already jailed or forced into exile just about all activists speaking out against the war. It has criminalised what remained of Russia's independent journalism. It has cracked down on academics, bloggers and even a hockey player with suspect loyalties.

But nowhere are these ambitions clearer than in the Kremlin's race to overhaul how children are taught at Russia's 40,000 public schools.

The nationwide education initiatives, which start in September, are part of the Russian government's scramble to indoctrinate children with Mr Putin's militarised and anti-Western version of patriotism, illustrating the reach of his campaign to use the war to further mobilise Russian society and eliminate any potential dissent.

While some experts are sceptical that the Kremlin's grand plans will quickly bear fruit, even before the new school year the potency of its propaganda in changing the minds of impressionable youngsters was already becoming apparent.

A ninth grader, Irina, said that a computer class in Moscow in March, for instance, was replaced by the viewing of a state television report on Ukrainians surrendering to Russian troops and a lecture explaining that only information from official Russian sources was to be trusted.

She soon noticed a transformation among some friends who had been initially scared or confused by the war.

"They suddenly started repeating everything after the television," Irina said in a phone interview alongside her mother, Ms Lyubov Ten. "They suddenly started saying that this is all deserved, that this had to happen. They couldn't even attempt to explain this to me."

Irina said that when she challenged her friends about Russian war crimes in Bucha, they shot back: "It's all propaganda."

NYTIMES