Rooting Out Spies
Starting in September, students across the country will be required to sit through lectures celebrating Russia’s “rebirth” under President Vladimir Putin’s leadership, my colleague Anton Troianovski writes.

The government has issued directives to schools to teach a series of pro-war propaganda classes, according to activists and Russian news reports. But a proposed decree from the education ministry would go further, enshrining Putin’s two decades in power as a historical turning point in the standard curriculum.

History classes will be required to include several new topics, including “the rebirth of Russia as a great power in the 21st century,” “reunification with Crimea,” and “the special military operation in Ukraine.”

“We need to know how to infect them with our ideology,” Sergei Novikov, a senior Kremlin bureaucrat, told thousands of schoolteachers in an online workshop recently. “Our ideological work is aimed at changing consciousness.”

As government employees, teachers in Russia generally have little choice but to comply with such demands. But there has been some grass-roots resistance. A teachers’ union has provided legal guidance to dozens of teachers who have refused to teach propaganda classes this spring, with some principals simply canceling them.

“You just need to find the moral strength not to facilitate evil,” said Sergei Chernyshov, who runs a private high school in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk and has resisted promoting government propaganda. “If you can’t protest against it, at least don’t help it.”