Chronicles of Indoctrination

It seems schools decided to go all-in before summer break: across the country, children marched, recited prayers, listened to soldiers, and even arranged desks in memory of the dead:

📌 Exams with God. The main phase of Russia’s Unified State Exam (EGE) has begun. To “support” graduating students, mass prayer services are being held across the country. Students are urged to attend church, while parents submit their children's names for prayers online — with churches charging around 100 rubles per prayer.

📌 Schools as election tools. Schools are increasingly being used to falsify votes. In Saratov, children were forced to bring their phones so that “volunteers” could use them to vote in a local beautification poll. In Chuvashia, teachers demanded that parents report — by full name — on their participation in the United Russia primaries via school chat groups.

📌 Final “Important Conversations.” Russian schools held the last Conversations About Important Things lesson of the academic year. It focused on “the values that unite us”: heroism, patriotism, and service to the Fatherland. Students were shown an episode of Simonyan’s propaganda show, while the idea of “freedom” was only mentioned in the context of public health insurance.

📌 Battlefield school trips. High school students across the country were taken to military training camps simulating real combat. In Kaliningrad, for instance, teenagers had to “break through enemy lines in the rear, rescue a hostage, and evacuate to a safe zone.”

📌 One desk — six dead soldiers. Schools continue to ceremonially unveil so-called “Hero Desks.” In the Rostov region, one such desk was dedicated to six alumni who died in Ukraine.