When patriotism lessons were imposed in her Moscow school last September, Tatiana Tchervenko refused to teach “propaganda” to her fourth-grade students, in the midst of the Russian assault on Ukraine.
The teacher initially taught maths at times reserved for patriotic education, then, under pressure from her superiors, tackled this theme, but without repeating the Kremlin discourse.
An act of resistance which earned him two warnings from his management. And in October, masked men arrested her at her school, put her in a police vehicle and kept her in custody for several hours.
Finally, in December, she was fired.
If Tatiana Tchervenko, 49, refused to comply with the injunctions of her hierarchy, it is because she considers that the courses in question, called “Conversations of Importance”, are an attempt to militarize the minds of the students.
“They want to produce little soldiers. Some will go to war, others will manufacture ammunition and others will create computer software for all this,” she told AFP.
If the Kremlin’s objective, in launching its assault on Ukraine on February 24, 2022, was a quick victory, the fierce resistance of the Ukrainians, supported by Western arms deliveries, destroyed this ambition.
From now on, the power hammers that Russia is the target of a war by proxy of the West and that each citizen must be ready to defend the fatherland, drawing day after day the parallel with the fight against the Nazis during the Second world war .
It is in this logic that Vladimir Putin ordered in September the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of reservists, therefore civilians, who today are fighting and dying on the front lines.
For the Russian sociologist Grigori Ioudine, the Kremlin is preparing the population, adults and children alike, for a “major existential war”.
And the “Conversations of Importance” at school are, he says, part of that effort.
The themes covered deal with the glorious Russian or Soviet past, national symbols but also social issues related to family or culture, the Kremlin defending conservative values ??against a “decadent” West.
In a video on “Russia’s place in the world”, shown in classrooms on February 13, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov responds to a child asking him what “young citizens can do to help their country.
“The drawings that children send to the front, we see in the reports (…) how important it is for the fighters,” he said.
For the sociologist, Mr. Ioudin, this testifies to a desire for “complete and radical transformation of education, to mobilize Russian youth to wage war”.
Moreover, Russia plans that from the start of the school year in September, high school and university students will follow a basic military course, including the handling of grenades and Kalashnikov assault rifles, as in the Soviet era.
“Education now has two functions: to make propaganda and to provide basic military training”, judges the expert, who did not wish to reveal whether he had gone into exile like many of his fellow critics of power.
In addition, posters glorifying the army and “heroes” appeared on the streets of the country. And since March, discrediting military forces is punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
On television, programs and documentaries on the conflict in Ukraine are omnipresent, hammering home the message of a nation that must mobilize at all costs.
“Life is greatly overestimated”, declared for example in January Vladimir Solovyov, one of the main voices of the Russian media machine. “Why be afraid of the inevitable?”
The Orthodox Church is also involved, the patriarch Kirill assuring that dying at the front washed away “all sins”.
“There is a glorification of war, elements of a death cult,” judge Grigori Ioudin, the sociologist.
Andrei Kolesnikov, a political scientist at the Carnegie Center, believes that Russian leaders are seeking to form a society that unites with the regime.
“Future generations must obediently apply the will of the state,” he notes.
Many Russians also join, such as Nikolai Karputkin, visitor to a military amusement park near Saint-Petersburg, where families come for rides in armored cars and where children learn to shoot and lead an army offensive. infantry, arms in hand.
“We are not fighting a war against Ukraine, but a war against the West, a war against the Western values ??that are trying to be imposed on us”, judges this 39-year-old father.
“We must defend the traditional values ??and the sovereignty of our homeland.”
25/02/2023 07:41:26 – Moscow (AFP) – © 2023 AFP