Putin Is Turning Eighth-Grade Classrooms Into Army Training Grounds
A class of Russian first-graders stood to attention this fall as a soldier who had served on the front line in Ukraine inspected their military uniforms.
“Check your dress!” ordered the serviceman. “Your buckles should face not left, not right, but straight ahead.”
The pupils, age 6 to 8, adjusted collars, swiveled belts and repositioned the name badges on their chests. Then, they settled behind their desks for an hour of Russian language study.
Drills of this kind, which took place in the Kursk region bordering Ukraine and were broadcast on Russian state television, are happening across Russia as the Kremlin reaches into the country’s schools to prepare potential combatants for future wars.
It is part of a dramatic transformation of Russia’s education system that gained pace after the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 but was supercharged by the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. As the conflict approaches the four-year mark, military-style training and war topics are embedded in Russia’s school curriculum, while the budget for such programs has ballooned as the focus has turned to the youngest grades.
By eighth grade, weapons training—once extracurricular—is now mandatory. Teens are taught army discipline, military history and how to assemble Kalashnikovs and fly drones.
History textbooks portraying the West as Russia’s enemy and Ukraine as its stooge will soon be rolled out for the youngest grades, the government says. Outside of the classroom, the Defense Ministry has its own Youth Army, with a claimed 1.85 million members age 8 to 18 integrated into the school system.
The Kremlin has signaled the war in Ukraine could last years, and analysts say the military indoctrination push is aimed in part at rearing a generation of militarized patriots who recognize the Russian state as the ultimate authority and will unquestioningly answer a future call to fight.
“If you take school-age children and indoctrinate them properly, then they will become cheaper and more efficient soldiers for any kind of war you may plan in the future,” said political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann, describing the Kremlin’s logic.
Key to the campaign is the involvement of active-duty soldiers, who now teach schoolchildren how to handle guns and fight in self-defense. Soldiers walked hand-in-hand at the start of term with pupils whose fathers had fallen in battle.
“Wars are won not by generals, but by schoolteachers,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in December 2023, calling on soldiers to enter Russia’s classrooms. A state program now fast tracks their teaching applications.
For Putin, remastering Russia’s curriculum to promote patriotism and army service has been a long-held ambition. After he came to power in 2000, the Russian leader lamented a loss of unity in the wake of the Soviet collapse and said a lax youth policy was leading to the corruption of young minds.
Putin was one of millions of Soviet schoolchildren who joined the Pioneer and Komsomol youth movements, which taught devotion to communist ideals. As president, he revived and revitalized a network of youth clubs to train a new generation of militarized patriots.
His government also increased funding for so-called patriotic education, focused on teaching basic military skills and a historical narrative that whitewashes Russia’s past.
In 2015, many of the youth clubs merged into the Defense Ministry’s Youth Army with military-style uniforms and red berets. Its members stand guard at historical ceremonies and attend regular army training sessions.
Putin also moved to bring the education system under government control, targeting schools that taught different interpretations of Russia’s past. He argued that a tug of war with the West over Russia’s soul was just as fierce as the fight for natural resources.
“The intention has been to use all the tools the government can think of to prepare children ideologically, psychologically and, at least on some level in terms of basic military skills, for war,” said Ian Garner, a lecturer and author of a book on Russia’s youth.
Russian schools now start the week with an hourlong class titled “Conversations about Important Things,” aimed at spreading conservative Russian values among children, according to government documents. The teaching material for preschoolers, according to a copy published in Russian independent media, declares, “To live means to serve your Motherland.”
Since 2024, a new class called “Foundations of Security and Defense of the Motherland” includes instruction on the Kalashnikov rifle, the RPK machine gun, the RPG antitank grenade launcher and the Dragunov sniper rifle, as well as lectures on psychological operations and “unity of command,” according to documents published online as a resource for teachers.
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History classes are based on textbooks co-written by Vladimir Medinsky, Russia’s chief negotiator on Ukraine. The 11th-grade version describes Ukraine as an ultranationalist state and claims, without evidence, that the U.S. opened secret biolaboratories on Ukrainian territory in the buildup to the war. It says Kyiv was working to develop nuclear weapons ahead of an attack on Russia with the full backing of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
“This would possibly have spelled the end of civilization,” the textbook reads, according to copies of it posted on Russian state-linked websites. “We couldn’t let this happen.”
Funding for “patriotic education” increased from 3.5 billion rubles, equivalent to $42 million, in 2021 to more than 50 billion rubles, almost $600 million, in 2024, according to government statistics. This year, another four billion rubles was earmarked to equip 23,000 schools with model Kalashnikovs, grenades and drone kits.
The new curriculum is also taught in occupied parts of Ukraine, where authorities have seized and destroyed Ukrainian-language books, and residents say Ukraine’s national history is scrubbed from the timetable. Parents who dial their children into online classes taught in other Ukrainian cities risk arrest for doing so.
Beyond the classroom, public figures disseminate a message of sacrifice and commitment to the defense of Russia. “A man is created not for peace, but for war, and Russians—for victory,” Vladimir Solovyov, a TV anchor close to Putin, told a gathering of young adults in Moscow last fall.
That is resonating with thousands of Russian children who have lost relatives in Ukraine. Authorities have renamed schools in honor of men killed there. Classrooms often contain “hero desks” decorated with portraits of graduates who have died in the war.
But the most controversial change has been the introduction of a military ethos at the heart of the civilian classroom.
For some, intensive preparation for military service begins in preschool, where cadet classes include physical drills carried out in army-style uniforms. Parents of some first-graders who don camouflage at school have already identified which military university they want their children to attend, and have an expectation for where they will ultimately serve, according to Russian state media.
In the television report about military drills at the school in Kursk this fall, serviceman-turned-teacher Andrey Apurin said he had his work cut out to bring the pupils up to scratch. “We have a long way to go before we establish full discipline,” the 22-year-old said.
Many parents support the change. But others, as well as teachers and education experts, warn that the indoctrination risks spawning a jingoistic, unquestioning generation that will perpetuate Russian warmongering.
“When a child is handed a rifle and told ‘Putin is our pride,’ and that Ukraine is where enemies who want to destroy us are living, they don’t have the critical thinking to say: ‘No, wait, it’s not that way,’ ” said Dima Zicer, a Russian education expert living abroad.
Some teachers who have refused to deliver the militarized curriculum have faced criminal charges.
In June, a Moscow court sentenced teacher Natalia Taranushenko to seven years in jail for telling pupils about atrocities committed by Russian troops. By the time of her sentencing, Taranushenko had fled the country.
Write to Matthew Luxmoore at matthew.luxmoore@wsj.com
The War in Ukraine
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