Russian President Vladimir Putin declared 2023 the Year of Teachers and Mentors in Russia. The Ministry of Education wrote on its website that “this is not only a chance to thank the teachers who educate our children every day, but also a time for new opportunities.”
Gratitude and new opportunities were not long in coming. Over the course of two years of war, teachers unwilling to support Russia’s “special military operation” have been given the opportunity to pay fines, face administrative and criminal charges, and lose their jobs.
This is the story of a teacher whose anti-war stance cost him his job. We also look at what experts believe is in store for other teachers who don’t toe the line, and contemplate what the future holds for secondary education in wartime.
“You can’t go against your conscience. Recently someone at school told me, ‘You cannot hold any position other than the official one, as expressed by the government.’ Well, I do have my own opinion and so do many other teachers! And you know what? It sure doesn’t match the government’s. I don’t want to be a mouthpiece for the state propaganda. I’m proud that I’m no longer afraid to write about this, and I’m proud to be a teacher.”
This was the comment 28-year-old Kamran Manafly, a geography teacher at Moscow School No. 498, posted on social media in the spring of 2022 alongside a picture of himself at an antiwar protest. He was fired several days later for “immoral behavior.”
Manafly started teaching in 2015. He said he feels that, by its very nature, geography can’t be separated from politics. After all, what are geography teachers supposed to tell their students about places like Abkhazia, Crimea, Transnistria, and Nagorno-Karabakh?
“Those areas are commonly referred to as ‘unrecognized republics’ and this is exactly how we studied them. If I’m being honest, we used to be able to do this because no one kept tabs on teachers or what they taught.”
Manafly said that until about 2018 teachers in Russia could say whatever they wanted in class. But once the war started, the government began to vigorously poke its nose into classrooms, as propaganda, pressure, and control intensified. And the control extended beyond the classroom.
After Manafly’s school principal saw his post, she insisted that he delete it, but he refused and was told that he should quit. When he didn’t do that, he was fired for “immoral behavior.” Under Russian law, immoral behavior includes lecherous behavior toward students, drinking alcohol at work, taking bribes, and informing students of test questions ahead of time. But, at a special meeting led by the principal, Manafly’s colleagues recalled that he often traveled to international conferences and seminars and participated in international programs.
Manafly said that his school’s principal had previously advised him not to talk about having participated in such conferences, and, starting in 2016, he was no longer given professional development credit for attending them.
“I thought that by presenting at conferences I was representing Russia and defending its honor, but not only were my expenses for these trips never reimbursed, I was told to keep quiet about them. When I went to the United States for the last time in 2019 on an exchange program for teachers, I had to take time off. I was allowed to develop my professional qualifications only in my ‘free time.’ And it was better not to talk about these trips.”
Manafly recounted that, after he was fired, the principal deemed it necessary to call him and vow to her former teacher that she would “make every effort to put him behind bars for a long time.” That was in March 2022, when none of the current, more Draconian laws were yet in place. Manafly got the message and emigrated to the United States.
He bitterly remarked that the reasons for his dismissal meant that he can never teach again in today’s Russia.
When asked if he felt the principal realized that she was actually ruining his life by depriving him of the opportunity to teach, Manafly is unequivocal:
“She is a city council member of the ruling United Russia Party. So, I think she understood perfectly well.”
The principal of Moscow School No. 498, Tamara Vasilyevna Gorzeiko, did not respond to a request to comment for this story.
Manafly said that, in his case, as in many other similar cases, the teaching staff reacted instantly.
“In my situation, it was the principal who gave the go-ahead for the school maintenance supervisor to attack me. This happened after I was fired and went to school to get my things. He tried to keep me from entering the building and picked a fight. I had to call the police. The rest of my colleagues wouldn’t give me the time of day. They changed their attitude toward me and got with the program literally ten minutes after it became clear that I was a freethinker.”
Ivan Vtorushin, who oversees legal aid for OVD-Info, a human rights organization that deals, among other things, with cases involving teachers, said he feels that teachers reporting on each other, denouncing colleagues at meetings, and creating ethics committees is mostly a way for them to demonstrate their loyalty to the government.
He added that they also want to show that “they’re ready to ‘purge the ranks’ of those who disagree with the government and aren’t sufficiently devoted to it. But this didn’t start overnight; it’s always happened at schools and universities. It’s just that, before the war started, the laws and mindset of our government’s executive branch were quite different, so people reported on one another less.
“Let’s be realistic, you have to support the government in order to become a school principal,” Manafly said. “Only certain people whom the government trusts can climb the ranks from ordinary teacher to principal or even assistant principal. Don’t forget that it is specifically schools that are considered the ‘guarantors’ of ‘correct’ voting. I personally know some very decent teachers who falsified election results without the slightest compunction.”
Schools have long played an important role in Russian elections, as evidenced by the fact that almost half of all polling places are in schools and that teachers serve as poll workers. In 2019, the local teachers’ union for Moscow and Moscow Oblast urged teachers to “think how they will explain their participation in Russia’s rigged elections to their students.”
The media has reported multiple incidents where teachers working on election commissions stuffed ballot boxes, switched ballots, and committed other violations. Such reports have even surfaced in pro-government news outlets.
Manafly said he is convinced that the government only allows teachers it trusts to oversee voting. He personally helped out only once, and even then he was only tasked with standing by the front door and giving directions to the polling station.
He said he doesn’t feel that pressure from the authorities is always behind ballot rigging and directing propaganda at children. Some teachers are true believers.
“A physics teacher in her early forties was working at our school,” Manafly recalled. “She really loved her subject and was a gifted teacher. Right after the war started, we were advised not to discuss it with our students. She was very surprised and asked, ‘Why not tell them that we’ve started killing Ukes?’ No one made her say that; she expressed her own thoughts. Don’t underestimate the number of people, including teachers, who support the war. No one has to make them say anything in favor of it, because they do that just fine on their own.”
The physics teacher did not wish to comment for this story.
Dima Zitser is a teacher, writer, blogger, and founder of Apelsin (Orange), a nonprofit organization and school of informal education. He urges people not to generalize teachers and see them as a faceless mob. However, he considers the pro-government stance of most teachers to be a natural development.
“Neither teachers nor teaching staff are all the same,” he said, “so when we portray them all as scum and traitors, we do them and ourselves a disservice. We can’t forget that. But with that in mind, we need to admit that teachers are one of the most disempowered and poorly educated groups in society. With all due respect to the teacher training colleges that prepare our teachers, the teaching profession requires educators to keep learning and growing.”
You’ve probably heard that the main job of schools is to teach students how to learn. But can people teach if they can’t learn themselves?
The average age of a teacher in Russia is 47, and 26 percent of teachers have reached retirement age. Many aren’t interested in the latest research from the field they teach; they’re frustrated with their social status, and they have no desire to keep learning and developing. Instead, they prefer to rely on what they learned several decades ago.
“Often, these people have a limited frame of reference that is very rigid and black and white,” Zitser added. “Many of them are women of pre-retirement or retirement age who have long been waiting for things to go back to how they were in Soviet times. They went to school and taught for many years in a system with a different way of thinking than today. Suddenly, it turned out people wanted freedom and the world isn’t black and white. Some of these teachers changed, but most didn’t. Some laid low and waited for a return to Soviet life in the early 2000s.”
Commenting on teachers’ support of the war, Zitser also recalled that for many years they have taken part in carousel voting, voter fraud, and ballot-stuffing, but he said that teachers aren’t the only ones capable of such things.[1]
“Do you really think that the situation is any different among performers? Or among plumbers or engineers? We tend to call out teachers (and, truth be told, with good reason). But look what’s happening in theaters! How about the Voronezh Theater or in Ulan-Ude? It paints a similar picture.”[2]
There aren’t many ways for teachers to protect their rights, because Russia does not have a centralized trade union system. The Teachers’ Alliance is an independent trade union that gives teachers legal assistance and helps them raise money to pay fines. Since it initially received both financial and media support from Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, which the Russian government designated as an extremist organization, the Teachers’ Alliance lost its official accreditation.
When the Teachers’ Alliance was first established, it dealt with issues such as unpaid wages, conflicts in the workplace, and attempts by school administrators to force teachers to conduct political propaganda. However, after Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Alliance has mostly heard about pressure put on teachers to keep quiet after they made antiwar statements at school or posted them online.
Danil Ken, head of the Teachers’ Alliance trade union, was fired in 2020 from the school he had worked at for eight years. He said he feels that both society and the authorities are putting teachers under increased scrutiny.
“In the first place, teaching is a rather high-profile profession – teachers often speak publicly and are likely to be active online. In the second place, the government imposes certain political requirements on them. In the past, they had to put up a conformist front, but no one demanded public pledges of allegiance. But now that there’s a war going on, propaganda in schools, universities, and colleges is seen as an essential way of influencing public opinion. Teachers are expected to directly support the army and promote the war. Some of them who are strongly against this have quit, while others try to strike a balance between their viewpoints and those of the government. A significant number of teachers have faced charges in administrative and/or criminal cases.”
Ken said that his organization has dealt with numerous cases related to teachers’ antiwar stances, but they are not always prosecuted as laws against “immorality.”
Charges of immorality are very difficult to challenge in court,” Ken said. “The law is vague, which makes it practically impossible to prove you are innocent. Propaganda is obviously prohibited in schools, but no court is going to say that the lesson plans for Conversations on Important Topics, or Vladimir Medinsky’s new textbook, are propaganda (see “Peace Signs: The Troubled State of Russian Education” Russian Life, Fall 2023).[3] So in theory, teachers could be charged for not using these materials in class. But, in a real-case scenario, it’s difficult for school administrators to do this. It’s much easier to fire teachers for technical infractions, of which there are dozens to choose from. Even correcting students’ homework at home is one.”
Tatyana Gir, a young English teacher at the Penza Oblast Olympic Reserve School, didn’t plan on publicly voicing her opposition to Russia’s War on Ukraine. But when two of her students were barred from participating in a championship match in the Czech Republic as a result of Russia’s aggression, Tatyana expressed the opinion that, while she and her fellow Russians were not personally responsible for their country’s war in Ukraine, the sanctions imposed on the Russian government were justified.
“Russia invaded a sovereign state and planned to overthrow its president and government, is bombing cities, and even shelled a maternity hospital in Mariupol,” Gir said to students. One of them recorded her speech and passed the recording along to law enforcement. Penza’s Lenin District Court found Gir guilty under Russia’s “law on fakes” and sentenced her to five years probation for spreading made-up information about the Russian army motivated by political hatred.
This is far from the only time that students have reported on their teachers.
“I keep in contact with my former colleagues who are still in Russia, and they have confirmed that propaganda is leaving its mark on students,” Manafly said. “What’s more, the children of politicians, security service agents, and policemen also go to school. Who do you think influences them more – their parents or geography teachers? Children who were ready to snitch on their parents have been around forever, there are just more of them now.”
“Pavlik Morozov[4] was also law-abiding and acted exactly as the laws of his time dictated,” Dima Zitser said. “Students reporting their teachers to authorities is the result of how students have been taught over the last 20 years. The Russian classroom is a battlefield for teachers and students.
“Of course, this is an over-simplification, because not all schools and teachers are the same. On one level, there’s an effort to free people from the illusion that they have a conscience: whatever is black is presented as white, but then switches to blue, and then later, it’s white again, and good luck voicing any doubts you might have. All this happens within a frame of reference everyone is used to in our schools, where students are pitted against their teachers. So, this is why we have what we have.”
“It’s important to cite not just the cases that have already been brought to court,” Ken said. “There may be hundreds or thousands of them, but there may be just as many or even more that haven’t reached the public realm.”
As of August 2023, OVD-Info was aware of 19 criminal cases filed against teachers in schools, 46 administrative cases, and 67 cases where out-of-court pressure was exerted on teachers, 52 of which resulted in dismissals.
“There are millions of teachers and students in Russia,” Ken said. “This means that there have been and continue to be a tremendous number of situations that did not result in denunciation, fines, write-ups or dismissals.”
* * * *
For the past year and a half, Manafly has been living and working in the United States, but not as a teacher.
“It’s obviously a completely different world. I don’t have to be afraid to speak or watch what I say. I don’t have to deal with racism or harassment because I’m Azerbaijani, but I regret not being able to teach in Moscow. I think I did my job really well.”
[1] Carousel voting refers to the practice of transporting busloads of people to different polling stations to vote multiple times.
[2] In March 2023 in Ulan-Ude, Artur Shuvalov, an actor at the Bestuzhev Dramatic Theater, slit his wrists in front of an audience and complained of being hounded by the theater’s administrators for ripping up a flag bearing a patriotic Z symbol and refusing to help organize a concert for soldiers wounded fighting in Ukraine. In November 2023, Mikhail Bychkov, long-time artistic director of the Voronezh Chamber Theater was fired after publicly expressing his opposition to the invasion of Ukraine.
[3] Conversations on Important Topics is a recently added secondary school unit designed to promote support for Russian aggression in Ukraine. Vladimir Medinsky served as Russia’s Minister of Culture from 2012-2020 and was a lead author on a new history book for 11th graders that frames Russian history in accordance with state propaganda.
[4] Pavlik Morozov (1918-1932) was extolled as a martyr for informing on his corrupt father and then being killed at the age of 13 by anti-Soviet family members. Subsequent research has shown this story was fabricated, but it was widely used in propaganda, especially toward children, and was the basis for stories, songs, and poems. Statues of Pavlik were erected across the Soviet Union.
This article was originally published by T-Invariant, which this spring was declared a “foreign agent” by the Russian government.
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