October 08, 2023

Integration through Education?


Integration through Education?
Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Russian Life files.

In an October 4 speech honoring Russia's Teachers of the Year, Russian President Vladimir Putin called for increased efforts to support education in regions recently annexed from eastern Ukraine.

"Supporting the educational system in these regions is extremely important," Putin said. "We need to help our colleagues catch up, and we must do everything we can to ensure that both schoolchildren and teachers become a part of the huge, common, unified educational space of our country.”

The regions in question were illegally added to the Russian Federation after their capture from Ukraine in the wake of Russia's invasion. The new administrations are set to be made up of hypernationalist officials, and, already, integration efforts have taken on some draconian forms.

What's more, the classroom has become one of the leading battlegrounds for Russian patriotism. Students expressing dissent from Russian ideology, even inadvertently, have faced punishment, and required extracurriculars seeking to promote "traditional values" and support for the state have become part and parcel of Russian education.

Veterans of the Ukraine war are being selected as a new generation of schoolteachers. And a new history textbook introduced this year, too, has increased Russia's nationalist fervor in public schools.

With these trends in mind, it is difficult not to see the growth of state-funded education in these regions as a stronghanded attempt at the integration of Ukrainian territories into Moscow's orbit.

You Might Also Like

The Wrong Kind of Patriotism
  • November 30, 2022

The Wrong Kind of Patriotism

A student in Karelia was reportedly disciplined for wearing a sweatshirt with an American flag on it.
Like this post? Get a weekly email digest + member-only deals

Some of our Books

93 Untranslatable Russian Words
December 01, 2008

93 Untranslatable Russian Words

Every language has concepts, ideas, words and idioms that are nearly impossible to translate into another language. This book looks at nearly 100 such Russian words and offers paths to their understanding and translation by way of examples from literature and everyday life. Difficult to translate words and concepts are introduced with dictionary definitions, then elucidated with citations from literature, speech and prose, helping the student of Russian comprehend the word/concept in context.

How Russia Got That Way
September 20, 2025

How Russia Got That Way

A fast-paced crash course in Russian history, from Norsemen to Navalny, that explores the ways the Kremlin uses history to achieve its ends.

White Magic
June 01, 2021

White Magic

The thirteen tales in this volume – all written by Russian émigrés, writers who fled their native country in the early twentieth century – contain a fair dose of magic and mysticism, of terror and the supernatural. There are Petersburg revenants, grief-stricken avengers, Lithuanian vampires, flying skeletons, murders and duels, and even a ghostly Edgar Allen Poe.

Marooned in Moscow
May 01, 2011

Marooned in Moscow

This gripping autobiography plays out against the backdrop of Russia's bloody Civil War, and was one of the first Western eyewitness accounts of life in post-revolutionary Russia. Marooned in Moscow provides a fascinating account of one woman's entry into war-torn Russia in early 1920, first-person impressions of many in the top Soviet leadership, and accounts of the author's increasingly dangerous work as a journalist and spy, to say nothing of her work on behalf of prisoners, her two arrests, and her eventual ten-month-long imprisonment, including in the infamous Lubyanka prison. It is a veritable encyclopedia of life in Russia in the early 1920s.

Murder at the Dacha
July 01, 2013

Murder at the Dacha

Senior Lieutenant Pavel Matyushkin has a problem. Several, actually. Not the least of them is the fact that a powerful Soviet boss has been murdered, and Matyushkin's surly commander has given him an unreasonably short time frame to close the case.

The Moscow Eccentric
December 01, 2016

The Moscow Eccentric

Advance reviewers are calling this new translation "a coup" and "a remarkable achievement." This rediscovered gem of a novel by one of Russia's finest writers explores some of the thorniest issues of the early twentieth century.

About Us

Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.

Latest Posts

Our Contacts

Russian Life
73 Main Street, Suite 402
Montpelier VT 05602

802-223-4955