Hello!

This is Anna Orlova from the independent media outlet 7x7. The school year is coming to an end in Russia. Throughout the year, Russian schools have continued to focus heavily on patriotic education.

We asked our readers how patriotic activities — such as “Conversations About Important Things” lessons, morning flag-raising ceremonies, and meetings with military personnel — affect students. Here is what they shared.

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Parents move children to online schools to shield them from propaganda

One of our readers has a daughter in the eighth grade who studies online. But the girl missed being around other children, so her mother decided to try transferring her to a private school. The experiment quickly backfired.

The school constantly held pro-war events: priests wearing camouflage uniforms performed at school concerts, teachers handed out postcards demanding that children sign them for soldiers, and parents were asked in group chats to donate money for Russian troops fighting at the front.

The girl noted that while her classmates attended all the events, they rarely questioned what they were actually about — they were simply exhausted by the sheer volume of activities combined with exam preparation.

“My daughter’s experiment lasted two months. A lack of real-life interaction is bad, but interactions at school don’t feel genuine either,” the mother said.

After two months of offline classes, the girl returned to online schooling.

Parents try to shield children from pro-war activities

Another story came from the mother of an eighth-grader at a Moscow school. She fought to keep her son out of propaganda events and urged other parents to do the same.

She formally requested that her son complete the patriotic lessons at home and obtained a medical certificate stating that he suffered from nervous exhaustion, which exempted him from attending large group events.

Parents are deeply concerned that many school subjects have become subordinate to military themes.

“The level of brainwashing at school is immense. When they were told to write essays about ‘real men,’ almost everyone wrote about soldiers or the military. Mine was the only one who wrote about Beethoven and overcoming oneself,” the student’s mother wrote.

She was terrified for herself and her son: in 2023, Alexey Moskalev from Tula, the father of another schoolgirl, was prosecuted and later sentenced to prison over his daughter’s anti-war drawings.

“Am I scared? You bet I am! But I only have one son. There isn’t another! It is more terrifying to lose his soul than to deal with these monsters,” she wrote to us.

What students themselves think

We also received messages from students themselves. They said that teachers are exhausted by the pro-war lessons too and often conduct them only because they are required to.

In some schools, teachers have refused to use the new history textbooks, which portray Europe and Ukraine as Russia’s enemies.

Students also expressed concern that teachers are forcing younger pupils to download the national messaging app MAX and are increasingly targeting younger children with patriotic messaging.

Students are also worried about the persecution of LGBT people after Russia declared the “international LGBT movement” an extremist organization.

In late May, police charged a 13-year-old student under laws banning “LGBT propaganda” and the display of extremist symbols.

“I specifically ask you to mention the LGBT topic. I hope the security forces and other scum read this text. Let them know that we still buy queer literature secondhand anyway. Banning it is useless. An older brother or sister will still come home and explain to younger children that love doesn’t necessarily have to be between people of opposite sexes,” a student wrote to us.