Days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Andrei Shestakov opened a series of files in a WhatsApp group chat for history teachers like him in his eastern Russian city.
The archives, which have been reviewed by Reuters and contain dozens of pages of documents and presentations, as well as video links, are instructions for teaching school-age adolescents about conflict. It is not clear who shared the files with the group chat, but many of the documents bear the emblem of the Ministry of Education in Moscow.
The material includes teaching guides stating that the Russian soldiers who fought in Ukraine were heroes, that the Ukrainian rulers had a common goal with the people who collaborated with the Nazis in World War II, that the West was trying to sow discord in Russian society, and that Russians had to remain together.
Shestakov said he flipped through the archives during one of his classes. The thin 38-year-old man said he had worked as a police officer for 16 of them before becoming a teacher in January. But in recent years he has had growing doubts, he said, whether Russia's rulers lived up to the values they professed about democracy, influenced in part by prominent Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny.
He decided not to give the modules to his students at Gymnasium No. 2 school where he worked in Neryungri, a coal mining town in eastern Siberia, about 6,700 km (4,160 mi) east of Moscow.
Instead, Shestakov told his students about the contents of the learning guide and why they were historically inaccurate, he told Reuters. For example, he said he explained that the material that claimed that Ukraine was an invention of Bolshevik communist Russia, but that the books talk about the history of Ukraine dating back centuries.
He continued. On March 1, he told students during a citizenship course that he would not advise them to serve in the Russian army, that he was against the war against Ukraine and that Russian leaders were showing elements of fascism, saying that in Ukraine they were against fascism in a statement signed by the police and revised by Reuters.
In the following days, the local police and the Federal Security Service, known as the FSB, called Shestakov for questioning, according to the statement signed on March 5 about his comments in class. He said that he has not been charged in connection with those comments. The FSB and local police did not respond to requests for comment.
A court fined him 35,000 rubles (about $420) on March 18 for discrediting the Russian armed forces after he posted online videos of interviews with Russian soldiers captured in Ukraine, as seen in a court decision issued by Reuters.
He said he would quit his job last month because he thought he would be fired anyway because of his public opposition to the war, he told Reuters. The local educational authority and the Ministry of Education did not respond to requests for comment on Shestakov and the learning guide. When Reuters contacted the school by phone, a woman who identified herself as the acting principal said she refused to comment on Shestakov's case and ended the call.
Teachers across Russia have received the same or similar teaching guides, according to two teacher unions, two other teachers and social media posts from two schools reporting that they have taught the modules.
Olga Miryasova, a union official called Teacher, said that regional education authorities have distributed the learning guide Shestakov received in several schools across the country. Reuters could not independently determine how many schools received the modules. One of the teachers said that they received a different teaching package than Shestakov's, although there was similar content.
The initiative shows how the Russian state, which has tightened its grip on the mainstream media, is now extending its propaganda efforts about the war in Ukraine to schools as the Kremlin tries to strengthen support. Since the beginning of the war, many Russian schools have posted images on social media showing students sending messages of support to troops fighting in Ukraine and standing in formation to spell the letter “Z”, a symbol of support for the war in Russia.
Teachers who disagree with the war are now joining opposition activists, non-governmental organization activists and independent journalists who feel pressure from the Russian state, facing fines, prosecutions and the prospect of losing their jobs. President Vladimir Putin signed a law in early March that would criminalize the dissemination of “false” information about the Russian armed forces with fines or prison terms of up to 15 years.
Even before the invasion, the Kremlin had urged its opponents through a combination of arrests, Internet censorship and blacklists.
The Kremlin did not respond to requests for comment on its handling of war resistance, the learning guide and Shestakov's case.
Russian Education Minister Sergei Kravtsov told a parliamentary committee in March that his ministry had launched a national campaign to discuss Russian-Ukrainian relations with students, amid children's questions about the situation in Ukraine and sanctions.
The Kremlin has said it is enforcing laws to thwart extremism and threats to stability. He says he is carrying out a “special operation” to destroy the military capabilities of his southern neighbor and “denazify” Ukraine and prevent genocide against Russian-speakers, especially in the east of the country. Kiev and its Western allies have dismissed this as an unfounded pretext for war, accusing Russian troops of killing civilians.
THE “HYBRID WAR” OF THE WEST
The learning guide Shestakov received states that it is intended for students aged 14 to 18. It contains detailed lesson plans for teachers, links to videos of President Putin's speeches and short films to illustrate the lessons.
According to the teaching material, the West is waging an information war to try to turn public opinion against the Russian rulers, and the entire Russian people must resist.
One curriculum explains that Russia waged a cultural war against the West that had destroyed “the institution of the traditional family” and was now trying to impose its values on Russia.
He says that Ukraine has been pursuing an anti-Russian policy since the collapse of the Soviet Union: “There were attacks on the Russian language, our common history was falsified, war criminals and criminal groups of World War II became heroes,” according to the document, which refers to Ukrainian nationalists who formed an alliance with Germany during that war.
Another lesson is that the West is using “hybrid war” — a mixture of propaganda, economic sanctions, and military pressure — to try to defeat Russia by fueling internal conflict. “That is precisely why they urge us to attend unauthorized demonstrations, they incite us to break the law and try to scare us,” he reads.
“We must not succumb to provocation,” the document says.
The modules contain a game where students have 15 seconds to decide whether a statement is true or false. One statement reads: “Organizing protests, provocations by authorities and mass demonstrations are an effective way to resolve a hybrid conflict.” According to the tutorial, the correct answer is false.
Reuters found social media posts from a school in Samara, on the Volga, and a school in Minusinsk, southern Siberia, showing slides of the same presentations used.
Danil Plotnikov, professor of mathematics in Chelyabinsk, in the Ural Mountains, told Reuters that his bosses had asked him to teach similar content, but with a different curriculum than Shestakov received; Plotnikov did not identify who the chiefs were. Tatyana Chernenko, a mathematics teacher in Moscow, said that colleagues from other schools told her that they had been asked to teach similar modules, but that they had not been taught at her school.
Teachers Reuters spoke to said that some regions and schools were pushing classes harder than others. None of the five teachers said they had heard of cases where teachers were explicitly instructed to teach the modules. They said it was usually written as an application or recommendation from a school or regional education authorities.
Some said no and had no consequences, said Daniil Ken, president of an independent teachers' union called the Teachers' Alliance. Others did not teach the classes, but they told the bosses they had them, Ken said. He added that refusing was a risk because teachers didn't know if their principals would pressure them to resign.
Ken said his union has heard half a dozen teachers every week who say they will resign because they didn't want to promote the Kremlin line, something Reuters could not independently verify.
POLITICAL AWAKENING
Shestakov wears very short hair and practices sambo, a martial art developed in the Soviet army. He said his career in the police force included a one-year period with the special forces of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, a branch of law enforcement officers whose officers are now fighting in Ukraine. The Ministry of the Interior did not respond to a request for comment.
In 2018, when he worked as a community policeman with juvenile delinquents, he had awakened politically, according to Shestakov. He said he began watching videos of Navalny, the opposition figure now in a Russian prison, claiming that the Kremlin leaders have become corrupt.
“I became a real person of the opposition,” Shestakov said.
He said that when the war began in Ukraine, images of the victims disturbed him and that he watched videos of the fighting on social media for hours.
Under a pseudonym, he republished videos of interviews with Russian soldiers captured in Ukraine in the comments section of a local media outlet with some 5,200 subscribers, according to Shestakov and the March 18 court ruling seen by Reuters.
The court said his actions violated a law that prohibits discrediting the Russian armed forces.
Shestakov said he suspected that the FSB had tapped his phone calls in recent weeks, although he had no proof of it. He also said that he has seen three times in recent days people he recognizes as undercover FSB agents. The agency has not responded to requests for comment.
Now Shestakov plans to leave Russia because he fears more sanctions from the authorities. He is said to join tens of thousands of Kremlin opponents who have also fled the country since Putin began cracking down on the opposition in 2018.
He said he planned to go to Turkey unless the authorities forbid him to leave the country.
Staying and abandoning his public opposition to the war was not an option for him, Shestakov said. “It will be hard for me to keep my mouth shut,” he said.
(with information from Reuters)
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