To please Putin, universities implement sweeping changes

Two weeks before the start of his 25th year as Russia’s supreme political leader, Vladimir Putin made a sweeping proclamation: “Wars are won by teachers.” The remark, which Putin repeated twice during his year-end news conference in December, shed light on a campaign he is waging that has received little attention outside wartime Russia: to imbue the country’s education system with patriotism, purge universities of Western influences, and quash any dissent among professors and students on campuses that are often hotbeds of political activism, writes Mary Ilyushina for The Washington Post.

At Saint Petersburg State University, this meant dismantling a prestigious humanities programme called the faculty of liberal arts and sciences. For more than a decade, until May 2022, the faculty – or college – was led by Alexei Kudrin, a liberal economist and former finance minister who had been a close associate of Putin’s since the early 1990s, when they were deputy mayors together in St Petersburg.

In a radical reshaping of Russia’s education system, curriculums are being redrawn to stress patriotism and textbooks rewritten to belittle Ukraine, glorify Russia and whitewash the totalitarian Soviet past. These changes – the most sweeping to schooling in Russia since the 1930s – are a core part of Putin’s effort to harness the war in Ukraine to remaster his country as a regressive, militarised state.
Full report on the Stars and Stripes site