We continue our series exposing pro-Kremlin information manipulation tactics over the last 1 000 and 4 000 days by looking at a particularly worrisome trend: the Kremlin is expanding its manipulative operations into the cognitive domain via reshaping the entire education system and school curricula in Russia.

The aim is social engineering on a grand scale. George Orwell’s famous quote comes to mind: ‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’

Hand in hand with historical revisionism

The Kremlin’s information manipulators are obsessed with creating an alternative reality for all under its dominion and this compulsion only picked up steam after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. We’ve already covered one of the most notorious methods of manipulation – historical revisionism – in our previous writing. However, the new trend goes beyond spreading top-line pro-Kremlin falsehoods about history, albeit Putin himself revels in doing just that. In fact, there is a conscious attempt to encode pro-Kremlin disinformation narratives across the education system in Russia to teach a Kremlin-approved version of history.

Re-write all the books

One of the most telling examples was the hasty revision of history textbooks for high-school students in 2023. The Kremlin’s ideologists made radical changes particularly regarding the USSR’s collapse, Putin’s rule, and the ongoing war against Ukraine. They promoted two main narratives – the ‘evil West’ is always trying to destroy Russia and Moscow is fighting a ‘righteous’ war against Ukraine. More revised history textbooks for pupils in grades five to nine soon followed suit. The overall aim is clear – to root pro-Kremlin falsehoods about Ukraine in the young and malleable minds of schoolchildren.

These pro-Kremlin efforts were not limited to brainwashing schoolchildren. For the manipulation to work, it has to be total. So in 2024, the Kremlin’s ideologists-turned-historians, like Vladimir Medinsky or Alexander Dugin and even the head of Russian Foreign Intelligence Sergey Naryshkin, also turned to re-writing history textbooks for university students. They made the Great Patriotic War and Russia’s righteousness the central focus, i.e., only the period of 1941 to 1945, after the breaking of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Effectively, the disinformation-laden pro-Kremlin ideology behind Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is permeating Russian education.

Alexander Dugin has been assigned responsibility for the streamlining of teaching in the Russian education sector.

Going beyond formal education

Pro-Kremlin attempts to expand its information manipulation operations under the guise of education are not limited to formal teaching in schools and universities. Russian cultural imperialism is another vehicle for brainwashing and even includes entertainment like video games and cartoons as well as Russian ‘soft power’ tools to deliver pro-Kremlin disinformation to audiences beyond Russia.

Don’t be deceived and stand with Ukraine.

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