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Putin Commences Soviet-Style Brainwashing of Russian Youth

Posted on Thursday, October 5, 2023
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by Ben Solis
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AMAC Exclusive – By Ben Solis

Vladimir Putin who commences a soviet style of learning for russian students

The United States has been actively planning a nuclear attack on Russia since 1945. The Marshall Plan was a dependence scheme benefitting American capitalists. The Truman Doctrine was nothing but U.S. imperialism. NATO is nothing but an offensive alliance against Moscow. These are just a few examples of the “truths” included in a new “history textbook” unveiled for Russian students this year.

The fresh set of Kremlin-approved narratives about Russian history post-World War II are a crucial part of Putin’s effort to shape how young generations of Russians think about the West and the United States. The 448-page volume paints America as the world’s great villain since the start of the Cold War, further describing “the return of our historical lands into the Federation” as “the most important event in modern history.”

Education Minister Sergei Kravtsov formally introduced the textbook in August, with some 650,000 copies quickly distributed to 11th-grade students – the final year of Russian high school.

Russian historian Nikita Sokolov, the author of 28 original articles and books on actual Russian history, called the state-approved textbook “an excessively swollen propaganda brochure.” Sokolov added that the textbook underscores one of the Russian society’s biggest problems – a failure to adequately educate students.

Another Russian historian, Dr. Ivan Kurila, told this author that the new textbook wrongly imposes the idea that the government has always played the primary role in history. In doing so, it violates the three guiding principles of any good textbook: that history should be about how people actually lived; that history cannot be centered on one entity, like the government in Moscow; and that textbooks should teach students differing viewpoints, and that sometimes those viewpoints cannot end in compromise.

Vladimir Medinsky, a propaganda aide to Russian leader Vladimir Putin who served as culture minister from 2012 to 2020, is a co-author of the textbook and described the sections from the 1970s to the present as “thoroughly reworked.”

The result is that the new textbook mirrors versions used in the Soviet Union during the depths of the Cold War, when pupils were forbidden to challenge the state-approved narratives and the truth was actively concealed.

Like their peers before 1991, Russian students will now learn that every decision made by the Soviet Union during the Cold War was to stop nuclear conflict, rather than instigate it.

America is, of course, the primary enemy in this story. “The Second World War had not yet ended, and the United States was already developing plans to invade the territory of the USSR and bomb Soviet cities with nuclear weapons,” the textbook reads.

The textbook also flips true history on its head and claims that the Soviet Union “supported the national liberation movements in Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe to protect them from the U.S.-imposed global colonial system.” Of course, the reality is exactly the opposite.

Russian students will learn that the Soviet government was always correct, even when it perpetrated seemingly heinous crimes against its own people.

For instance, the textbook states that Stalin’s imprisonment and execution of POWs returning from Germany at the end of World War II was justified because most people accepted harsher punishments (“Such measures found understanding in society”).

As for dissidents imprisoned for calling attention to Moscow’s human rights abuses, the textbook says it was understandable because the Communist Party had to address the terror scare: “State security agencies observed the West patronizing the dissidents. The growing threat of terrorism in the West rationalized this surveillance.”

The textbook even incredibly claims that the famines of the late 1940s – a direct result of the Soviet regime’s politicization of agricultural science, a phenomenon known as Lysenkoism – “made people even stronger and more united.”

In some cases, the textbook is so divorced from reality that it is even in conflict with prior statements from Vladimir Putin himself on past mistakes of the U.S.S.R.

Earlier this year, Putin told a reporter that the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and 1960s were wrong. “We acknowledged long ago that part of the Soviet policy was mistaken and only led to tension in relations. One must not do anything in foreign policy that directly contradicts the interests of other peoples,” he said.

However, the new textbook teaches that the Soviet regime had a “justified fear that the Western spy agencies were the catalyst for the Hungarian crisis led it to dispatch troops to Hungary and aid the authorities to suppress the uprising.”

Predictably, President Ronald Reagan is demonized as applying “secret directive pressure on Western countries to reduce economic cooperation with the Kremlin.”

The last part of the new textbook is devoted to the war in Ukraine, with the authors describing the conflict as a “battering ram” being used by the West to destabilize Russia. Ukraine is portrayed as an “ultranationalist state” that is a direct threat to Russian citizens.

Many Western observers have expressed fears that Putin’s ultimate goal is to recreate the Soviet Union. At the very least, it’s now clear that he has revitalized the Soviet propaganda machine.

Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.

 

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Russ
Russ
1 year ago

Putins brainwashing Russian youth shouldn’t be confused with the Biden/lgbtq brainwashing of American youth.

paul
paul
1 year ago

Sounds as if Biden and Putin have much in common.

Rik
Rik
1 year ago

Lying Crooked Joebama Biden has Greatly surpassed Putin in his “brainwashing” technique in Indoctrinating American youth to HATE AMERICA! If Capitalism is so bad, then leave, we won’t stop him!

Loves Dogs
Loves Dogs
1 year ago

One of the first things the article says that the text book is a “failure to adequately educate students”. Who in the US believes that the US is adequately educating its students when all the teach is sex or sex related. Our education system is a HUGE joke. At home schooling is superior to anything the Fake Schools are teaching. I bet in Russia they can do simple math which is above what the Fake Schools in this country teach. They are indoctrinating… well guess what we are doing since everything in our school system is based on Fake Facts such as CRT or that you can change your sex or other nonsense.

Frances
Frances
1 year ago

How is this any different than what takes place in America’s indoctrination centers (aka schools)?

Pcar
Pcar
1 year ago

The difference between US brainwashing and Russian is they’re making the children patriotic Russians and the USA is teaching our children that their country is evil.

A Voter
A Voter
1 year ago

Exchange Biden for Putin and the story is just as believable.

Leland John Eagleson
Leland John Eagleson
1 year ago

If you look at American “education” you will see that we have beat the Russians at this “education” game. The 3 “R”s?? MEH, they are not for the greater good…

Gabe Hanzeli kent wa
Gabe Hanzeli kent wa
1 year ago

Well putin has his work cut out to catch up with the american pervert public schools.

Robert Zuccaro
Robert Zuccaro
1 year ago

Big suprise, dictators always look to seed young minds. Substitute “us” for “them” in these textbooks and add gender affirming forum stories and you have an NFT-approved textbook for prepubescent US school children.

Casey C Matt
Casey C Matt
1 year ago

My God……..accusing Putin again. “I have a hangnail……PUTIN DID IT”. What exactly is the current purpose of NATO if not as an aggressor against the Capital of Russia? It was founded as a defense against the Soviet Union…which is now gone and has been for 30 years. When the wall fell we promised Gorbachev the Russian leader at the time that if Russia dissolved the Warsaw Pact, their equivalent of NATO but formed AFTER NATO, we would never expand NATO further east. Well fast forward to the younger Bush administration and suer enough NATO has spread like cancer. Ukraine was the red line Russia established and burned NATO equipment for
As for Russian youth being “propagandized” you do know they too have access to the same internet we do and in Russia in EVERY magazine-newspaper outlet their citizens can buy rags like the NY Times, WAPO……they can watch CNN,MSNBC, FOX……..but can WE read TASS or watch RT? We can only watch RT on Rumble its been banned elsewhere……..so who is the propagandist here?

Carol
Carol
1 year ago

1984 is a reality! Between Putin and the Biden admin and the leftists in our education system, history is being rewritten all over and changes to make whatever the leftist want be the good guys while slamming the other side. How 1984? Demonic forces are at work all over the planet, focus on Christ, HE’S are ONLY HOPE!

Tom
Tom
1 year ago

Eternal war for eternal profit. How much intervention to support the wrong side in countries to protect US businesses?

Jeri
Jeri
1 year ago

Putin is a student of history. It is well documented that this the the main way to move forward with indoctrination. He figures he has learned from the past and will get it right this time. Human beings will never tolerate being enslaved so we will have to repeat this Marxist way of thinking followed by death and destruction yet again. Feckless dolts.

Terri
Terri
1 year ago

At least Putin doesn’t allow children to be indoctrinated with the homosexual and transgender agenda. He thinks we’re sick for the mutilation of our children. I’ve read some of his speeches and I agree with what he said about what the the West is doing to children.

spitfire?1940
spitfire?1940
1 year ago

And Biden/Obama commence Soviet/Nation style brainwashing with American youths!!

Stephen Russell
Stephen Russell
1 year ago

Since 1917

CLIFFORD F GERACI
CLIFFORD F GERACI
1 year ago

The American public school system is doing the same thing with critical race theory. Teaching children how evil America is and how it fundamentally needs to be more progressive and “woke” in thought, dumbing down America. Putin couldn’t have planned a more self destructive nature that our own teachers are doing.

John Beach
John Beach
1 year ago

While it has been heartening to see the freedoms that Russians have enjoyed over the past thirty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the former USSR, one would hope that the spirit of liberty, which has been allowed to inspire change from the ignorant austerity of the Soviet era, would have so captured the minds of, at least, two generations of Russians, such that they will be able to retain that liberty in the face of reversion and revisionism.

Dee
Dee
1 year ago

Isn’t that what the Democrat liberal socialist and dictatorial gov’t that we now have is doing? Brainwashing our youths with the ideology and woke agenda? We cannot criticize Russia which our gov’t itself is doing.

Gloria
Gloria
1 year ago

Probably no more than U.S. military does brainwashing / drug treatment with the U.S. military. Like my mother always said: That’s like the pot calling the kettle black.

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