Teaching Statism in Russian Universities: Between Indoctrination and Re-Interpretation
Mentor
Ivan Fomin is the head of the Ideas for Russia initiative. He also teaches at the Boris Nemtsov Program in Russian Studies at Charles University and is a Democracy Fellow at CEPA. His research is focused on political semiotics, Russian political discourse, and Putin’s regime’s ideology. He has worked at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow but left Russia after the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He was a Russia Research Initiative fellow at George Washington University, a fellow of the Fedor Stepun Program at Ruhr University Bochum, and a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University SAIS. He also contributed to research projects at INION RAN Center for Advanced Methodologies, Nicolaus Copernicus University, and Jagiellonian University. His publications have appeared in Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Demokratizatsiya, European Journal of International Relations, and International Theory. He holds a Candidate of Sciences degree in Political Science.
Project description
The project explores the “patriotic upbringing” course called “Foundations of Russian Statehood” (Osnovy rossiiskoi gosudarstvennosti, ORG), which was introduced in Russian universities in 2023. The course was developed as a part of Putin’s increasingly active efforts to ideologically indoctrinate younger people through schools and universities. The analysis aims to produce better insights into the ideology of Putinism as well as into how Russians adapt to the regime’s growing ideological pressure.
What makes the issue of ideological indoctrination in Russian education particularly important is the fact that the popularity of Putin and his policies, including the aggression against Ukraine, generally tends to be significantly lower among younger Russians. Thus, the regime’s future depends, among other things, on whether the Kremlin manages to effectively indoctrinate the younger generation.
The study is divided into two major packages. The first is aimed at reconstructing how Putin’s regime describes and explains the fundamentals of its ideology when it explicitly specifies them in teaching materials provided to students and educators involved in the “patriotic upbringing.” The analysis focuses on officially distributed teaching aids, textbooks, and syllabi of the “Fundamentals of Russian Statehood” course. It also contrasts the “textbook version” of Putin’s ideology with its other manifestations that can be traced in Russian political discourse.
The second package seeks to understand how educators involved in teaching ORG interpret the guidelines imposed on them. The research in this respect is based on the analysis of Telegram group chats created for university teachers undergoing training to become ORG lecturers. Additionally, the package explores ORG-related academic articles published in Russian academic journals.
Publications: