In Russia’s classrooms, a new form of political indoctrination is taking shape, with students increasingly exposed to state-sponsored propaganda aimed at shaping their political views and encouraging them to report “opposition-minded” peers to authorities.

An animated video shown across Russian educational institutions presents students with a scenario involving a new classmate named Stas who supports opposition politics and invites peers to an unauthorized rally. The video’s only acceptable conclusion? Report Stas to the police.

This represents just one example of an extensive propaganda apparatus that has accelerated since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, according to Pavel Talankin, a former social educator from the Chelyabinsk region who co-created the documentary “Mr. Nobody vs. Putin,” which examines the militarization of Russia’s education system.

“The documents came down to us from all sorts of organizations — not just the Education and Enlightenment Ministries, but also the Distance Learning System, the Ministry of Social Relations, and Rosmolodezh,” Talankin explained. “About 50 manuals a month. If some agency urgently needed to stage a patriotic event to meet its reporting quota, they made us organize it.”

Talankin’s school was among the early testing grounds for these new propaganda techniques, implementing political lessons even before the nationwide introduction of “Conversations About Important Things,” a program now standardized across Russian schools.

The effectiveness of these methods on young minds concerns educators like Talankin, who witnessed a lesson titled “Hero of Today” for fourth-grade students. What began as a discussion about everyday heroism—helping elderly pedestrians or caring for animals—pivoted abruptly to President Vladimir Putin’s supposed respect for nature and older generations. By the lesson’s end, most students identified Putin as their national hero.

While the Russian Ministry of Education develops much of this material, numerous regional and municipal departments contribute their own propaganda manuals. Despite their varied sources, all follow narratives established by the Kremlin, with definitions of “extremism,” “terrorism,” and “destructive movements” evolving to match the regime’s current political needs.

The expanding scope of what constitutes “dangerous ideology” in these educational materials reveals a troubling pattern. A 2013 “Comprehensive Plan to Counter the Ideology of Terrorism,” created by the FSB-controlled National Antiterrorism Committee, initially focused on radical Islam. By 2024, this definition had expanded dramatically to include “Ukrainian nationalism and neo-Nazism,” “mass-murder subcultures,” and various ideas allegedly promoted by “terrorist organizations.”

The plan now recommends preventive measures for teenagers who previously lived in Ukrainian-controlled territories and migrants—groups viewed with increasing suspicion by Russian authorities.

Following Russia’s 2023 anti-LGBTQ legislation, the Federal Institute for Education Quality Assessment (FIOKO) classified as “destructive youth behavior” what it termed “abnormal sexual urges,” “distorted gender-role identification,” “professional begging,” “shocking body modifications,” “freak style,” and participation in “marginal subcultures.”

The ideological targeting continues to expand in bewildering directions. A 2022 manual from the Saratov Law Academy simultaneously categorized as “radicals” groups as diverse as Male State, radical feminists, Antifa, hippies, and skinheads. It described the childfree movement as “potentially destructive,” while labeling TikTok users, anime enthusiasts, vaccination skeptics, and “Slavic neo-pagans” as “destructively passive.”

University students face similar scrutiny. Recommendations published in 2023 for identifying “adherents of radical ideologies” claimed that Ukrainian military units were recruiting Russian youth. The expanding list of “radicals” now includes anarchists, neo-Trotskyists, “ultra-radical feminists” and, paradoxically, “supporters of radical patriarchy.”

This comprehensive effort to police thought and encourage informant behavior among Russia’s youth signals a troubling return to Soviet-era ideological control, now updated with modern enemies and digital-age techniques—a development with profound implications for Russia’s next generation and their relationship with the wider world.