During the full-scale war against Ukraine, the Russian authorities sharply increased spending on the patriotic education of children. In 2025, they planned to allocate more than 66 billion rubles for these purposes, about 20 times more than in the last pre-war year. Separately, more than 20 billion rubles in budget funding was earmarked for the Movement of the First, created in 2022.
As Novaya Gazeta Europe notes, state influence extends far beyond the classroom. A significant part of the environment in which an ordinary schoolchild lives, from textbooks and technical clubs to social networks, video platforms, and cinema, is linked to structures affiliated with people from Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.
The Prosveshcheniye publishing house dominates the school textbook market, accounting for 82% of the segment in 2020. A quarter of the company belongs to a fund managed by Fin-Partner, whose ties to Arkady Rotenberg had been detailed by the outlet earlier. The remaining stakes are held by VEB, Sber, and the Russian Direct Investment Fund.
Hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren are involved in science and engineering clubs where they are given technical tasks often connected to military technologies. The assignments for these clubs and competitions are prepared by Rostec and its subsidiaries headed by Sergei Chemezov. According to the outlet, some of the children’s developments are later used in military production, and winners of Olympiads are invited to continue cooperating with the state corporation.
A large share of schoolchildren’s media consumption, Novaya Gazeta Europe writes, is controlled by structures linked to Yury Kovalchuk: VK, National Media Group, and Gazprom-Media. Through them run school chats, popular social networks, blogger content, film distribution, television channels, and streaming services. Among older students, the share of VK users, according to the figures cited in the article, reaches 96-99%.