Teachers at a May Day demonstration in St Petersburg. Photo (c) “Teacher” Inter-regional trade union of education workers. All rights reserved.While some teachers in Russia are involved in falsifying election results and excusing corruption, others picket government agencies, get together to form independent trade unions and tell their pupils about how to behave when they are arrested.
Since the 26 March protests, teachers and admin staff at some Russian schools and universities have started running awareness-raising sessions with their students. Mostly they tell them about the opposition rallies (funded, naturally, by the west) and the danger facing Russia from the US State Department, although sometimes they also harass students who dare to disagree with them. Videos appear regularly on social media, showing teachers trying to convince their school or university students that Russia’s endemic corruption is perfectly normal and that they should respect their country’s rulers. The Ministry of Education and Science claims that teachers hold these pseudo-patriotic chats on their own initiative, without any orders from above.
The result of these political education lessons is that teachers as a group have, not surprisingly, come under fire from the public, accused of “servility and amorality” – despite the fact that many of them have been at opposition rallies themselves.
