| Entrance to the Faculty of Law of St. Petersburg State University. (Ksenia Ivanova for The Washington Post) |
Two weeks before the start of his 25th year as Russia’s supreme political leader, Vladimir Putin made a sweeping proclamation: “Wars are won by teachers.” The remark, which Putin repeated twice during his year-end news conference in December, shed light on a campaign he is waging that has received little attention outside wartime Russia: to imbue the country’s education system with patriotism, purge universities of Western influences, and quash any dissent among professors and students on campuses that are often hotbeds of political activism. At St. Petersburg State University, this meant dismantling a prestigious humanities program called the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences. For more than a decade, until May 2022, the faculty — or college — was led by Alexei Kudrin, a liberal economist and former finance minister who had been a close associate of Putin’s since the early 1990s, when they were deputy mayors together in St. Petersburg. “We had many classes on U.S. history, American political life, democracy and political thought, as well as courses on Russian history and political science, history of U.S.-Russian relations, and even a course titled ‘The ABCs of War: Causes, Effects, Consequences,’” said a student at the faculty, also known as Smolny College. “They are all gone now,” the student said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. In a radical reshaping of Russia’s education system, curriculums are being redrawn to stress patriotism and textbooks rewritten to belittle Ukraine, glorify Russia and whitewash the totalitarian Soviet past. These changes — the most sweeping to schooling in Russia since the 1930s — are a core part of Putin’s effort to harness the war in Ukraine to remaster his country as a regressive, militarized state. Since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, leaders of Russian universities, which are overwhelmingly funded by the state, have zealously adopted the Kremlin’s intolerance of any dissent or self-organization, according to an extensive examination by The Washington Post of events on campuses across Russia, including interviews with students and professors both still in the country and in exile. Professors who spoke out against the war, or allowed safe spaces for students to question it, have been fired. Students who picketed or posted on social media for peace were expelled. Meanwhile, those who volunteer to fight in Ukraine have been celebrated in line with Putin’s promises that war heroes and their descendants will become the new Russian elite, with enhanced social benefits, including special preference for children seeking to enter top academic programs. Normally, such programs require near-perfect grades and high scores on competitive exams — uniform standards that applicants from all societal backgrounds have relied on for decades. And the most fundamental precept of academic life — the freedom to think independently, to challenge conventional assumptions and pursue new, bold ideas — has been eroded by edicts that classrooms become echo chambers of the authoritarian nativism and historical distortions that Putin uses to justify his war and his will. As a result, a system of higher learning that once was a beacon for students across the developing world is now shutting itself off from peer academies in the West, severing one of the few ties that had survived years of political turbulence. Freedom of thought is being trampled, if not eradicated. Eminent scholars have fled for positions abroad, while others said in interviews that they are planning to do so. |
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Students from the youth organization “Young Army Cadets National Movement” visit the Victory Museum in Moscow, which is devoted to World War II. (Nanna Heitmann/Magnum Photos for The Washington Post) |
At the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow, officials last July created the Ivan Ilyin Higher Political School, which is now being led by Alexander Dugin, a fervent pro-Putin and Orthodox Christian ideologue who was tasked with “revising domestic scientific and educational paradigms and bringing them into line with our traditional Russian spiritual and moral values.” “There has been a catastrophic degradation in Western humanitarian history,” Dugin said at a January seminar on transforming Russian humanities education. “This is evidenced by gender problems, postmodernism and ultraliberalism. We can study the West, but not as the ultimate universal truth. We need to focus on our own Russian development model.” Last month, students pushed an online petition to protest the naming of the school after Ilyin, a philosopher who defended Hitler and Mussolini in World War II and advocated for the return of czarist autocracy in Russia. In a statement to Tass, the state-controlled news service, the university denounced the petition as “part of the information war of the West and its supporters against Russia” and asserted, without providing evidence, that the group behind it had no connection to students at the school. Programs specializing in the liberal arts and sciences are primary targets because they are viewed as breeding grounds for dissent. Major universities have cut the hours spent studying Western governments, human rights and international law, and even the English language. “We were destroyed,” said Denis Skopin, a philosophy professor at Smolny College who was fired for criticizing the war. “Because the last thing people who run universities need are unreliable actors who do the ‘wrong’ thing, think in a different way, and teach their students to do the same.” This story is part of a new series “Russia, Remastered,” which reveals how Vladimir Putin is harnessing the war in Ukraine to transform his own country and fulfill his vision of a restored superpower. More stories will be published in the coming days: |
| French President Emmanuel Macron and Chinese President Xi Jinping participate in the official welcoming ceremony at Les Invalides in Paris on Monday. (Yoan Valat/AP) |
Xi and his wife Peng Liyuan visit a restaurant at the Tourmalet Pass in the Pyrenees mountains, France, on Tuesday. (Aurelien Morissard/Pool/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock) |
Making his first trip to Europe since before the pandemic, Chinese President Xi Jinping in France was treated to a state banquet at the Élysée Palace on Monday and then visited the French president’s favorite childhood vacation spot the next day. In Europe, Xi faces a continent that has grown more skeptical of Beijing since his last visit five years ago — although generally not as skeptical as the United States, our colleagues Ellen Francis, Emily Rauhala and Vic Chiang write. |
| • Vladimir Putin swore the oath of allegiance on Russia’s constitution at his inauguration for a fifth term as president on Tuesday. The traditional pomp and ceremony conveyed his might as Russia’s supreme, uncontested leader for the past quarter-century. Bristling with optimism about his ongoing war against Ukraine, Putin, 71, declared he would place Russia’s security above all else and promised that the country would be victorious. • The Biden administration is delaying the sale of at least two arms shipments to Israel amid mounting concern about the country’s plan to expand a military operation in southern Gaza that could dramatically increase the conflict’s death toll, said four people familiar with the matter. The White House and State Department declined to explain the decision, but it is the first known instance of a delay in U.S. arms transfers since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack. One U.S. official described the move as a “shot across the bow” intended to underscore to Israeli leaders the seriousness of the United States' concerns. • Ukrainian authorities said they arrested two officers in the agency responsible for protecting senior government leaders and accused them of developing a plot to assassinate President Volodymyr Zelensky and other top Ukrainian officials — as a “gift” to Russian President Vladimir Putin for his inauguration. |
| By Devlin Barrett, Tom Jackman, Shayna Jacobs and Marianne LeVine | | |
By Melina Mara, Scott Dance and Brianna Sacks | | |
By Marianna Sotomayor, Leigh Ann Caldwell and Mariana Alfaro | | |
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| By Kenneth Roth | Foreign Policy | | |
By Eden Fineday | The Washington Post | | |
By Andy Mukherjee | Bloomberg | | |
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JERUSALEM — Israeli forces seized control of the Rafah border crossing in the southern Gaza Strip on Tuesday, shutting down the flow of aid and sending thousands of civilians fleeing as they opened a new front in the months-long war to eradicate Hamas from the territory. In a statement, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it had gained “operational control” of the Palestinian side of the crossing as part of a “precise counterterrorism operation” in Rafah, which shares a border with Egypt. The incursion Tuesday appeared limited, falling short of the large-scale ground offensive Israel has threatened in Rafah. But it also shut down the crossing, a key entry point for aid to southern Gaza, triggering immediate concern over the delivery of food, fuel and other supplies to Palestinians displaced by the war. The operation to take the Rafah crossing came less than 24 hours after the IDF dropped leaflets over the city ordering roughly 100,000 civilians to leave large parts of it. The United States has urged Israel not to carry out an offensive in Rafah without a “credible” plan to evacuate civilians. The Egyptian Foreign Ministry described the incursion as a “dangerous escalation” that was threatening the cease-fire effort and endangering the lives of the million Palestinians who depend on the crossing for humanitarian aid and a “safe way out for the injured and patients to get treatment.” Cairo has specifically warned against any Israeli move to secure the no man’s land between Gaza and Egypt, known as the Philadelphi Corridor, a nine-mile-long stretch that Israel controlled before it withdrew from the area in 2005. |
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“Safety is from God only. The Israelis announced the blocks that they will enter. I am currently next to those areas, so when our turn comes, we will have to leave — if we are still alive by then," Mohamed Khaled, 22, told The Post. “We can’t find anywhere to go now. There is no place left. People are being scattered around, each leaving in a direction. Constant bombardment, I swear. It is not easy to leave. Transportation is extremely expensive for us. I pray tomorrow I could find a place to go to.” Mohamed, 32, currently living in Rafah, said: “I am originally from Gaza City and was forcibly displaced three times inside Gaza. One time, I was at my sister’s home and there was an airstrike. My mother and I were injured, and my sister and her husband were too. Then we moved to al-Shifa Hospital, but there were strikes too, so we left to the central city of Deir al-Balah, but that was evacuated, so we came to Rafah, where they bombed again, and now we are at Mawasi." – Loveday Morris, Heba Farouk Mahfouz, Claire Parker and Shira Rubin Read more: Israeli troops seize Rafah border crossing, imperiling Gaza aid |
|  (Martin Meissner/AP)
By Elliot Smilowitz |
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