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Teachers, de-Ukrainianization and agitprop in Ukraine’s occupied territory

While Ukrainian society generally acknowledges the forthcoming difficulties related to the reintegration of the generation having grown up under Russian occupation, there is little research which explicitly focuses on schooling in these areas. Early in 2022, we interviewed university students and experts under condition of anonymity who had experience in the educational systems of the Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics”. They provide valuable accounts of their memories of schooling and add insightful personal reflection and analysis.

Presuming a Ukrainian victory, when the Russian war against Ukraine comes to an end, Ukraine will face the daunting task of reintegrating the territories currently occupied by Russia. For Crimea and parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, this means undoing a decade’s damage on these regions’ economies, but especially on their social fabrics. Elsewhere, Moscow’s strategy has been to fast-forward the de-Ukrainianization of the occupied territories, epitomized by the vulgar slogan that “Kherson will be Russian forever.”

September 17, 2024 - Eugenia Kuznetsova Michael Gentile - AnalysisIssue 5 2024Magazine

Residents of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic at the celebration of the Day of Russia in 2019. Photo: DmyTo/Shutterstock

In addition to the damage caused by Moscow and its proxies, reintegration will have to confront decades of ideological nihilism and political machine culture. While both rooted in Soviet paternalist politics, post-independence regional power brokers – first under the auspices of the Communist Party, then the Party of Regions, and finally its various post-Maidan incarnations – never came to terms with these problems.

On the contrary, they frequently sought to extract political capital from the floating mythologies surrounding Lenin, the “Great Patriotic War” (the Soviet narrative for the Second World War) or the local blood-tainted icons of communism. In fact, as Ivan Posylnyi observed recently, until 2014, “the glorifying Soviet narrative about Donbas was not erased and no alternative approach to redefining Donbas was suggested in Ukrainian public and education discourses.” With the public space saturated by Soviet war monuments and other communist paraphernalia, the “people’s republics” found fertile ground for their neo-Soviet rhetorical repertoire.

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