Yelizaveta Antonova leaves the journalism college at St. Petersburg State University. She believes a protest of an attack on a reporter cost her a spot in graduate school. 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.”
“Russia, Remastered” examines how Vladimir Putin, stoking conflict with the West and risking a new world war, is harnessing his invasion of Ukraine to transform Russia and fulfill his revanchist vision of a restored superpower.to belittle Ukraine, glorify Russia and whitewash the totalitarian Soviet past.
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.
At times, people in Russia are afraid to speak with journalists or to say things that they worry could provoke the authorities. Many people in Russia avoid speaking in public about politics or the war in Ukraine, fearing they could be reported to the authoritiesFor these reasons, The Post agreed to withhold the identities of some people interviewed who expressed concerns about their safety.
Natalia Abbakumova has been a researcher and translator in The Post’s Moscow bureau since 2001, collaborating during that time with 10 bureau chiefs. Previously, she worked briefly for The Economist. She holds a degree in foreign languages from Moscow Linguistic University.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.
Like other aspects of Putin’s remastering of Russia — such as patriotic mandates in the arts and the redrawing of the role of women to focus on childbearing — the shift in education started well before the invasion of Ukraine. In 2021, Russia ended a more than 20-year-old exchange program between Smolny College and Bard College in New York state by designating the private American liberal arts school an “undesirable” organization.