Patriotic education rising in Russia
Moscow (AsiaNews) – As Russia’s patriotic fervour grows, support for the military and the desire to join the Armed Forces are reaching new heights, deepening the militarisation of Russian society.
Russia’s Defence Ministry has recently indicated that the number of applications to join the nation’s military schools and academies has doubled over the past year. Currently, only one candidate in six is being accepted, a trend that applies to both men and women.
Militarisation in Russia begins long before young people go to college, this according to a recent feature report by Meduza, an online Russian language newspaper and news aggregator.
Increasingly, Russian parents are sending their children to military-patriotic clubs, which prepare them for military service, and teach them to love the motherland and be ready to fight with different types of weapons to defend it.
A special Russian government programme established in 2010 oversees the military-patriotic education of the population (a concept that grew fast in the wake of the Ukraine conflict). At present, the Defence Ministry is preparing a new plan for 2016-2020.
The goal is ambitious, namely to make citizens feel greater responsibility for the fate of their country, prepare them to defend it, increase interest in the nation’s history and make them proud of the heroes of Russia’s past. The programme’s specific goals include boosting by 10 per cent military recruitment, starting with the very young.
Under the programme, the State plans to instil in children aged 1 to 6 spiritual values based “on love, kindness, work, friendship, honesty and understanding of the motherland”. Military-oriented patriotic and sports clubs are its key component because their goal is to enhance the prestige and popularity of the armed forces.
Some patriotic clubs are connected to the Church, and stress religious values. One of these is the ‘Orthodox Patriotic Club of Saint Spyridon,’ which was set up in 2010 in the cathedral of the city of Lomonosov, just outside St. Petersburg.
Here, children are taught a mix of martial arts, weapons handling, and survival skills. The aim is to prepare them to serve in the military and "introduce them to the Church, through sport and the strengthening of Orthodoxy."
Such organisations are directly funded by the Moscow Patriarchate, which gets about US$ 35 million from the State each year to organise activities that promote traditional spiritual values and patriotism among adults and children alike.
According to Meduza, about a hundred of such clubs have been formally registered, but there could be many more. And the State funds these bodies.
For this year, some 12 patriotic programmes are planned for a total cost of US$ 2.95 million. If the patriotic education programme for 2016-2020 is approved, that figure will jump to 1.68 billion roubles for the whole period (more than US$ 29 million), an increase of almost 10 per cent.
.png)
