Putin’s Russia – Educated for War: How the Regime Militarized Society and Rewrote History?

How did an unremarkable KGB officer become one of the most powerful and controversial leaders in the world? In this special series of the 4 Minutes podcast, we closely follow Vladimir Putin’s rise to power – from his childhood in Soviet Leningrad to his intelligence career and the key moments of his rule that reshaped Russia and the world. What events shaped his policies? What are the roots of the current conflict? And what does the future hold for Russia?

Join us for this compelling series and understand how Putin’s Russia came to be. 🎙️

Transcript

Welcome to another episode of our series Putin’s Russia. In this installment, we focus on a process that was long underestimated—not only in the West, but even within Russia itself. We're talking about the slow, systematic militarization of Russian society and the state-led rewriting of history. It’s not just about school textbooks, but about an entire system of influence—through media, pop culture, and youth organizations—all designed to shape a “new Russian citizen”: loyal, strong, obedient, and ready to die for the motherland.

From the start of his presidency, Vladimir Putin understood that control over the past means control over the future. In 2021, he signed a law banning the “defamation of the memory” of the Soviet Union during World War II—which effectively criminalized any mention of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the invasion of Poland, or the Katyn massacre. In today’s Russia, history is not told as it happened—it’s told in the way the regime needs it to be told.

In recent years, Russian schools have undergone major changes. History textbooks have been rewritten to glorify state power and Russia’s role as the “liberator of the world from fascism.” Soviet repression, gulags, and man-made famines are either downplayed or completely omitted. Since September 2023, patriotic education has been made mandatory in all schools. Students watch videos about military glory, learn the national anthem, practice saluting, and in some regions, even receive basic firearms training.

A shocking example is the youth organization Yunarmiya—Putin’s version of the Soviet Pioneers. It has over a million members aged eight to eighteen. They wear uniforms, take oaths, march in parades, and learn to shoot. On its official website, the organization proudly declares: “We are raising defenders of the homeland”—and this mission is meant quite literally. In some regions, participation is mandatory; in others, students are “encouraged” with incentives like easier university admissions.

The regime doesn’t focus only on children. It targets the adult population too. Russian television runs a constant campaign in which any dissent is framed as treason, and any foreign opinion as an “attack on Russian values.” Popular TV shows, talk shows, and even commercials are saturated with military symbolism, glorification of the army, and a binary worldview: us versus them. Teachers who express dissent are fired. Independent journalists vanish. And the internet—once a haven for free thought—is increasingly censored.

The Kremlin has also turned the “fight against Nazism” into a universal justification for any military action. When Russian troops invaded Ukraine in 2022, the operation was presented to the public as a campaign of “denazification”—despite Ukraine having a Jewish president and no active Nazi movement. But this narrative fit perfectly into years of propaganda that had painted the West and Ukraine as threats, and Russia as the defender of truth and justice.

The West largely failed to notice this trend. Many analysts saw Putin as a pragmatic autocrat—not a messianic leader preparing his country for a long civilizational conflict. Yet as early as 2015, Russian textbooks were already revised to emphasize NATO as a threat and to promote military strength as a national value. Posters in schools carried slogans like “The Army is our pride” and “Defense is an honor.” On Russian TikTok, videos circulated showing young girls in uniform reciting patriotic poems about Putin, while boys practiced with rifles.

Today, Russian society lives in a world where war is not an exception—it is the norm. Children are raised to believe that heroism means dying on the battlefield. Women who have lost their sons are publicly honored as “mothers of heroes.” And anyone who questions the war is silenced, prosecuted, or forced into exile. The regime built the ideological foundation for war long before the first shot was fired.

In our next episode, we’ll examine the moment when all this preparation turned into action—the day the Russian army crossed the border and launched the biggest military conflict in Europe since World War II.
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Thank you for listening—we’ll be back next time with more of Putin’s Russia.