This paper examines how Russian history textbooks reuse the “Great Patriotic War” (GPW) as a national myth to frame the “Special Military Operation” (SMO) and channel students’ sense of “us” and “them” in line with the state's interpretation of duty and moral obligations. Focusing on the unified grade-10/11 textbook set edited by Vladimir Medinsky and Anatoly Torkunov, we build parallel corpora of the GPW and SMO chapters and analyse keywords, collocations, and agency patterns. Drawing on critical discourse concepts of ideological square and social-actor representation of the in-/out-group, we show how naming practices, the grammatical encoding of agency/responsibility, and justificatory topoi project GPW frames onto the present war. The objectives of the contribution are twofold: (1) analytically, to provide a corpus-based account of how the state-aligned national myth of the “Great Patriotic War” is mobilized to script the “Special Military Operation”; and (2) methodologically, to demonstrate a replicable toolkit based on corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS), that operationalizes war-myth transfer via measurable elements (keywords, collocations, n-grams, voice/agency profiles). As a result, we contribute to ongoing debates on memory politics and the manipulation of collective remembering in Putin’s Russia by showing how the canonical war and victory myths are repackaged in school textbooks to justify the war against Ukraine in educational discourse.

My research focuses on the representation of the war of Russia against Ukraine in Russia’s state-sponsored memory and history museums. In these institutions, the “official memory” of the Second World War is politicized and instrumentalized as a central tool to consolidate national unity around the current regime and its foreign and domestic policies. Rooted in the Soviet myth of the heroic victory—portrayed as sacred and untouchable—the official narrative of the Second World War is legally protected and reinforced through mass media, state-sponsored cultural production, and “patriotic education.” While seemingly selective and monolithic, this narrative remains adaptable to the current geopolitical and domestic contexts. Former allies are reassigned new roles, and interpretations of historical events are reconfigured to construct parallels between past and present wars. In the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the “collective memory” of the Second World War has been mobilized to justify current aggression. Significant resources continue to be dedicated toward explaining the ongoing war to the general public, underscoring the necessity of state-sanctioned narratives for legitimizing the present war. Consequently, museums across Russia have been developing temporary and permanent exhibitions narrating the war against Ukraine, including dedicated displays integrated into permanent collections and mobile exhibitions touring the country. I visited several museums in Russia—in Moscow and other cities—at the beginning of 2025. The theoretical foundation includes a comprehensive exhibition analysis framework based on Moser’s methodology, which examines museum contextualization within socio- political environments, embedded power relations, and object selection and presentation techniques. This is complemented by an analysis of narrative structures informed by Mieke Bal’s narratological approach, focusing on how narratives are constructed and conveyed through museum objects. Additionally, semiotic approaches to objects and presentation strategies, inspired by Scholze, offer tools to interpret how meaning is produced and communicated through museum displays. Preliminary results reveal a collapse of temporal and narrative boundaries, as state discourse frames the war in Ukraine as a direct continuation of the fight against fascism in the Second World War. Accordingly, the heroic narrative of the Soviet Union’s WWII experience provides the foundational framework for narrating the current conflict, with an intensified heroic and evaluative tone. Furthermore, within this rhetorical framework, decolonial discourse is co-opted and inverted—transforming Russian imperial aggression into a purported struggle against the West’s colonial politics. Simultaneously, ethnic diversity is instrumentalized to project an image of national unity supporting the regime’s policies.

The contribution focuses on some pivotal elements of educational discourse in Russia following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Thus, the research examines evidence of systemic indoctrination as it is discursively articulated within the mandatory Russian university discipline “The Foundations of Russian Statehood.” Employing normative ethics and critical discourse analysis, it investigates how narratives of collective identity unfold in two central textbooks for this course. Through an analysis of collective identity as a tool of political control and an instrument for producing ideological homogeneity, it is demonstrated how “The Foundations of Russian Statehood” can be assessed against the criteria of indoctrination. The contribution places particular emphasis on the distinction between legal authority and epistemic authority, and on the ways in which “The Foundations of Russian Statehood” aims to overturn this distinction and limit the moral agency and autonomy of students and teachers.

This paper examines how references to history are employed for ideological indoctrination in Russian educational settings. The issue of ideological indoctrination in Russia is particularly significant, given that support for Putin’s policies, including the war against Ukraine, is noticeably lower among younger Russians. Consequently, the future of the Putin regime depends, to a significant extent, on its ability to effectively indoctrinate young people, and the Kremlin is noticeably preoccupied with winning over Russia’s youth. Moreover, it has especially ramped up its indoctrination efforts after 2022. In particular, it was during this period that the school course “Conversations About Important Things” and the university course “Fundamentals of Russian Statehood” were introduced into the Russian education system. The explicitly declared intention of the courses is to propagate “patriotism”, “civic-mindedness”, and “traditional family values” among young Russians. This paper draws on a multimodal discourse analysis of “Conversations About Important Things” and “Fundamentals of Russian Statehood” to examine how verbal, audial, and visual elements in their teaching materials help propagate the Kremlin’s ideological message and reconstruct the essence of that message. The analysis includes teaching guidelines, lesson plans, multimedia presentations, videos, and supplementary resources provided to teachers. It demonstrates that the two ideological courses often use history to promote statism, militarism, and self-sacrificial heroism. They also seek to instill national pride and national victimhood and construct national continuity. To this end, the materials combine images of military heroism from fictional, historical, and contemporary domains to frame national history as a series of glorious military victories. They present the county’s heroic past as a truth that must be protected. The state is depicted as a core value, and national history is told largely as a history of saving, preserving, and strengthening the state. The courses also employ a broad notion of “serving the Fatherland” to conflate militarist and non-militarist concepts of heroism.