Journal of International Social Studies, v. 12, n. 1, 2022, p. 1 Corresponding author: rapoport@purdue.edu ©2012/2023 National Council for Social Studies International Assembly http://www.iajiss.org ISSN: 2327-3585 Page 1 From the Editor: My Twitter feed these days is a mixture of pictures: horrible scenes of death and destruction from Ukraine’s Bucha, Mariupol, or Odessa, where my family must hide in shelters during hours-long air-raids; horrible scenes of Russian police forcibly dissolving crowds in St. Petersburg, where my friends and former colleagues protest against Putin’s war; and no-less-horrible scenes from some Russian schools, where teachers have students draw the letter Z, a new Russian swastika, and recite poems glorifying the war in the neighboring country. Or this one: A 55-year-old teacher from the Russian city of Penza was detained by police after two students recorded her and turned her in for making anti-war comments; she faces 10 years of prison time. This is what happens when civic/citizenship education is substituted with brainwashing and the militarization of consciousness. For more than two decades, one of the foci of the Russian government has been military propaganda and mass mobilization campaigns thinly disguised as patriotic “education.” In 2001, Putin’s government passed a state program, Patriotic Education of Citizens of the Russian Federation, which has been renewed several times. Using Soviet-era terminology, the 2003 Conception of Patriotic Education pointed out that military-patriotic education, the purpose of which is preparation for military service, is an inseparable part of patriotic education. This was followed by attacks on history education and successful attempts to cleanse national history that turned it into a powerful ideological tool. In June 2007, Vladimir Putin condemned the history textbooks, accusing them of falsifying history. He called texts about World War II that included criticism of the political or military actions of the USSR inadmissible and insulting. The mythology preservation campaign logically continued in May 2009, when a presidential commission “to oppose attempts to falsify history to the detriment of Russia’s history” was formed. As a result, only a couple of officially approved history textbooks with similar uncritical and glorifying interpretations of historical events are allowed to be used in schools. What happened to history education and citizenship education in Russia should be a lesson to everyone. And a reminder to those who forgot – on November 2, 2020, on the eve of Election Day, Donald Trump signed an executive order that created a commission to promote patriotic “education” to combat critical views of American history. Sapienti sat! Anatoli Rapoport mailto:rapoport@purdue.edu http://www.iajiss.org/ Journal of International Social Studies, v. 12, n. 1, 2022, p. 1 Corresponding author: rapoport@purdue.edu ©2012/2023 National Council for Social Studies International Assembly http://www.iajiss.org ISSN: 2327-3585 Page 2 Editor mailto:rapoport@purdue.edu http://www.iajiss.org/