Russians Don’t Know Their Own Country and Plans for New School Subject about It Won’t Help, Yury Dolgoruky Telegram Channel Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Jan. 31 – Moscow is returning to the school curriculum in Russia of a 34-hour course on the Foundations of the Spiritual and Moral Culture of the Peoples of Russia in order to overcome a rising tide of inter-ethnic tension. The motivation is fine, the Yury Dolgoruky telegram channel says; but the problem is far larger and has more consequences.
    The broader problem that the country needs to address is that Russians know far too little about their country and about the other peoples who live in it; and addressing that requires a far larger effort than any single course can provide (t.me/s/yuradolgoruk reproduced at rosbalt.ru/news/2025-01-31/telegram-kanal-yuriy-dolgorukiy-my-ne-znaem-svoyu-stranu-5312683).
    The author of the telegram channel says that in his experience, “people living in Astrakhan have little idea about the geography of Siberia, confusing it with the Far Eas; people in Omsk want to know whether one must get a visa to visit North Ossetia; and those in the Urals believe that Stavropol is located somewhere on the border with Central Asia.”
    Those are “real cases” from his personal experience, he continues; and they show that “we don’t know our country, a longstanding and systemic problem that isn’t going to be solved solely within the framework of relieving inter-ethnic tensions because the origins of this problem are far deeper and the consequences far more serious.”
    Indeed, reducing the issue of knowledge about the country to the question of how its peoples relate to one another can have the effect of both addressing those problems and acquiring more knowledge about Russia as such, exactly the opposite effects that those behind this new program say they seek.