Officials Say Mordvin School Closed for Safety Reasons but Local People Blame This Move on Kremlin’s Need to Find Money for Putin’s War

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 24 – Russian authorities have closed the only school in a region within Moldova where Shoksha is used as the language of instruction. Officials say the school had to be closed because it was unsafe, but local residents think that it was shuttered as part of Moscow’s effort to find more money for Putin’s war and that officials will steal any savings anyway.

            Parents say that the school is quite safe ad that they view it as a place where their children can go without risk, and they thus suspect that it has been closed to find money for Putin’s war, to line the pockets of corrupt officials, or as part of an effort to destroy their small language community (okno.group/school-mordovia/).

            Russian officials group the three nationalities of the republic, the Moksha, the Erzya, and the Shoksha, who speak a mixture of the other two and number only about 10,000, into a single Mordvin nation. But the Moksha and Erzya have become increasingly active, and now the Shoksha are doing so as well, at least in part due to Russian plans to close this schools.

            (On the ethnic mix in Mordvinia and the ways in which this has changed both as a result of local activism and Moscow calculations in recent years as the population balance between the Mordvins and Russians has changed, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/04/moscow-increases-repression-of-erzya.html and the sources cited therein.)

            The Shoksha apparently thought they had protected the school by renaming it for one of their number who fought and died in Putin’s war in Ukraine; but the decision to close the school and forces pupils now there to travel to a neighboring district center shows they miscalculated, something that has further fueled their anger and their fears about the future.

            Anger because this small non-Russian nationality sent its sons to fight for Moscow in Ukraine and is being rewarded with this slap in the face; and fears about the future because without such a native language school, the prospects for the survival of this numerically small nationality are anything but good.