By Murad Rakhimov | 2025-03-06

TASHKENT -- Russian authorities are trying to use "special military operation (SMO) museums" to glorify their invasion of Ukraine.

In the Kremlin's view, the attempted destruction of the Ukrainian people reflects "valor" and "patriotism."

Just a year and a half after the Russian army began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there were already more than 14,000 such museums and expositions in Russia, TASS reported at the end of December 2023.

At that time, 9,000 "military-patriotic clubs" were operating in high schools and about 1,000 were open in colleges.

Virtual and interactive museums

Kremlin propaganda is keeping up with the times.

A Nizhny Novgorod information technology company has created a virtual "SMO museum" -- an online program that can be installed on a computer or used with virtual reality (VR) goggles.

The developers have already sold numerous digital "museums" to Russian schools, universities and youth centers across the country, Reporter NN, a regional news outlet, reported February 7.

About 250 schools have already purchased equipment and software for the interactive museums about the war in Ukraine, according to the creator of the digital museums.

The program reportedly includes more than 120 themed sections, personal stories of soldiers, more than 40 "360-degree video scenes" and more than 50 models of military vehicles.

The entire spectacle's timeline ends with the caption: "Kharkov [Kharkiv] is a Russian city. The enemy will be defeated."

A single interactive museum in Vladimir province rotates among various schools, The Insider reported February 6.

Its "exhibits" include 3D images of weapons and military vehicles, video messages from Russian President Vladimir Putin and articles about supposed Nazism in Ukraine. Children are invited to use VR goggles to look at a destroyed house in Siverskodonetsk or the interior of a captured Ukrainian military vehicle.

The new school initiative is part of systematic brainwashing of Russian citizens "to ensure their loyalty to the Putin regime's aggressive and neo-imperial direction," said Alisher Ilkhamov, director of Central Asia Due Diligence, a think tank in London.

The key aspect of ideology that becomes implanted this way is the scrapping of past understandings and historical meanings, he told Kontur.

"The concept of the 'Russian world' was invented to justify this ideology, which can hardly be called anything other than Nazi in its essence, denying the Ukrainian nation's sovereignty, its right to self-determination," said Ilkhamov.

From Lenin to Putin

Under the Soviet system, patriotic education also featured the "military-" prefix.

Six months after the Bolshevik Revolution, in April 1918, the new regime issued a decree "On compulsory training in the art of war" and introduced pre-conscription training for teenagers aged 15-17.

In 1962 during the post-Stalin thaw, the Kremlin abolished the decree. But under Leonid Brezhnev in 1967, it returned to Soviet schools.

The memory of World War II has experienced similar transformations, said Nigara Khidoyatova, a Uzbek historian and politician who lives in the United States.

At some point, Putin started seeking a way to ground his rule within the story of World War II, she said.

"From that time on, the entire ideological machine began to work on creating the image of an invincible Russia that supposedly fought and defeated German Nazism alone, and is now fighting against 'Nazi' Ukraine," Khidoyatova told Kontur.

In both eras, the Soviet Union and its successor state, Russia, have created such propaganda through falsification and the replacement of facts, events and concepts.

Now the Kremlin is banking on historical memory of World War II.

"The only question is whether the country's population ... will accept that hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers are dying disgracefully in the current war, having been deceived by the Putin regime," said Ilkhamov.

'Lessons in valor'

Kremlin-backed media outlets claim the "SMO museums" arose spontaneously from "grassroots initiatives" both in Moscow and in the ethnic minority-populated internal republics that have suffered the most from the wartime draft, such as Buryatia.

But Putin's instructions to four ministries -- culture, enlightenment (education), defense, and science and higher education -- appeared on the Kremlin website back in September 2023:

"Ensure the creation of museums (provincial, municipal or based on educational organizations) dedicated to the events of the [SMO] and the feats of its participants."

Putin instructed the ministries to consider the possibility of transferring SMO artifacts to the museums.

Kremlin-controlled propaganda outlets frequently cite the so-called "lessons in valor" taught to Russian schoolchildren not by teachers but by veterans of the war in Ukraine.

"SMO participants tell schoolchildren more than what is in history textbooks," TV channel Russia 24 reported in February 2024.

A video recording of an assembly of Volgograd schoolchildren shows a Wagner Group mercenary wearing a Bakhmut Meat Grinder medal.

On February 11, Kindergarten No. 423 in Chelyabinsk hosted an exhibition of weapons and other hardware from the war, organized by the local branch of Putin's United Russia party.

"The boys and girls were able not only to learn a lot of interesting things about grenades and pistols but hold them too," local online publication Pchela enthusiastically wrote in a large photo report from the kindergarten.

One of the most shocking pictures shows a little girl holding a grenade launcher. A veteran of the Ukraine invasion helps her aim the weapon.

'A step towards victory'

Promoting war in kindergartens and schools may seem normal to inhabitants of Russia after their nonstop immersion in the state's messaging since February 2022, said Uzbek journalist Sabohat Rakhmanova.

"Ideas that we call propaganda may not be unusual for them at all," she told Kontur.

Parents, teachers and activists should denounce this ideological effort in schools to exalt the war, Rakhmanova said.

"They should talk about the influence of evil on the course of history and encourage children to reflect on war, and on how war itself represents that evil [influence on history]," she said.

"Combating propaganda with counter-propaganda has always proven to be effective. Making the attempt is already a step towards victory."