In the context of closed statistics, officials increasingly confuse data consumers, especially on the eve of September 1. In an interview with Russian television, Minister of Education Sergey Kravtsov stated that «in general, about 1,700 new schools have been built by September 1, 43 schools will open, and we are over-fulfilling the president's order. 1,300 schools — the president set the task — we have over-fulfilled and introduced about a million new places». You don't have to be a statistician to calculate — out of 1,700 built schools, 1,657 have NOT opened. Accordingly, the question: «a million new places» — is also a virtual figure that has not «opened»?
The hardships and deprivations of Minister Kravtsov
And are there enough students for this «million places», and in which regions? Are there enough teachers for this million students? Parental stories are passed from mouth to mouth. A physicist resigned from the school — and for a whole year this subject was not taught (this is Moscow!). An IT teacher and a historian went to the SVO from the school — and did not return, they were killed. It will be easier with foreign language teachers — the number of hours of teaching them is decreasing, why does an isolating state need any European languages — Russian is enough to follow commands. There is no less reporting for teachers, and in general their main task is to get rid of students and parents so that there are no scandals, and everyone attends the flag-raising and «Conversations about the Important», and the rest does not matter.
According to the same Ministry of Education, at the beginning of the last, 2024–2025 academic year, 18,287 vacancies remained unfilled in schools, that is, 1.75% of the total number of teachers. If the ministry works with these figures the same way as with the data on built schools, this indicator is probably understated several times. In rural schools — this was personally referred to by the Speaker of the State Duma in the spring of 2025 based on data from the Accounts Chamber — the teacher shortage reaches 30% (and rural doctors — about 50%). It is characteristic that leading workers complain about unsolvable problems for decades to themselves. So maybe something should be «fixed in the conservatory», for example, return these young teachers and doctors from the trenches so that they work for life, and not turn into «the salt of the Russian earth» in the literal sense?
Of course, there are many questions about the qualifications of the current teaching staff. As well as the content of new subjects — «Family Studies», «Basics of Security and Homeland Defense», «Basics of Spiritual and Moral Culture». Not to mention the history according to Medinsky–Torkunov–Chubaryan, for which the unfortunate Kravtsov already had to answer — he personally went to Chechnya with a corrected version of the textbook. Kadyrov then stated: «... the gross formulations in the address of entire peoples subjected to Stalinist repressions have been removed from the previous edition». But there was no one to protect other social groups, including the liberal intelligentsia, from some amazing conclusions of the authors of the «Short Course». And it is depicted there as a collective enemy of the people, even in the post-Stalin period.
The minister also had to be involved in another hot topic — migrant children and school. Speaker Volodin, who now speaks on all issues of modernity, recently triumphed:
«...The results of enrollment in primary and secondary classes in several regions show a significant reduction in the number of foreign citizens' children admitted to education...»
This means that these children will hang out on the street and then close themselves in ghettos — the consequences for social peace and crime rates are clear. And they could successfully assimilate (which, by the way, was very reasonably noted by the head of Tatarstan, Rustam Minnikhanov) and subsequently become law-abiding citizens and workers. Duma deputies, as always, went even further than their pastor: let, they suggested, no more than one migrant child per class. (You, friends, would better introduce such a quota in domestic football, where there are almost no Russians left in teams funded by state oligarchs.) Kravtsov was forced to approach the problem more technologically: it is necessary, he told the president, to create special classes for migrant children to adapt them to studying in Russia. The idea itself is not entirely meaningless, but where will you find so many Russian language teachers for foreigners from the Central Asian region if you lack Russian language teachers for Russian children?
As soon as Sergey Kravtsov said that no teachers, parents, or children would be forcibly transferred to using the messenger Max, Moscow Deputy Mayor Rakova announced that this process would indeed be universal — within the framework of habitual totalitarian violence. Few people experience joy from interacting with the new technology (although favorable sociology of state services immediately appeared — people approve!) — everyone is used to Telegram and especially WhatsApp (75% of respondents, according to the Levada Center, use this messenger), and here is something incomprehensible.
More precisely, understandable — your portable, round-the-clock «Comrade Major» in your pocket! This thing will be implemented in the education system with difficulty, but persistently.
Photo: Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia for the Kaliningrad Region
There are areas where the Ministry of Education is simply not allowed and probably not even warned about decisions being made. As in the situation when the Prosecutor General's Office declared the Swiss educational system International Baccalaureate an undesirable organization, which included (now it can be written in the past tense) 29 Russian schools, both private and public; many of them with very high ratings. Too good and expensive education, providing opportunities to enter Western universities — these characteristics are completely intolerable for a state that a) isolates itself from the West, b) aims to isolate youth from the West, c) would like to control the minds and souls of young people, and not only with the help of the messenger Max. In the motivational part of the announcement of IB as undesirable, it is stated: «formatting Russian youth according to Western templates».
According to «Western templates», almost all the children of the Russian political-economic elite have already been reformatted, and now the rest can be detached from the process? However, the children of wealthy parents will not have to worry — while the opportunities to send them to study abroad exist. For children who were part of the IB system within state schools, there should also be no problems: they all have licenses, adapted to teaching according to Russian programs. And if the teachers are good, hardly anything, except for the arrival of competent authorities directly to them thanks to the messenger Max, can prevent them from providing children with quality, that is, essentially Western education. Further, the relevant authorities will have to destroy specific schools, as was done in Soviet times, for example, with physics and mathematics school No. 2 on Leninsky Prospekt.
But this is half the trouble, Kravtsov faces a real problem: schools will probably have to widely open doors to new passionate cadres for teaching ideological «spiritual and moral» disciplines, «Conversations about the Important» (now also for kindergartens!), performing songs by recommended composers and singers. That is — returning from the SVO. This, of course, corresponds to the general vector of adaptation of former military personnel, but probably children will also have to adapt to them. If in Soviet times, old military instructors were the subject of jokes and disdain from students, now schools may receive psychologically traumatized and physically strong teachers in their prime. How will parents and children, as well as «civilian» teachers, adapt to this?
However, returning from the trenches and their family members may have other trajectories. They may start studying themselves. But this is already a headache not for the Ministry of Education, but for the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. This is no longer for Sergey Kravtsov, but for Valery Falkov.
Challenges and problems of Minister Falkov
The Putin regime needs soldiers, workers, and engineers. Naum Korzhavin once noted that in the Soviet Union they tried to provide, especially in the technical field, not education, but professional training. This is a very significant difference: an educated person is capable of critical thinking, while a professionally trained technician only adapts to the proposed circumstances. This is intuitively, and perhaps rationally felt by the Kremlin when it emphasizes that teenagers leave school for colleges, that is, vocational schools. There is a wave of optimistic reporting about how many ninth graders decided not to continue regular education. In several regions, including Moscow and St. Petersburg, they give a very attractive benefit for this — they are exempted from two OGE exams.
The state pays for both SVO participants and their children — universities are required to allocate at least 10% of budget places for them. In 2025, almost 3,000 participants in military actions and their children used the quota in 18 of the best universities in Russia. At the same time, 83% of such applicants were admitted without exams or would not have entered on general terms because their scores were below the passing ones.
As for the statistics for the entire higher education system, according to the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, as of mid-August, 28.4 thousand people were enrolled in Russian universities in 2025 under the preferential quota for participants in the special military operation (SVO) and their families — 74.2% more than in 2024. But the quota, despite all the preferences and enrollment of obviously unsustainable applicants, is not filled. Its occupancy was 55.7% of the allocated 50,957 places (in 2024 — 32.3% of 50,496 places). Try, even if you have preferences, to study, for example, at MIPT — studying there is so difficult that it is completely unclear why you should enter there, even if you have all the benefits from Putin.
Recently, the rector of the St. Petersburg Polytechnic University broke through: he called military beneficiaries «an honorably problematic contingent». They pull up laggards, put up with them, are afraid to expel:
«...We try to minimize expulsions. They exist, but they are personal. We cope, raise those who have not fallen behind, teach them. This is our duty...»
The rector of Bauman University spoke in the same spirit, but also politically correctly:
«...Their average score is slightly lower than in the general competition, but overall people compete. They don't need special conditions. They are normal guys. There are difficulties, as with other entrants. The fact that we, as a country, give them the opportunity to enter in a separate competition is what we should do...»
The main thing is that the graduate, without reaching for the stars and not thinking about anything, can forge the technical shield of the regime and be ready to become a worker in the military-industrial complex and related industries — this is how the person of the future is seen in this model.
Important is the transition from 2026 to the Soviet model of specialist training with the abandonment, at least formally, of the Bologna system of bachelor's and master's degrees: such a mechanism should isolate the loyal Putinist entering life from the West and its scientific and educational temptations.
This increases competition among «nerds» — to enter a budget place under such restrictions, you need to be geniuses: it's like with Jewish children before the revolution and in Soviet times — due to segregation, open or latent, only the most talented could break into the higher education system. But the state went further: a bill was submitted to the Duma, according to which military widows will receive «preferential right» to enroll in college or university «under equal conditions». Thus, the military quota is expanding — such a scale of benefits for veterans did not exist after the Great Patriotic War, and in fact, there were none at all. In the late Soviet times, those who served in the army and joined the party, as well as those going under national quotas, also successfully competed with so-called «schoolchildren» and had certain preferences, but not in such an expanded understanding.
The main thing is that all this has a symbolic meaning, but is completely devoid of economic rationality. If the state needs, say, professional technicians, then it needs to include mechanisms for «catching talents», not turning them off. But the barbarization/ideologization of school and higher education is a process that is difficult to stop. However, it is also quite difficult to completely destroy the quality education that Putin's Russia inherited from Yeltsin's Russia, when modern educational structures were sometimes created from scratch, including in cooperation and correlation with the West. So the meaning and content of the key confrontation of the coming years is the struggle of two trends in the formation of human capital. One of them is decapitalization, demodernization, and barbarization, the other is attempts to preserve, sometimes even pointwise, focal, normal educational traditions and the preservation of human capital. On the one hand, time works for decapitalization, since the Putin regime does not intend to leave; on the other hand, for the state to overdo it in this means losing personnel: some will be politically loyal but unqualified, some will leave the country.
That is — as quality universities prepared talented students for export, so they continue to prepare. The state preferred not to create conditions for them to work in the country, retaining only one incentive for technicians — exemption from the army, and began to erode the very foundations of education quality, diluting student masses in increasingly impressive proportions with those who would never have reached higher education on their own. If it weren't for the special operation and the state's battle with the country's human capital.
* Andrey Kolesnikov is considered a «foreign agent» by the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation.