I have commented on this one before. Liberals are in ecasties about a ‘film’ produced based on covert recording of Russian schoolchilden by a teacher in Russia, who subsequently ran away.
The basic point to make is this is a dirty school-teacher. By his own admission he secretly abused a role as the school’s videographer to covertly film children in his care. He then ran away, taking the footage with him, and has seemingly used it to set himself up in the West.
I work in a Summer Camp in the UK every year. The whole question around filimg or photographing children is incredibly fraught. Basically – group leaders who accompagny their children are strictly told ‘no filiming or photographing’. The legal position is not 100% clear but a combination of the ‘Safeguarding’ agenda and Data Protection law leads the ICO to recommend always giving parents an opt-out from any filming. There is no sign that Pavel Talankin did that. Indeed the whole narrative (and sales pitch for the film) depends on the idea of covert filming.
Even, outside of the law, anyone who has worked as a teacher knows how disgusting this is and what a violation of trust it is. He is filming the children in sensitive contexts and then using that to further his own career, without their permission, (or their parents’). In the UK he would definitely be sacked, and almost certainly run into troubles with the Council which regulates teachers, the Teaching Regulation Agency, – if not face legal action from the parents. He did nothing especially ‘brave’; he had a role in the school which allowed him to make videos; it wasn’t really covertly filiming at all. In one version of the story he took the material out when he left the country – in the revised version of that story he sent it out to a film director while he was there. Neither entailed much risk. (He could, for example, simply have uploaded the footage to Google Drive, from within Russia and left with nothing incriminating on him. And; even if he did take hard copy materials on a disk out of the country he had the legitimate defence that it was part of his job). There was basically no risk to him. “Extremly brave Mr Talankin” and “at great risk to himself” is a piece of fiction, marketing spin for the resulting film.
So; it is odd, to say the least, to see liberals like the Guardian’s Amelia Gentleman praising him to the skies. How to explain this? The only possible answer is that for Amelia Gentleman Russian children have no rights, do not exist and are, indeed, to be erradicated. I wish that Gentleman could be put in front of a Russian court and have to explain why she thinks Russian children have no rights.
On the question itself. I have been working in Russia (in a private school and in language schools) for the last 5 years. It is 100% true that at least two separate programmes of ‘political indoctrination’ have been brought in. The main one is called ‘Conversations about Important Matters’. I have also been told by students about one called ‘The Spiritual and Moral Foundations of the Russian people’. It is also true that schools are now running special events, where, for example, veterans of the war are invited in to give a talk. There are also a few military events, as mentioned in the article. Is Amelia Gentleman is really going to assert that schools the world over do not ‘indoctrinate’ children in their national values? That, if the UK was at war for 5 years, there would not be lessons ‘explaining’ the war; which, one imagines, would not put the point of view of the other side in much detail? Is she complaining that Russian schools are not teaching children about how their country has “launched an aggressive and unprovoked war” and their President is ‘trying to re-create the Russian Empire”? You can’t move in UK schools these days for all kinds of value indoctrination about ‘British values’. (The actual difference is that these are some kind of synthetic hotchpotch values dreamed up by a bureaucrat in Whitehall without any grounding in society). Schools the world over indoctrinate children in their national values. Get over it. (And stop violating the privacy of Russian children, while you are about it).