Digital Authoritarianism in the Classroom: Wartime Propaganda Through Social Media in Russian Schools

Since the launch of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin has intensified the digitalization of authoritarian governance, embedding wartime ideology into multiple layers of public life. One of the most significant yet understudied vectors of this transformation is the militarization of education. This paper examines how Russian schools, kindergartens, and universities have been mobilized as channels of digital authoritarian messaging, focusing on the production and dissemination of propaganda through their official social media accounts on VKontakte—the state-favoured platform and a key component of Russia’s digital governance infrastructure. The study builds on my earlier data-driven investigations (Novaya Gazeta Europe, 2023; 2025), which documented emerging patterns of wartime socialization: glorification of military violence, ritualization of support for the “Special Military Operation” (SVO), expansion of paramilitary training for children, and the proliferation of ideological rituals such as “Hero’s Desk” or SVO-themed school assemblies. While these journalistic findings revealed the existence of widespread state pressure on educators, they could not map the structural mechanisms or national variations. This research addresses that gap by constructing a large-scale computational dataset and tracing how authoritarian narratives are digitally imposed across the Russian educational system. The dataset comprises posts from approximately 45,000 verified institutional VK accounts representing kindergartens, primary and secondary schools, colleges, and universities across all Russian regions. Covering the period from February 2022 to the present, it includes several million messages published during wartime. A multi-stage analytical pipeline combines automated data extraction through the VK API, extensive preprocessing, BERTopic-based unsupervised topic modelling, and LLM-assisted hierarchical classification. The coding schema captures multiple propaganda modalities: SVO-specific messaging (“support our soldiers,” front-line glorification), militarized patriotic content (drills, weapons training, cadet activities), mandatory ideological lessons (“Conversations about Important Things”), recruitment-adjacent initiatives, and memorialisation of fallen servicemen in educational spaces. Qualitative semi-structured interviews with teachers, parents, and students (N≈15) complement the computational analysis and illuminate the lived experience of participating in or resisting state ideological directives. Preliminary findings show a rapid and coordinated escalation of militarized discourse in the months following the invasion. Propaganda is most intense in border regions and in areas where recruitment centres heavily target local populations. Messaging shifts linguistically from “traditional patriotism” to explicit legitimation of the SVO and normalization of military violence, often directed at very young children. In many schools, administrators treat VK posts as bureaucratic proof of ideological compliance, turning digital platforms into instruments of vertical control. Educators describe being placed under pressure to stage ideologically charged events, document them online, and reproduce centrally defined narratives. This study contributes to scholarship on digital authoritarianism by demonstrating how Russia fuses online ideological governance with offline educational institutions to produce wartime loyalty. It argues that state-managed social media accounts function simultaneously as propaganda channels, surveillance instruments, and bureaucratic performance spaces. By revealing the infrastructural logic of this hybrid digital–physical authoritarian apparatus, the study highlights how authoritarian regimes in the Global East increasingly use institutional digital communication to shape political subjectivities from early childhood.