A wartime generation of youth molded by Putin’s propaganda

Formerly a child-prodigy powerlifter with little experience in journalism, Naumova has reported from most of the major battles of the war in Ukraine — including, most recently, Kyiv’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, as well as from Mariupol and Bakhmut, two Ukrainian cities that Russian forces nearly demolished and then seized. Her dispatches have focused not on Russia’s military as an invading force but as liberators of Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine.

Since Putin ordered tanks with the letter Z scrawled across them into Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin has drastically expanded its focus on youth — introducing militaristic programs in schools and unleashing a barrage of hyper-patriotic messaging. While thousands of young people have left Russia, those who remain are part of a new generation that is redefining what it means to be Russian and will shape the nation’s outlook for decades. As much as any seizure of Ukrainian territory, experts say, this will be a tangible legacy of Russia’s war.

Kremlin officials have defended their policies on youth, education and culture as reflecting the demands of Russian society. Putin often speaks about the importance of Russia’s youth and shaping how they think. “The linchpin of the country’s future, the continuity of its development, is that young people have reliable life guidelines, that they consider our traditional values truly their own,” the Russian leader said earlier this year.

On the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion, Naumova was among those invited to attend Putin’s address to the nation. She sat next to high-profile war correspondents and military bloggers and took selfies with some, including Vladlen Tatarsky, who was assassinated about a month later.

“We will never live as we did before the start of the special military operation,” Naumova said, using the Kremlin’s euphemism for the war in a video message to her followers ahead of Putin’s speech. “We need to understand this, accept this, continue to work and live on. The future depends on all of us, and we will be victorious!”

“This new generation is being raised on the idea that the West hates us,” said a former senior Kremlin official who still operates in government circles and who, like some other Russians interviewed by The Post, spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak about sensitive matters. “Now everyone, including young people, must be for the war, for traditional values and religion — you must be performatively patriotic.”

Sergei Guriev, a Russian economist who once led Russia’s premier economics university but fled the country and is now dean of the London Business School, described Putin’s efforts to indoctrinate Russian schoolchildren as “dangerous.”

“As borders are increasingly closed to young Russians and Putin introduces this ideological education, we may end up with a generation which is raised in this Putin way,” Guriev said in an interview in the spring, when he was dean of Sciences Po university in France. “Somehow it will have to be undone, and it’s not going to be easy or quick.”

Young Russians are self-dividing into castes. Some are conformists, many of whom have calculated that this is the only way to rise and thrive within this remastered society. Many avoid politics or engaging with Russia’s institutions altogether. The rest are outcasts.

Mikhail Dkhnyakov has chosen to belong.

Dkhnyakov speaks English and Polish, has a penchant for smart, navy suits and keeps a well-pruned beard to offset his youthful features. He reads the Financial Times and the Economist, religiously refers to the Kremlin website and state newswires, and has set his sights on a life in politics — dreaming of becoming foreign minister one day. He took his first step toward this goal when he got a competitive internship at the Duma, Russia’s parliament.

Dkhnyakov was born in a small village outside Yaroslavl, 180 miles northeast of Moscow. At 6, he told his father that he wanted to become mayor. He joined Yaroslavl’s “Volya” youth organization and his school’s debate club before winning a place at the Foreign Ministry’s diplomatic academy in Moscow, where he now leads his university’s “Russian World” student society.

At 21, Dkhnyakov is already fluent in Russia’s political language. In an interview, he referred to Russia’s “fraternal … blood” ties with Ukraine, waxed lyrical about Russian civilization, boasted of Russia’s inclination toward “cooperation and constructive dialogue” on the international stage, and expounded on the need to defend the country from external pressure.

He insisted that there are no political prisoners in Russia because there is no such designation in Russian law, and he waved off reports of a sharp rise in political prosecutions of young Russians. “Anything can be written on the internet,” he said.

“The most important thing for me is that everything is good in my country. I want people to live peacefully, to walk around smiling and being happy,” Dkhnyakov said. “It will be up to me and my fellow students in 20 to 30 years to decide what will happen in the world and what the role of our country will be,” he added. “I expect that it will be fair. A world order based on international law.”

Yegor Balazeikin, by contrast, chose exclusion.

He was arrested at age 16 and is now serving a six-year prison sentence for attempted terrorism after throwing molotov cocktails at two military enlistment offices to protest the war. The explosives never ignited and caused no damage.

“Now it’s the second year of my imprisonment,” Balazeikin, who is now 18, wrote in a letter to The Post from the detention center where he was being held in St. Petersburg. “I don’t have any regrets. I don’t hope, I don’t beg, I don’t cry.”

He has refused to apologize for his actions. “This won’t happen,” he wrote. “I am focused on this one word — protest.”

Balazeikin’s mother, Tatyana Balazeikina, said his actions were the result of months of battling with his conscience after his uncle, an experienced officer who volunteered to fight in Ukraine, was killed in combat. Balazeikina said his death was a wake-up call for her son, who realized all he had been told about Russia’s great war machine and justifications for invading were false.

“These kids who grow up, who become teenagers, then young adults, have a choice to make,” she said. “Some are ready to resist. They are not ready to negotiate with their conscience. Others are so brainwashed by propaganda that they support everything that is happening now. And the rest do not care.”

Balazeikin is not the only teenager in prison for resisting. In April, Lyubov Lizunova, 17, was sentenced to 3½ years for inciting terrorism after she wrote graffiti — “Death to the regime!” — on a garage wall in Chita in Russia’s Far East in fall 2022. Lyubov and her boyfriend, Alexander Snezhkov, 20, who was also convicted in the case, had attempted to flee Russia after being arrested, according to local media.

In June, Arseny Turbin, 15, was sentenced to five years on terrorism charges. Prosecutors accused him of trying to join the Freedom of Russia Legion, a paramilitary unit of Russian nationals fighting in the war on Ukraine’s side. Moscow has designated the group a terrorist organization. Turbin has denied the charges, and Mediazona, a Russian-language news outlet, reported that evidence against him was falsified.

Still, many young Russians are unconcerned by the war. Like young people everywhere, they are preoccupied with school, friends and their own futures.

While out at a rave in Moscow in the winter, a 24-year-old named Arseny said that Russia’s wartime youth are in an intense and anxious process of finding themselves amid the sociopolitical chaos.

“The state now tries to build a pro-Russian, patriotic ideology devoid of substance,” Arseny said, adding that he had a “neutral attitude” toward the state and did not believe the nationalist fervor had influenced his life or thoughts. He spoke on the condition that he be identified only by his first name because criticizing the government can lead to criminal prosecution.

He said, however, that much had been lost when thousands of Russians — including artists — fled after the invasion. Instead of “cool parties” and a formerly dynamic, positive atmosphere, “the mood is post-apocalyptic,” he said, adding that he believed a new “apolitical and original” culture was gradually developing to replace it. A few days after the interview, the club where he attended the rave was shut for several months following backlash from conservative Russians.

Since the invasion, the government has invested heavily in militarizing young Russians, bolstering funds for education programs and youth movements. And as Putin urges Russian women to birth more children, young Russians are also being taught that defense of their motherland and self-sacrifice are all-important.

In September 2022, schools were required to offer a class called “Conversations About Important Things,” developed by the Education Ministry, covering various topics from the Kremlin’s perspective, from national identity to world events. Putin personally led an inaugural lesson with selected students in Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave near Poland.

During the lesson, Putin repeated his false claim that Russia’s mission in Ukraine was to “stop the war” and “protect the people” in the eastern Donbas region.

History books introduced at the start of the 2024-25 school year for high school seniors blame the United States for the war in Ukraine and include a quote from Putin in which he falsely asserts: “Russia did not start any military actions but is trying to end them.”

The war has also ushered in a push for militarization, with a proliferation of weapons presentations and training days at kindergartens and schools across Russia. Beginning this month, 10th- and 11th-graders are required by law to undergo combat and military medical training in a new course called “Fundamentals of Security and Defense of the Motherland.” A textbook has been introduced for eighth- and ninth-graders on how to operate drones.

And last year, more than 14,000 “hero desks,” each emblazoned with the face and biography of a Russian soldier killed in Ukraine, began appearing in thousands of schools, as part of a new initiative backed by Putin’s United Russia political party.

“Children are now given lessons about not just the family, traditional values and Russian heroes, but crucially, heroes who sacrifice themselves,” Garner said.

The Youth Army, created by the Russian Defense Ministry in 2016 to prepare children physically, intellectually and “spiritually” for war, has also seen a significant increase in membership, rising to at least 1.3 million children and teenagers since the invasion. Its members must all take an oath: “I swear to remain forever true to the Fatherland and to the Brotherhood of the Youth Army!”

In late July, hundreds of teenagers descended on a faculty building at the Baltic Federal University in Kaliningrad, with some reportedly trying to break in through a back door, according to Russian independent news outlet SOTA.

Outside, a throng of teens danced, screamed and chanted, “Russia, Russia, Russia!” Some waved Russian flags. Others had painted their faces in red, white and blue. The scene was reminiscent of young fans swarming a concert hall to see their favorite band, but it this case, the celebrity onstage was Ekaterina Mizulina, the head of a Russian group that polices internet content and advocates for censorship.

Mizulina, 40, is director of the group, called the Safe Internet League, a quasi-governmental organization intended “to educate and develop media literacy skills in children and their parents” and combat what the Kremlin regards as dangerous online content. She has spearheaded efforts to block YouTube and restrict Google in Russia and has publicly claimed credit for writing hundreds of denunciations of people and businesses she has deemed unpatriotic. An embodiment of the polarization gripping wartime Russia, she has also amassed a strange but significant fan base among young Russians as a meme-friendly youth advocate.

“Ekaterina Mizulina is the sex idol of our time,” one of the teens who had come to get a glimpse of Mizulina told SOTA in an interview. “This is the Russian Taylor Swift!” another said. One person said it was right for Mizulina to be pushing to censor foreign music. “I think this is correct: Young people should not be exposed to Western propaganda.”

Every week, she receives complaints from young people about shoddy school canteens and run-down parks but also unpatriotic teachers or classmates, which she then posts to her Telegram, which has nearly 800,000 subscribers.

In an interview, Mizulina said she aspires to create a channel of communication with Russian youth that is similar to Putin’s “Direct Line” — an annual televised call-in show during which he responds to complaints from everyday people. Mizulina said most of the letters she receives are from young people who are “really, really annoyed.”

“They don’t understand why some people who work in the universities say things against Russia or Russian people,” she said, referring to professors who have criticized the war. “The mentality in Russia has changed a lot, and it has changed young people as well.”

Mizulina dresses to appeal to her young fans, sporting leather jackets, statement jewelry and sunglasses. But her messaging has had serious consequences. Last year, a 23-year-old TikToker who published content supporting Ukraine was handed a military summons after he was denounced by Mizulina. Others have been harassed and bullied, or had their livelihoods ruined.

Uliana Strizh, 31, a mother and volunteer working with the pro-war Zakhar Prilepin Foundation, said that she was raising her own two children to be patriots and that youth in wartime Russia are far from apolitical.

“They are thoughtful and they understand the path that we have chosen. … They will have to rebuild our world no matter what,” Strizh said in an interview.

Strizh said she wanted more attention put toward teaching children patriotism, including through movies, interactive games and on social media platforms — where it is possible to speak to children “in their own language.” But, she said, the main responsibility of patriotic education lies with parents.

Since Russia’s Ukraine invasion, Strizh is rarely at home in the city of Nizhny Novgorod. Instead, she spends nearly all of her time volunteering in Donbas. Her young children, she said, have even come with her to the front.

“I know that my children will live in a different world. And I don’t want them to have guns in their hands,” she said. “My children will need triple patience, love and kindness.”

“They know why this is all this happening,” Strizh continued. “They understand more than many adults do.”

About this story

Reporting by Francesca Ebel. Natalia Abbakumova and Robyn Dixon contributed to this report. Photography by Nanna Heitmann/Magnum Photos for The Washington Post.

Editing by David M. Herszenhorn and Wendy Galietta. Additional editing by Vanessa Larson. Design and development by Yutao Chen and Anna Lefkowitz. Design editing by Christine Ashack. Photo editing by Olivier Laurent. Graphics editing by Samuel Granados.

Additional support from Matt Clough and Jordan Melendrez.