Since the start of the war in Ukraine, employees of Prosveshcheniye, Russia’s leading educational publishing house, have been asked to remove mentions of Ukraine and Kyiv from Russian schoolbooks, Mediazona reported.
Editors working at the publishing house told Mediazona that after February 24, they had to change about 15% of texts. “Our goal is to make it seem like Ukraine simply doesn’t exist,” one of its sources said.
Another editor pointed out that mentions of Ukraine are removed depending on the context. “We can mention how we saved Kyiv, but there cannot be any mention of Ukraine’s independence now.”
Several years ago, the publishing house recommended its editors to remove Ukraine’s flag from paragraphs related to the heraldry of different states. “A couple of times, we had to remove the US flag, but it was easier, our program doesn’t focus much on world history,” Mediazona’s source stated.
The media outlet’s sources also noted that employees can be fired for expressing an anti-war stance: signing petitions, attending protest rallies or publishing anti-war messages on social media. According to Mediazona’s sources at Prosveshcheniye, one of its editors lost their job after publishing a political statement on Facebook.
