A basketball in the middle of a half-destroyed school gym is the tangible sign of a hasty departure on account of the bombs. It’s 2023 and we’re in what’s left of Lyceum No.2 in the small rural settlement of Hostomel, Kiev, and it’s here that Stefano Di Pietro’s War on Education [+lire aussi :
bande-annonce
fiche film] begins, a documentary released in Italian cinemas via Garden Film on 24 February, on the occasion of the third anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, following a world premiere in Amsterdam’s Moving Arts Centre after previously screening in upwards of 20 countries, in institutions and events such as the 33rd Karpacz Economic Forum (Poland) and the Council of Europe in Strasbourg (a screening at the European Parliament is scheduled for March).

Whilst images definitely speak louder than words in this lucid testimonial of oppression, and Matteo Ruperto’s highly effective original score transforms the air-raid alarm sirens into a dull, lengthy groan, Ukrainian Minister for Education Oksen Lisovyi does help to lend meaning to the film’s title: “when they occupy land, the first thing they destroy is the libraries, literature in the Ukrainian language and textbooks used by our education system”. In the territories they haven’t managed to occupy, the Russians target infrastructure: they destroy schools and kindergartens, “because they know that education is a weapon which can be used to indoctrinate people with their ideology”.  Emmanuelle Abrioux, head of UNICEF Ukraine’s education department, confirms that there was, initially, an extended teaching network for younger children, but “now two thirds of kindergartens have been destroyed, which will have “a long-term impact on children’s contribution to the community”.

This deliberate attempt at repression goes back a long way. It wasn’t Putin or the Soviets who introduced it, but the tsars during the years of the Russian Empire, resulting in the Ems Ukaz in 1876, which banned Ukrainian language and culture and, subsequently, Ukrainian history. As Kyiv Independent reporter Alexander Khrebet explains, russification has been going on for 300 years, especially in eastern Ukraine. Since the occupation of Donetsk in 2014, “one million children between 6 and 17 years of age have been studying in schools controlled by Russians in the regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporižžja and Kherson”, and twenty thousand have been deported directly to Russia. In Crimea, there’s been a kind of “pilot project” going on where the Russians have cancelled Ukrainian language and history lessons and have instead been teaching children to march and shoot using real weapons. In short, they’ve been inculcating their version of international and Russian history, such as the one Vladimir Putin infuses into his essays and articles, or the one featuring in the new junior high textbook in Russia, written by ex-minister Vladimir Medinsky, revolving around the myth of the western world “lying about Russia”. “Exactly like my old Soviet textbook”, quips Ondřej Soukup, editor of The Czech Radio. “Ukraine simply doesn’t feature in Russian books which have been published over the past 20 years. And the problem is that the Russians believe that the Ukrainians are Russian”, stresses historian Georgiy Kasianov. And it would appear that US president Donald Trump shares this belief.

Through painstaking, linear direction which is attentive to the testimonies of everyday people and to the aesthetic of the devastated areas, and through balanced editing coming courtesy of Claudio Gusmini, War on Education explains that what’s going on in Ukraine doesn’t only involve missiles and tanks. It’s a hybrid war revolving around the slow and continual penetration and annihilation of a culture and of a critical, independent way of thinking, focusing first and foremost on the youngest generations. And with the aim of using education as an instrument for propaganda and for constructing identities, as well as a form of control. It’s an Orwellian nightmare: if you can control history, you can control the future.

War on Education was produced by Euroclio - European Association of History Educators and In Media Res, in co-production with History Co:Lab.