A Washington Post story on how Russian President Putin’s transformation of Russian schools to be nationalistic, pro-military indoctrination centers where no lessons countering the official account of history and current events can be mentioned invites a comparison of his plans with those instituted in US states led by Republicans.

The immediate impetus for Putin to force schools to become indoctrination factories is the Russian invasion of Ukraine:  Putin has said that Russia invaded its neighbor and former Soviet republic because it had to purge “Nazis” from the Kyiv regime; there are no Nazis in the Ukrainian administration. He’s now ordering schools to teach students an exaggerated version of the Soviet role in defeating Hitler and actual Nazis to include the quest to include disinformation linking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, to the Nazis, much like America’s far-right try to connect Jewish businessman George Soros to the infamous SS.

The Kremlin has ordered teachers who to fail to comply with the indoctrination lessons to be fired.  It’s demanded that old textbooks be scrapped in favor of lessons that glorify Soviet/Russian military action in places like Afghanistan, Georgia, Crimea and Ukraine. 

Sound familiar?

In states like Florida, Texas and Missouri, Republican governors and legislatures are instituting very similar policies.  You cannot teach, for example, that the United States subjugated Blacks, Asians and other non-white races and ethnicities to systemic injustices.  Textbooks that even approach a discussion on historical events–European settlers massacring native peoples; the Trail of Tears; even slavery–are downplayed if they’re even taught at all.  In some schools, the “noble cause” of the Confederacy has permeated lessons:  the South didn’t secede because of slavery, the myth goes, but for “states’ rights”–ignoring the fact that each state that seceded specifically listed its desire to maintain slavery as the root cause for its decision.

This demand to rewrite history has led to the appropriation of a line of historical analysis called Critical Race Theory, a concept primarily taught in law schools in the US to examine the role race has impacted minority communities in legal concerns, to be demonized by conservatives, who assert that any mention of race is CRT and cannot be taught because it makes white students feel back about themselves.

And like Russia hiding the atrocities it committed in World War II and the war crimes it’s currently committing in Ukraine, conservatives in the US want to wipe away the American LGBTQ population in the guise of removing any reference to LGBTQ people from schools.  If you don’t mention it, conservatives believe, it won’t exist.

Instead of dealing with the issue head on–or in some cases, even acknowledging that the item exists at all–conservatives believe that burying the things they don’t like to deal with will make them go away.

It goes beyond the schools:  GOP members of Congress now want to expunge Donald Trump’s impeachments from the historical record.  Nothing bad, they assert, can be said about the titular leader of the Republican Party, who was impeached twice for violating his oath of office, including trying to undermine the Constitution by negating the results of the 2020 election, spurring an attack by domestic terrorists on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The lessons of Russia’s rewriting of history are seen as an instruction book by American conservatives, not a cautionary tale.  Their power to succeed is limited because only by learning from our mistakes can we make our nation stronger.  Any other path will lead to the same authoritarianism Russia has lived under for decades.