The Kremlin is reintroducing “scientific communism” to Russia’s universities. What will the “new patriotic intelligentsia” look like

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The Kremlin commissioned Andrei Polosin, the new vice-rector of RANEPA and close to the deputy head of the presidential administration, Sergei Kiriyenko, to develop a new ideological course for universities that would become a kind of analogue of “scientific communism”, which was compulsory study in the times soviet According to a source in the Meduza publication, Polosin’s task is to “save the lost generation” of young Russians critical of the Kremlin.

Polosin’s course is called “The Foundations of the Russian State”. According to Meduza, the Russian authorities came up with it after the start of the full-scale war with Ukraine.

Polosin is a trained psychologist, was a certified trainer in the so-called neuro-linguistic programming, worked as a political strategist, including participating in the campaign of the Union of Right Forces in 1999 (the list of this block was headed by Kirienko). In the 2000s, he himself worked in the presidential administration as an adviser to the domestic policy department. Since 2013, he worked at the Russian Nuclear Agency Rosatom, which was then headed by Kirienko. In particular, he oversaw the corporation’s projects in the field of culture and education. Among other things, Polosin held so-called forecasting sessions in closed “atomic” cities, to which supporters of conspiracy theories, such as science fiction writer Sergei Peresleghin, were invited.

Peresleghin is one of the many followers of the methodologists movement. The writer’s views are indeed quite exotic. For example, he believes that the consequences of the climate crisis are not harmful, but beneficial to humanity (this is not true), and he also promotes the unscientific theory of “inclusive capitalism”. This system, according to Peresleghin, “is linked to the Rothschild family, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank” and has turned the majority of people on the planet into “disenfranchised masses”.

According to Meduza’s sources, in recent months Polosin unexpectedly became one of the main ideologues of the Kremlin. The aim of the “Foundations of the Russian State” university course it is developing is said to be to change the minds of students whom the Kremlin has failed to indoctrinate. According to one of the interlocutors, the intelligentsia in Russia has always taken an anti-state position, and now the time has come to educate the “patriotic intelligentsia”. The Kremlin wants a new patriotic intelligentsia, whose idol is not Elon Musk, but Lomonosov. At the same time, the main audience of the new project should be mostly technical students, not humanities.

The course, according to Meduza, will consist of five parts. The key ideological element of the course will be the third step, “Russian Worldview and Values ​​of Russian Civilization.” In it, students will be told about the so-called pentabase of Russian civilization (this theory was developed, among others, by Polosin and an official of the presidential administration Alekander Haricev), which distinguishes it from the civilization of the West. It is argued that this concept is to the liking of Vladimir Putin himself and the members of the Security Council, and would attract technocrats, in contrast, for example, to the radical ideological concepts of the philosopher Alekander Dughin.