Vasily Prozorov, “Culturocide” (October 2022)
Short though it is, this is a disturbing documentary demonstrating how the post-Maidan government in Kiev under Presidents Petro Poroshenko (2014 – 2019) and Volodymyr Zelensky (2019 – present) has been systematically drilling Ukrainian schoolchildren with a false alternative history of Ukraine and Russia to incite hatred of Russia and Russian culture and history with books, comics and other printed materials printed and published in the West or with Western funds. Vasily Prozorov, a former Ukrainian security services employee now turned journalist, investigates the extent to which the education of Ukrainian children in primary and secondary schools has become politicised and infused with pro-Nazi / pro-NATO / anti-Russian propaganda. He visits Lugansk oblast, a formerly Ukrainian administrative region that became part of Russia in October 2022, and speaks with Natalia Rastorgueva, director of Lugansk Republican Library, who informs him of the changes the Kiev regime made to book stocks and acquisitions in school and public libraries while Lugansk was part of Ukraine. History books and various other books and printed materials that did not comply with the Kiev regime’s anti-Russia agenda were removed and replaced by books and printed media promoting and extolling an inflated history of Ukraine in which various inventions and discoveries made by other people are instead claimed to have been made by Ukrainians, and Ukraine is presented as a country long enslaved by Russia. The sordid history of extremist Ukrainian nationalist organisations during World War II and their role in the massacres of Jewish, Polish and Russian people while collaborating with Nazi Germany is edited out.
Prozorov also visits various school and public libraries in the Lugansk region to see if what Rastorgueva tells him is true. He peruses various school textbooks along with comics written for five-year-old children and discovers that what Rastorgueva says is unfortunately true. The literature written for young kindergarten pupils in particular is disturbing, praising NATO (the military alliance spanning 30 European and North American nations) as an organisation promising peace and security, and protecting human rights and the environment! Several books promoting NATO, its goals and aims, and the supposed benefits Ukraine will enjoy once it is accepted as a member, are shown on screen. The most disturbing aspect of the propaganda Prozorov finds in the libraries he visits, including a small village library, is that the books are printed on glossy paper and their printing and publication have been funded by Western organisations (many of them Polish or Jewish-run) and the US embassy in Kiev.
Seeking answers as to why so much propaganda has been created in such detail to reach even the youngest Ukrainians, Prozorov confers with Lugansk culturologist / mathematician Nina Ischenko who tells him that the agenda to change the Ukrainian people’s consciousness, so that they identify automatically with the West and not any other, comes from contact with Western civilisation and its products. The agenda aims at no less than the total transformation of Ukrainian people and their culture so that they identify fully with the values and concepts of Western civilisation and turn away from the models of other civilisations. Rastorgueva tells Prozorov that Ukrainian schoolchildren in Lugansk (until the region returned to Russia) are taught the fascist salute, how to shoot like soldiers using wooden models of machine guns, and are urged to hate, even attack and beat up Russians.
The documentary is presented as a current affairs article that might fit into a larger news program, not that it will do so very soon in a Western mainstream news program or series. The agenda behind the propaganda is very clear: as Prozorov explains, it is to tear Russian-speaking people in Ukraine away from their cultural identity, language and history, and to remake them in a new image – a bizarre and grotesque mirror parody of the New Soviet citizen. Intriguingly, the aim is not to make all Ukrainians believe in their own national autonomy and self-sufficiency, but to make them dependent on NATO for their well-being – because NATO actually intends for them to serve its interests, not their own.