Russian teacher ‘shocked’ as she faces jail over anti-war speech pupils taped
When Irina Gen, a 55-year-old English and German language teacher in the Russian city of Penza, embarked on an anti-war speech in her classroom, little did she know she was being recorded by her own students.
“I just wanted to broaden my students’ worldview. I hoped to break through the propaganda that is being fed to this country. But look where it got me,” said Gen, who faces a long-term prison sentence for “discrediting” the Russian army after her message went viral.
Gen also voiced her disapproval of the way Russian state media framed the bombing of a maternity hospital in the besieged city of Mariupol as a Ukrainian-style provocation.
At the end of last month, Russian prosecutors announced they had opened a criminal case against Gen under a recently introduced law that criminalises the spread of so-called fake news about the Russian army.
Prosecutors specifically took issue with the statements Gen made about the Mariupol maternity ward. She has since been banned from leaving the country, and her lawyer said she faced up to 10 years in jail if found guilty.
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Andrei Kolesnikov of the Carnegie Moscow Center said the experience of Gen and other teachers pointed to a worrying “Stalinisation” of Russian society. “It feels like we are in a time machine. A climate is created in which denunciations are encouraged by the authorities. We have seen the same processes develop under Stalin, which had devastating consequences,.”
Kolesnikov said he had been approached by “many university professors” who said they were scared to mention the “Ukrainian subject”. “They say that students are trying to provoke them into speaking about the conflict just to denounce them.”
Kolesnikov said if the current atmosphere in the country persisted, Russia “will soon have a new generation of Pavlik Morozov’s”, referring to the
Soviet boy who denounced his father to the authorities and became a propaganda icon, with statues of him being raised all over Russia.