Russia goes full North Korea, with new textbooks sidelining the western world as a non-entity

In a stark reflection of the Kremlin’s ongoing ideological embrace of North Korea level information control, Russian schoolchildren will now grow up without learning about Europe.

The latest edition of the third-grade textbook The Surrounding World has eliminated all chapters about European countries and their cultural heritage, replacing them with content focused on Russia’s so-called “friendly nations” — including China, North Korea, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.

As revealed by the independent outlet Verstka, this dramatic revision is not simply an academic update. It is a political act of erasure. Gone are references to France, Germany, or even Poland. The new textbook encourages Russian children to “learn more” about nations like Abkhazia and South Ossetia — Russian-backed separatist territories — alongside dictatorial allies like North Korea. The section that once explained Russia’s borders with Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukraine has been removed entirely.

For the first time, a speech by President Vladimir Putin appears on the opening pages of the textbook, setting a clear ideological tone from the outset. Its inclusion highlights the Kremlin’s effort to cultivate personal loyalty to Putin and shape political identity from the earliest stages of education.

The disappearance of Ukraine is especially telling. In the 2021 version, Ukraine was still listed as a neighboring state. In the 2022 and later editions, it no longer exists as such — an implicit territorial claim hidden in educational policy. The new content, meanwhile, glorifies China’s “contribution to humanity” and includes an unusually detailed account of North Korea’s capital city, Pyongyang.

This is not an isolated shift. It follows a series of ideological revisions in Russian education, including the now-infamous history textbooks authored by Kremlin aide Vladimir Medinsky. These books justify the invasion of Ukraine, distort the events of World War II, and present NATO as a perennial threat. Critics call them “textbooks of hatred,” crafted not to educate but to indoctrinate.

By reshaping the curriculum around authoritarian allies and cutting ties with European cultural and political narratives, the Kremlin is using education to engineer geopolitical loyalty.

The aim is clear: to raise a generation unfamiliar with democratic ideals, unaware of alternative worldviews, and fully aligned with the Kremlin’s version of reality.

In doing so, Russia is not just rewriting its past — it is preemptively rewriting its future. And in that future, Europe doesn’t exist.