Russia has a modern university teaching platform.
Open Education was founded in 2015 and is supported by eighteen Russian universities, including the country's most renowned such as Moscow's Lomonosov University, Saint Petersburg State University and the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and Petersburg.
With a differentiated range of subjects from natural sciences and humanities in 860 courses, the teaching platform has already reached more than two million listeners.
“Open Education” is a suitable educational medium for Russia with its geographical expanse and its enormous educational differences.
Recently, the platform has been offering a course entitled “Ukraine: Morphology and Mythology”, in which students will learn about the “main features of the formation of statehood in Ukraine, the specifics of the development of Ukrainian society, as well as economic and geographical conditions for the formation of the Ukrainian economic model”.
The course provides a "reasonable assessment of the events of the historical past in their close connection with modern politics".
The description of the course makes you doubt it.
She takes up the discourse that is drummed into viewers of state television programs every day: that the Ukrainian state has been experiencing a “systematic crisis” since 2014, which has “affected all areas of society without exception”.
In order to better understand this crisis, the course is devoted to “morphology, i.e. the structure of modern Ukrainian politics, Ukrainian history, geography, economy, state mythology”.
While other peoples — the Russians, Chinese, Americans and British are mentioned — have “traditional pillars” in state and society, Ukraine rests solely on myths.
In Ukraine, "history, economy, politics and even geography are sacrificed to a certain mythology".
How should we understand this?
The Ukrainians mythologize the Dnieper, while the Russians maintain a purely scientific relationship with the Volga and the Germans with the Rhine?
During Putin's reign, Russia consistently mythologized its history, and old cults such as the worship of Alexander Nevsky or St. Vladimir were revived at great expense.
When it is established that myths are only "brought to life" in Ukraine, one wonders what Ukraine's alleged global special path actually consists of.
In Russia there are proven experts in philology and history for the culture of Ukraine.
However, the course is offered by an economist and a historian whose doctoral thesis is about “Poland in the foreign policy strategy of Soviet Russia 1918/19”, i.e. the Bolshevik attempt to subdue Poland, which is related to the motivation of the course but not to its topic.
The course was developed at St. Petersburg University, where more scholars signed the open letter of protest against the war than the letter of loyalty to the state leadership.
The fact that only two colleagues were available as lecturers, whose expertise obviously lies in completely different fields, indicates that