“Open your mouth!” hissed the head of educational work at a school in Sudak at a high school student who remained silent during the Russian anthem. Despite the total zombification, such cases of disobedience are quite common in Crimea, so the occupiers are making great efforts to systematically search for “unreliable” families, using children for this purpose.

The most straightforward method is an annual survey in all middle and high school classes. Children are forced to answer questions about whether they are members of closed communities such as Ryodan (teenagers imitate anime criminals), whether they are fond of the AUE subculture (Prisoners’ Urkagan Unity, an ideology that opposes the criminal world to the official authorities), or whether they share the ideas of the Right Sector (yes, in Russia they are still feared of it).

Most often, the questionnaire also contains a proposal to share their knowledge about extremist communities or to report that someone close to them is under the influence of “extremists.”

“I don't understand who this is intended for. Will there be any idiot who will write “yes” in such a questionnaire? “Yes, I am in the movement. We put out anime in the neighborhood yesterday.”? Or there's another answer like “I want to get to know extremist activities”. Really? Do they expect someone to choose this option? At first, I thought there would be some tricky questions, but no, the questionnaire is completely for imbeciles,” laughs Eldar, a student of a Simferopol school.

The boy does not blame his teachers, he says it is a requirement of their management. The questionnaires have to be filled out quickly and completely, including absentees. The information is entered by the class teachers themselves, which further emphasizes the extremely formal attitude to this kind of event. But according to the high school student, teachers take monitoring of students' accounts on social media seriously. “There are suspicions that they are even messaging us in Discord (a messenger for communicating in online games), where we are talking about the games,” says Eldar.

Crimean adults also pay close attention to children's activity on social media. “Our daughter's classmate posted a picture of himself doing a 'Roman salute’ (aka Fascist salute) in a chat with his friends just for fun. It was just a typical teenage impudence. And then the class teacher somehow found herself in this chat, screened the photo, and sent it to the police. The boy was registered there, and his parents were dragged to the school and the FSB for interviews. Someone later asked the teacher why she did it. It turned out that she did it so that she wouldn't be deprived of her bonus. The principal threatened them that if they were not the ones to reveal the “extremism”, they would have a year without incentives. And this is half a salary,” says Vladislav, a resident of Feodosia.

There are other methods to identify disloyal parents. First of all, it is a statistical analysis of schoolchildren's involvement in “patriotic” activities. Among the dozens of data, there is a report that takes into account how many times each student took part in the “Letter to a Soldier” campaign (forced writing of letters to participants in the aggression against Ukraine), how many times they brought voluntary assistance “for the needs of the SMO” and how often they missed “Talks about important things” (forced propaganda events).

“It's almost impossible to hide or falsify anything there - each of these indicators is duplicated by different people, and each of them will be only too happy to turn you in - to show you that the numbers in such matters differ. We have one girl who doesn't go to “Talks about important things”. I talked to her father, and he said: Your propaganda is not about important things at all. And I had to write a report to the principal, because otherwise, at the end of the quarter, the head teacher would have collated her information and seen the absences. And they would have asked me why I hid it and didn't report it right away. This man, they say, was included in the database of those prone to extremism,” explains a teacher from Kirovsky district, whose name we are not disclosing for obvious reasons.

In addition, she explains that in schools, children are convinced almost every day that “snitching” is normal and even praiseworthy. On teachers included. And students are often happy to try, perceiving teachers with hostility and not thinking about the consequences of such snitching. According to human rights activists from the Irade initiative, school teachers regularly become victims of provocations by students who deliberately start conversations about their attitudes toward the war or Ukraine in general, and secretly record teachers on a dictaphone or video. These recordings are then posted on social media, and Russian fighters against extremism come to the teachers' homes.

Teachers who are fans of Russian propaganda do not shy away from provocations against schoolchildren. Children of refugees from the newly occupied territories are particularly affected, as they are more likely than others to have to answer the question “what is the Motherland” or talk about “pride in our achievements.” No less close attention is paid to the “understanding” of such topics by the Crimean Tatars. “The selection of questions on the test, the topics of essays, homework - a lot of things in the school curriculum are made to ensure that children, at least indirectly, even inadvertently, reveal their true beliefs,” Vladislav from Feodosia shares his observations.

Human rights activists state that the system of control over “thought crimes” on the temporarily occupied peninsula is multi-level and carefully thought out. Any demonstration of pro-Ukrainian beliefs threatens to be “worked out” by Russian security forces. And lately, “working out” is no longer a conversation in the office, but an assault on the house with machine guns, a brutal search, checking the contents of all phones, and taking them “to the basement” with the prospect of being accused of espionage.