School public pages began using “patriotic” words twice as often after OBZh was replaced with OBZR, a Verstka and Ne Norma study finds

School public pages began using “patriotic” words twice as often after OBZh was replaced with OBZR, a study by Verstka and Ne Norma finds

The words “patriot,” “feat,” “duty,” “training camps,” “army,” and “self-sacrifice” appear in every fourth school post that mentions the new subject “Fundamentals of Security and Defense of the Motherland.” At the start of the “SMO,” such words appeared half as often, in every eighth post about OBZh lessons.

Verstka and the research project Ne Norma downloaded and analyzed several million posts from 30,000 verified school public pages on VKontakte. From that dataset, they selected 275,000 posts dealing with OBZh and OBZR lessons.

The main difference between OBZR and OBZh is the basic military training module, under which schoolchildren are prepared to “defend the fatherland”. As the analysis of school posts shows, during OBZR children are told what “real patriotism” is and why they should admire examples of self-sacrifice.

Mentions of the word “self-sacrifice” have doubled since the start of the war. And in the 2025-2026 school year, the word “patriot” appeared in 19% of posts that mentioned OBZR. In 2021-2022, that word appeared in only 9% of posts about OBZh.

“Modern society needs patriots capable at any moment of self-sacrifice for the sake of saving the lives of other people,” a school public page from Kaluga Region quotes a female teacher as saying.

Read about how the rhetoric of school public pages changed amid the war in the study on Verstka’s website (with VPN):

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