“Officials” prohibit schoolchildren from coming to the Memorial competition awards ceremony

Unidentified persons from regional officials of the ministries of education forbid schoolchildren who participated in the historical competition “Man in History. Russia - XX century”, to come to the award ceremony in Moscow. This was reported on April 22 by Memorial International.

Information about this began to come to the organization on April 20. “The orders were given orally to the directors of only those schools where the winners studied (at the same time, the list of winning works was not public, the information leak was apparently connected with the hacking of the organizers’ e-mail). In all cases, representatives of the ministries referred to calls from officials from Moscow from the Russian Ministry of Education, who demanded in an ultimatum that teachers and students be banned from traveling to Moscow for the awards ceremony for the winners of the competition. They explained this by the fact that the Memorial is an organization banned in Russia. Information about such calls came from the Volgograd, Astrakhan, Penza, Arkhangelsk, Tver regions, from Mordovia and the Krasnoyarsk Territory.

First Deputy Minister of Education Valentina Pereverzeva told International Memorial that the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation, with such a banning initiative regarding the Memorial competition, did not come forward and did not appeal to the heads of regional educational structures with a ban on the trip of schoolchildren and their mentors to Moscow.

At the same time, it became known that, without explanation, Telegraph LLC, owned by Dream Industries (they also own, for example, the Zvooq Internet music service and the Bookmate book service), refused to fulfill the ceremony agreement concluded with Memorial without explanation. awarding the competition in the hall on Tverskaya. about this on Facebook . writes Nikolai Kononov, editor-in-chief of the Secret of the Firm magazine,

“What Memorial does, its mission is transparent and understandable. Schoolchildren's work on Soviet history is not an investigation about Medvedev's money and Putin's daughters to scare and ban the event. Perhaps Dream Industries did not want to spoil their high relations, but in any case, this whole story so far only causes a feeling of disgust. "Tsargrad-TV" with its party on the "Telegraph" is ok for them, but civic education and enlightenment is not ok. Progressive digital. So we will write it down, ”Kononov notes.

As a result, the ceremony will take place at the Nikitsky Gate Theater on April 26.