Putin's Canon

Vladimir Putin is compiling a 100-Book canon that all students must read, according to The Guardian.

From the article:

Putin, who is running for a third term as president in March, says that Russia has "always been described as a 'reading nation'", and proposes taking a survey of the country's "most influential cultural figures" and compiling "a 100-book canon that every Russian school leaver will be required to read – that is, to read at home rather than study in class or memorise. And then they would be asked to write an essay on one of them in their final exams. Or at least let us give young Russians a chance to demonstrate their knowledge and world outlook in various student competitions."

Journalist Alexander Nazaryan, who is writing a novel about Russian immigrants in New York, called Putin's "cultural-unity-through-literature proposal" the Russian leader's "most chilling [plan] of all".

"Social engineering through state mandated literature: Nothing else that Putin has done has been quite so nakedly Soviet in its desire to manipulate the human intellect into docility," writes Nazaryan, predicting that "the books that will benefit from Putin's new cultural policy will almost certainly be Soviet-era schlock churned out by Writers' Union foot soldiers who glorified their compatriots' miserable existence".