“I came from school satisfied”: how migrants from Donbass adapt in Russia

Today, Russian children went to school. The Minister of Education of the Russian Federation Sergey Kravtsov said that the number of students who today sat down at their desks in Russian schools has reached 18 million, and 2 million of them are first-graders. Among these 18 million there are those schoolchildren who moved to Russia from the war zone – the LPR, the DPR … “MK” talked with two such families, in one of them dad serves in the NVO zone, in the other he returned not so long ago. We learned how children adapt to Russian educational institutions and a new environment.

Natalya’s family moved from the Donetsk region (their city is 40 km from Donetsk) to the Russian Federation in February 2022, immediately after the start of the SVO. Natalya’s husband at that time served in the war zone, he was called up, the woman herself was pregnant with her second child, and their eldest daughter was 7 years old. For the first week they lived in a TAP in Rostov, then they moved to the Moscow region. They had relatives in the region, but they immediately began to rent their homes. While the husband served, the family lived on his military salary.

“When I gave birth to my second child, and he was about three months old, my husband was able to return home from the NWO zone,” Natalia told MK. – Now he works at a construction site, everything is fine with earnings, we have enough. I’m still at home with the little one. The daughter was received perfectly at school, the teacher turned out to be our countrywoman, originally from the Donetsk region …

– When did your daughter go to a Russian school?

– The first year she stayed at her school on distance learning. Then ours at that school went to full-time education. And they told us: “Come back, we won’t teach her alone remotely!”. It turns out that we are the only ones who left the class. And we got a job in a school near Moscow already in February of this year, in the second grade.

At first, my daughter was worried, afraid to go to a new school. She is a shy girl with us … But literally two or three days later she found friends in a new class. Even the kids are different. We are more closed there, but here we are sociable.

Was it easy to get into school?

– Yes, I went to the director of the school, which is within walking distance of us, explained to her our situation, that our school in the Donetsk region had reached the “point”, and we would like to settle down here, and she took us without problems. We were accepted even without documents! Then my mother brought the documents when she also moved to us.

– And how was her studies after the Donetsk school?

– There she studied for “triples”, but here the teacher pulled her out, and we graduated from the second grade with “fours” and “fives”! In general, we are very lucky with the teacher, she helps us in everything. A very good woman!

Today the girl went to her third grade. Parents spent 20,000 rubles on school fees: this is a new uniform, shoes, stationery … (A backpack from last year). “They bought what she liked, not what I wanted,” my mother laughs. Mom says that today, September 1, her daughter “flew to school”, where her friends were waiting for her.

We thought that after the summer it would be very difficult to wake her up. But she herself got up at half past seven in the morning! She got ready, woke up my husband and I and said: “Mom-dad, I’m ready!” – said Natalia. – She returned from school happy as an elephant, said: “I’m ready to fight for grades!”. And immediately ran to walk with classmates. So her adaptation to the Russian school went well …

The second family has a completely different story. The story of how difficult it is for those who survived the horrors of the bombings to adapt to a new place of residence. Maria’s family is from Slavyansk, everyone was in the militia. Maria admitted that she could not talk on this topic on the phone, otherwise she would burst into tears. So I dictated my story. The eldest son is now 30 years old, and daughter Polina went to the tenth grade.

“My daughter and I prepared food for the fighters. They were often under fire, but that didn’t frighten her,” the woman said.

The woman’s husband is now in the war zone. The son was also on the front line, but then he was demobilized, as he has sick children. He lives with his family in Nizhny Novgorod. For a while, Maria and Polina also lived with them.

Polina studied at a school in Nizhny Novgorod for a year, but was never able to adapt to new conditions, and, most importantly, to “other” teenagers different from her countrymen …

“It was wild for her that in Nizhny Novgorod, for example, her classmates had a different attitude towards their parents,” says Maria. – Our children always call back their parents, they are always in touch with them.

We really appreciate every minute spent together, because we are constantly under fire. My daughter found only a couple of girls in a Nizhny Novgorod school with whom she could communicate. But the boys are ready to demand money from their parents for something they urgently wanted to buy, they borrow money from each other.

Our children are looked after more. Of course, video lessons helped her daughter a lot – she found a group on the Internet, in which students from the pedagogical institute pulled up children from Donetsk. My daughter even became friends with these students. In terms of knowledge, our children are the same, but in terms of years they are 2-3 years older … This is the biggest difficulty in adapting.

Recently, Maria and her daughter moved near Mariupol, and on September 1, Polina went to a new Mariupol school.

Maria spoke about her friend, who, with grown-up children, moved from the war zone to Sochi. It was also very difficult for her children to adapt to new conditions and a new environment. “It is difficult for young people who survived at least one bombing to communicate with those who did not survive … They do not understand each other. It’s easier for the little ones, they forget everything more easily!” Maria says.