Decentralization in Russia: Schools Warn Students About VPNs as Criminal Activity and Signs of Addiction

In Russian schools, lessons are being conducted about the risks of VPNs: children are being taught why virtual private networks are dangerous, and parents are advised to be cautious if their child mentions the word proxy.
The Irkutsk Center for Education No. 10 published information about events related to the so-called legal landing and financial security lessons. The publication explains that VPN is a virtual private network, and its use is not safe. The lecture included the topic preventing the use of games and virtual VPN networks.
At School No. 32 in Irkutsk, preventive Five-Minute Safety sessions were held with the characteristic title: Prohibition of VPN Services: What You Need to Know? Students were told about the risks allegedly posed by such tools. In the Rostov region, at School No. 81 in the village of Yulovsky, discussions on safe internet use were held, where personal data, digital footprints, anonymity online, and - as a separate point - the risks of using VPNs were discussed.
A particularly striking case comes from a school in St. Petersburg. GBOU No. 480 in the Kirovsky district sent a memo to parents as part of the all-Russian inter-agency operation Clean Generation - 2026 , which included the words VPN, proxy, and Tor in a list of possible signs of a teenager s involvement in drug use - alongside slang terms like grass and salt. Parents are advised to monitor their children s correspondence, track content, payments, messengers, and set parental controls on devices.
The titles of school lessons in Irkutsk and other regions leave no room for ambiguity:
VPN is illegal. What can and cannot be done online now
Using a VPN is an aggravating circumstance when committing crimes
Prohibition of VPN services: what you need to know?
All these events are documented in the open publications of schools on social networks. What is happening reflects the gradual embedding of the VPN issue into the school agenda - from digital literacy lessons to materials equating the use of circumvention tools with signs of illegal behavior. The titles of the classes speak for themselves: VPN is illegal and aggravating circumstance.
The memo distributed as part of the Clean Generation - 2026 operation shifts the conversation from the educational sphere to preventive control: parents are encouraged to react to the very word proxy just as they would to drug dealers slang.
From a data analysis perspective, what is happening in Russian schools is not an isolated pedagogical initiative but the final element of a multi-level control architecture. The technical framework has already been established: since April 15, Russian services have been blocking users with active VPNs, and the number of blocked VPN services has increased from 258 to 469 in three months. The school lesson is the social framework of the same system: if technical blocking creates a barrier from the outside, then education forms a barrier from the inside. Equating the word proxy with drug slang is a classic stigmatization technique known to sociologists as moral panic : the tool becomes a symbol of deviance long before it becomes legally prohibited.
Historical patterns show the fundamental paradox of such campaigns: the more authorities ban a technology in the school audience, the higher its symbolic status among teenagers. The open question remains: can the educational system create a sustainable aversion to tools that cannot be completely blocked technically without physically disconnecting the country from the global network?