Russia's “rising up from the knees,” especially since the incorporation of the Crimea, has been increasingly attracting researchers’ attention. While the scholarship on post-Soviet Russia primarily focused on economic and political reforms in the 1990s and on institutional transformations in the 2000s. In the 2010s, the central issue in the Russia studies appears to be nation-building. Over the last few years, numerous publications contributed to the understanding of contemporary Russian nationalism, the relations between ethnicity and empire, nationalism and democracy, ideology and pragmatics, political intentions, and media representations. Much of this research addresses the most visible sources found in the public discourse. While gaining in transparency and verifiability, this focus also narrows the scope of the research on Russian national identity to the higher echelons of top-down identity politics.

Anna Sanina's book transcends these limits by presenting a comprehensive study of the actual implementation of the government's nation-building in the form of so-called patriotic education. Sanina juxtaposes the explicitly formulated goals and intentions with the actual practices and their results as perceived by various participants of the process playing various roles at various hierarchical levels. The study relies on extensive and diverse sources, ranging from official documents and textbooks to social survey data and, most importantly, interviews with various insiders, such as secondary and high school teachers responsible for the implementation of the patriotic education policy. The many quotations from the interviews included in the book convey often critical attitudes expressed with apparent sincerity, which alone makes the study a valuable contribution to the understanding of social processes in contemporary Russia.

The miscellany of primary empirical evidence posits as its main conclusion that, apart from the differences in content such as the important role of religion and the lack of a comprehensive ideology compatible to communism in defining the new Russian national identity, the practices of patriotic education reproduce their Soviet counterparts with astonishing accuracy. This result, consistently with Bourdieu's sociology of culture adopted by Sanina as the research framework, points out at the Russian patriotic education as a case of primacy of culture over structure. Even though the institutional system of late Soviet patriotic education had been dismantled by the late 1990s and the five-year programs of patriotic education fell short of established managerial standards, as Sanina argues, Soviet practices were quickly revived due to the habits of the educators (habitus in Bourdieu's terms) and the popular appeal of the general idea of patriotism as a desirable goal rooted in the values and attitudes of the majority. The skeptical views of the educators expressed in many interviews do not pose a significant obstacle to the implementation of patriotic education programs. According to Sanina, most of those responsible learned the Soviet practices in the 1980s, when the enthusiasm of the 1950s–1970s had largely given way to a pragmatic acceptance of well-developed and conventional techniques.

The book presents rich and compelling evidence for the author's thesis. Sanina successfully parts with the oversimplified image of propaganda constructed by elites, transmitted via mass media, and passively consumed by the masses. This more nuanced approach, however, also raises a number of questions the book does not answer. First, the “cold,” routinized version of patriotism revealed in Russia's patriotic education apparently contradicts its openly declared intentions as opposed to the subtle techniques of “banal” nationalism, to use Billig's term. Does this reflect the mere choice of the easiest way or an underlying strategy? Another issue given hardly any attention in the book is the challenge posed to patriotic education in Russia's regions with predominantly non-Russian ethnic populations, such as Tatarstan. Do the practices of patriotic education, or their content, or both, differ and in what ways? Finally, it remains particularly difficult to estimate the crucial dimension of efficacy. Do the practices of patriotic education actually boost patriotism, respond to the already existing demand for the official confirmation of existing patriotic attitudes in the population, or bring about some unintended consequences? The latter still largely remains to be seen through future events as well as future research.