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by pfdietz 1312 days ago
This came in handy when that meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk a few years ago. A teacher remembered the training and had everyone hide under desks, and they were spared laceration from the blown-in windows.
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In Russia, this kind of training is not a long-gone relic - there's a class in school that's dedicated to survival in various situations, covering all kinds of stuff from emergency first aid to making shelter in the wilds. A subset of that is dealing with anthropogenic disasters, and a subset of that is civil defense. If I remember correctly, we had two hours covering nukes alone - likely targets in the vicinity, what kind of damage to expect where, how to build fallout shelters, when to evacuate etc. So far as I know, this all is still taught in schools there.
Probably quite handy if that is all the training you get before your call up and your country is threatening nuclear war.
In Soviet times, the class was called "preliminary military training", and focused more on that aspect - not quite to the point where they'd shoot things, but it would involve timed field-stripping an AK, for example, and reading military topographic maps.

After 1991, the military aspects were stripped out, although in many schools they turned into an opt-in afterschool "patriot club" or some such. These were the primary source of videos like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrxjYfl05ek.

Recently, they've announced that they'll be reviving the old Soviet format, so it'll become mandatory for all high schoolers again, beginning with the next school year (starting in September, 2023).