If you watch one documentary this year, Mr Nobody Against Putin should be it. Pavel Talankin’s deeply moving—and disturbing—account of how Russian schools and society succumbed to Putin’s military death cult as soon as the invasion of #Ukraine was launched in February 2022 is both touching and heart-wrenching.
Russia’s most-polluted town
Pavel—known to his friends as ‘Pasha’—is a 33-year-old teaching assistant at a school in the small Urals city of #Karabash, famed as Russia’s most-polluted town, where copper mining waste has stained the surrounding hills black and noxious gases ooze from rusting pipes in the streets.
But for Pasha, a self-confessed loner who has always felt like an outsider in Karabash, even though he is loved by his students, the city is a place of love and romance. For him, the scruffy, grey, and stained 5-story Soviet Khrushchevka prefabs that house the city’s inhabitants are places of beauty—the tangled pipework of the copper mines, visions of beauty under the crisp azure winter skies, when temperatures can plunge to minus 40 degrees Celsius.
He may be an odd loner, but his job as a videographer tasked with recording all the academic, student, and social events at the school he himself attended (and where his plump, slightly grumpy but loveable mother works as a librarian) puts him at the centre of a community where sstudents gravitate to his tiny office, a place he dubs a refuge for #democracy in a country gone mad.
Pasha’s work—and obsession with recording everything on tape—even his own admissions of lonely evenings in the two-room flat he shares with a dog called Nebraska and 400-odd carefully colour-coded books—lay the foundations for a stunning directorial debut, shaped and supported by Copenhagen-based American documentarist, director, and writer, David Borenstein.
A chance contact via a social media request for someone willing to expose the militarisation of Russian education in the wake of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine blossoms into a risky but driven undertaking to do something to expose the tide of hatred that embraces Russian society as Putin’s #propaganda creates a victim complex in a country whose army is bringing untold misery and violence to its neighbour.
If you watch one documentary this year, Mr Nobody Against Putin should be it.
Collective madness
Pasha’s gradual awakening to the horrors of living in a society descending into collective madness—all under the guise of Soviet-style patriotism—is woven into his everyday recording of classes where teachers are directed to read prepared texts blaming Ukrainian ‘neo-Nazis’ for threatening Russia, and where a sallow-faced history teacher (who deludes himself into thinking he is seen as a ‘fun’ character by his students) lists Lavrenty Beria—Stalin’s murderous secret police chief—as among his favourite characters from history.
The deep emotional bonds he makes with many of his students and the degree to which his fellow teachers tolerate his idiosyncrasies—overlooking his playing of Lady Gaga’s Biden-inauguration rendition of The Star Spangled Banner one morning at school assembly instead of the required Russian anthem, the Glinka, or letting him off with a bit of finger-wagging when he removes sticky strips displaying the pro-war Z symbol on the school’s windows to replace them with X’s, which are an online code for support of Ukraine—reflect the sense Pasha has of Karabash as an essentially decent place.
But as the pace of official interference in the curriculum speeds up—with lessons in grenade throwing and weapons identification introduced, visits by #Wagner Group# mercenaries, and the creation of a new Young Pioneers-style patriotic youth movement becoming a new feature of school life—Pasha feels compelled to resign his job.
It is only when he is contacted by Borenstein’s team—who have somehow been notified of his willingness to expose the militaristic shift in Russian education—that Pasha discovers a new purpose, cancelling his resignation and committing to minutely recording what happens when totalitarianism and its usual death cult grips a nation.
Life becomes progressively worse in Karabash, with young men conscripted, sent to the front, and often returning in coffins. The funeral scene for Pasha’s friend Artyom—too dangerous by now to film—is all the more poignant and terrifying for the soundtrack that elucidates a grieving mother’s soul-destroying howls.
The time eventually comes for Pasha to leave Russia for his own safety, pulling off a daring departure that reveals the quiet courage of a man with a conscience.
Another side of Russia
This is a sensitive, honest, and beautifully shot film. Pasha acknowledges that his suffering and those of his friends who lost loved ones to the war cannot be compared with that of the Ukrainians. But the fact that he reveals another side of Russia—that of people who experienced freedom for three short decades and believe that that is the true birthright of Russians, not the hatred preached by Putin—makes this an important film that is both a beacon of light at a dark time and an important document for historians of the future.
