KIDS NO OLDER THAN 12 line up in military formation and then goose-step down the hallway of a school. A teacher conducting a lesson in patriotism tells a group of bewildered-looking students that anyone who doesn’t like what his or her country is doing should just leave. During a military drill, a young boy aims a rifle and points it at the camera. At a funeral for a soldier killed at Bakhmut, the dead man’s mother screams and wails, “No, no! My sweet boy!”—but we only hear the recorded sounds against the black screen: filming the funeral would have been too dangerous.

These are just a few scenes from Mr. Nobody Against Putin, the ninety-minute film that won the Oscar for Best Documentary on Sunday. Its provenance has a darkly ironic twist: 35-year-old Pavel “Pasha” Talankin—formerly a teacher, extracurricular activities coordinator, and videographer at a school in Karabash, a small mining town in the Urals region of Russia—shot most of the footage as part of a Ministry of Education directive, shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, to document patriotic education. Instead, after establishing contact with American documentary filmmaker David Borenstein via the internet, Talankin managed to smuggle out the footage on a supposed vacation trip to Turkey from which he never returned. The result is this film, directed by Borenstein and Talankin.

Clearly a maverick in his conservative town—his own mother, the school librarian, treats him as a weirdo—Talankin had been a friend and mentor to nonconformist kids for whom his school office was a haven of freedom. But the war quickly invades his world. Soon, the school schedule fills with military activities: “Marching practice, shooting drills, grenade throwing competitions.” In a particularly sinister scene, mercenaries from the infamous Wagner Group are brought in to talk to the kids about their exploits in Ukraine and pose for group photos; decorations at the event include banners with the Nazi-aesthetic Wagner logo, a white skull on a black-and-red background.1

Meanwhile, a recently graduated boy who had been close to Talankin, Ivan, gets conscripted and later sent to Ukraine. A current student, Masha, worries about her brother, who has been drafted; at one point, she reports that he called via a messenger app, “bawling” about all the dead men in his unit. Toward the end, a morosely dry-eyed Masha is visiting her brother’s grave; we learn that he had deserted, only to be captured, sent back to the frontlines, and killed.

The younger children, meanwhile, are being groomed to succeed them as cannon fodder. Watching students from his school march in the local Victory Day parade with large photos of fallen heroes, Talankin observes that the message to kids is, “Maybe one day you’ll be a dead soldier, too.”

Get 20% off for 1 year

THE SUCCESS OF MR. NOBODY AGAINST PUTIN inevitably stirred some controversies. While the Russian media mostly ignored the film’s awards—in addition to the Oscar, it won Best Documentary at the BAFTAs last month—there were several attempts to smear Talankin. Russia’s presidential council for “human rights” blasted the documentary for featuring children without parental consent. (Several kids who appeared in the film have said, albeit anonymously, that they approve.) Oscar-winning filmmaker and Putin crony Nikita Mikhalkov preposterously claimed that Talankin “forced” students to engage in histrionic patriotic displays for his “propaganda” material, while the tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets called Talankin a “stalker” and dropped sleazy hints about pedophilia.

But there was also, as with the 2023 Best Documentary Oscar for HBO’s Navalny, a backlash from Ukrainians and Ukraine supporters who bristle at the West’s perceived tendency to whitewash Russia and elevate Russian voices over Ukrainian ones—in this case, by passing over Ukraine’s Best Documentary submission: 2000 Meters to Andriivka, a film chronicling the Ukrainian war effort.2

American journalist Chris Sampson, who has spent the last four years in Ukraine, believes that Talankin is the latest iteration of the “Good Russian,” a comforting myth that allows Western liberals to think of the war as merely “Putin’s war” and avoid reckoning with the nationalism and warmongering ingrained in Russian society and culture. But Mr. Nobody Against Putin does no such thing: While Talankin is emphatic that this was a war unleashed and continued by one man, he also shows that Putin’s propaganda taps into something already present in the culture.

Share

Case in point: one of the film’s main characters, history and social science teacher Pavel Abdulmanov, who exudes a very true-believer vibe. In a grimly hilarious early scene, he is shown assuring the kids that European trade sanctions against Russia would soon leave Europe itself without food and gas. Later, when Talankin, still ostensibly recording patriotic education material, quizzes his colleague about historical figures he would most like to meet, Abdulmanov names several Stalin henchmen. Later on, he wins the town’s “favorite teacher” award (with a brand-new apartment as the prize), supposedly based on student voting. This is one case where you really want to hope the vote was rigged, but who knows? The point, though, is that Abdulmanov wasn’t bred in a Kremlin lab; he’s a product of Russian society and represents views and attitudes that are far from marginal.

Sampson also argues that Talankin’s Oscar acceptance remarks, which mentioned generic bombs and drones and ended with a call to “stop all wars,” flattened the moral distinction between Russia and Ukraine. I disagree, and the film itself rebuts any such moral equivalency;3 but the speech did, so to speak, “All Lives Matter” the subject. Meanwhile, Borenstein focused on American analogies, saying that Mr. Nobody is “about how you lose your country” through “little acts of complicity.” I don’t think parallels between Putin’s Russia and Donald Trump’s America are completely frivolous (though Russia before February 2022 was already authoritarian in ways unthinkable in the United States today), but the fact that neither creator of a documentary stemming from the war in Ukraine uttered the word “Ukraine” on the Academy Awards stage is grating.

Still, that doesn’t detract either from Talankin’s extraordinary courage or from the film’s exposé of the Russian war propaganda machine. Never mind what was or wasn’t said on the stage: Mr. Nobody Against Putin is a compelling indictment of both Putin’s war in Ukraine and the society that enables it. And it’s a warning that, even if Putin were to die tomorrow, the mess in Russia would hardly be over. Closely watching the subtle shifts toward militarism among the school’s students—and the fact that young local men continue to sign up for service in Ukraine even as the war grows deadlier—Talankin notes: “The kids have been taught well.”

Leave a comment