YoTo see the Oscar-nominated documentary, in which many of them have leading roles, students at Karabash School No. 1 had to obtain pirated copies and watch the film in private, on their phones or laptops.
Last week’s Bafta best documentary award for Mr Nobody Against Putin has been studiously ignored by Russian state media, and the award the film won at Sundance last year was also met with silence. School staff and government officials in the Kremlin seem united in their desire to pretend they know nothing about the film.
But Pavel Talankin, a schoolteacher, co-director and hero of the documentary, is hopeful that the film’s inclusion in the Oscars later this month will make more Russians aware of its existence.
Their images show their colleagues grappling with the launch of a new government-mandated patriotic education program designed to turn elementary school children into Putin enthusiasts and supporters of the war against Ukraine. The documentary reveals Russia’s powerful propaganda machine in action.
“I hope in the future it helps these kids understand that they were victims of all this,” Talankin says. “This film is aimed primarily at Russians and shows them what is happening now inside their schools.”
Talankin, whose role at the school was to coordinate and film school events and extracurricular activities, spent two and a half years documenting the mass indoctrination campaign. Images of classes had to be periodically uploaded to a government website as proof that staff were meeting the patriotic teaching quota required by the Ministry of Education.
He also took a great risk to himself by sending the images out of the country to American director David Borenstein, who began working on editing them for a film.
The documentary shows docile and obedient children, who at first seem bored and confused by the classes, and little by little they absorb the new material. Before the start of the war against Ukraine, they line up to sing joyous choruses declaring: “Let there always be sunshine; let there always be sky.” A few months later, we see them clutching their heads in worry and incomprehension as their teachers read government scripts about the Russian military’s goals in Ukraine, stumbling over unfamiliar words like “denazification” and “demilitarization.”
Soon, the school hallways echo with the noise of children marching soberly through the building, backs straight and arms swinging in unison. Representatives from the paramilitary organization Wagner visit them to teach them how to identify and avoid landmines that could blow off their legs. Grenade throwing competitions replace the usual sports classes. Meanwhile, at home on TV, children watch talk shows in which Russian soldiers talk about the war and utter phrases like: “We should not kill them (Ukrainians) out of hatred, we should kill them out of love for our own children.”
“Propaganda is very effective,” says Talankin, 34, speaking in London two days after winning the Bafta. “The state spends a lot of money on this; they wouldn’t bother if it didn’t work.”
The cumulative effect of introducing these classes in thousands of primary schools across Russia’s 11 time zones is significant. “Putin’s government is doing everything it can to create a generation loyal to its politics. The film highlights not only what is happening now, but how when these children leave education, in 10 or 15 years, a new generation of Putin loyalists will have been created,” he said.
This indoctrination program has a negative impact on the normal education of children. An emergency staff meeting is called to discuss why grades have dropped drastically at the school. Some teachers wonder if this could be because so much time is devoted to the new patriotism classes. The principal wearily says that she would be fired if she chose to stop teaching that subject. “It’s impossible to get into Russian schools with a camera, so being able to hear her say it makes this, in my opinion, the most important scene in the film,” he says.
Talankin is impressed that so many people in Karabash, a small industrial city in the Urals, were able to see the film. Pirated copies were passed from person to person, like samizdat volumes of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s banned works in the Soviet Union, he says. “Parents didn’t really know what was being taught in these classes. Some people have written to me with gratitude, others have told me that we will break your knees the next time we see you.”
When local officials learned that the film had been widely viewed in the city, they sent agents from the state intelligence agency FSB to the school to speak with teachers. “They brought the school leaders together and said, this person didn’t exist and doesn’t exist and you shouldn’t contact him; this movie didn’t exist and doesn’t exist and you shouldn’t make any comments about it.”
For Talankin it is important to believe that the film will end up having an impact in Russia, because his involvement in the documentary has forced him to leave his family and flee the country in which he had lived all his life to avoid being arrested for dissent. Repressive and updated anti-treason laws were introduced while he was filming, and if his project was discovered, he faced the threat of life in prison.
The day after the school’s graduation ceremony in 2024, he told his mother (the school librarian), his friends, and his colleagues that he was going on vacation to Turkey for a week, packed a suitcase with copies of all his recordings, and left the country in the hope that his bags would not be searched.
He knows that he will not be able to return home and has obtained political asylum in Europe. He believes the personal sacrifice was worth it. “It is better to talk about problems than to remain silent about them.”
In his Bafta acceptance speech, Borenstein highlighted the extreme bravery displayed by Talankin. “He is not Mr. Nobody. I wanted to show how quickly totalitarianism can take over a school, a workplace, a government. And how our complicity becomes fuel for that fire,” he told the audience.
“When a treason law threatened to imprison him, he kept filming. When a police car started parking outside his house, he kept filming. And when he had to sacrifice his entire life in Russia to smuggle these images out, he didn’t hesitate. No matter who we are, there is always power in our actions. Courage is found in unlikely places. We need more Mr Nobodies.”
