How 'Mr. Nobody Against Putin' struggles with uncomfortable truths of wartime Russia

"I wish I could be as brave as them," says Pavel Talankin, a school videographer in the industrial town of Karabash, speaking of Russians who protested the invasion of Ukraine in its first days. "But I'm not."

The line is not self-pitying so much as diagnostic, and it becomes the foundation of"Mr. Nobody Against Putin," an Academy Award-nominated documentary that offers one of the clearest portraits of how Russian authoritarianism sustains itself not through mass fanaticism, but through routine moral abdication and prioritizing one’s own survival.

After the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the school where Talankin works is methodically repurposed. What was once an educational institution becomes an extension of the state's war machinery. The children are prepared by their teachers — both mentally and physically — for a permanent state of war that awaits them as their destiny.

Talankin, horrified by what is happening, does the only thing he knows how to do: he films it.

The school is required to produce propaganda and upload videos to a government portal. Teachers and students recite prewritten scripts about the glory of the Russian military and the existential threat posed by the so-called "Ukrainian Nazis." But Talankin also begins filming something else: the awkward reality behind the performances, the mechanisms of indoctrination laid bare. He plans to show the world, as he puts it, how his beloved school, its teachers and students, are "sinking into the abyss."

Being the school videographer gives him a kind of institutional camouflage. A camera doesn't register as a threat — at least not right away. It lets him capture not just the pageantry, but the slippages: the strained smiles, the off-script unease, the dawning recognition, among the few who still have a conscience, of what this place is becoming. Still, as he himself notes later on in the documentary, filming becomes an increasingly dangerous act.

The new "patriotic" curriculum begins to take precedence over regular classes, and some of the teachers complain that their students are beginning to fall behind in their regular coursework. The students write letters of support to the Russian soldiers killing Ukrainians. They practice military drills in school hallways. They are taught to throw grenades. Wagner mercenaries visit to lecture the students on how to recognize mines and survive gunshot wounds.

Teachers are made to read scripts prepared by the state. They stumble over phrases like "denazification" and "demilitarization." In one darkly funny scene, Talankin calls a teacher from behind the camera to start over, and implies that her lack of ability to pronounce such words means she herself doesn't understand what "knowledge" she is imparting to the children. The awkwardness is revealing. These are not meant to be lessons. They are loyalty tests — ritualized words meant not to persuade, but to enforce submission.

What matters is not whether people believe it, though. Most of the teachers recognize the absurdity of it all, but they fall silent when Talankin suggests in the teacher's lounge that they just stop implementing the new curriculum. They all know refusal carries professional, social, and even legal consequences. And so they comply. They nod, they read the scripts through uncomfortable laughs and awkward smiles, and they oversee the military drills.

There are true believers among the faculty, among them a history teacher who praises Joseph Stalin's executioners and lectures students about how those who don't unconditionally love their motherland are "parasites" who need to disappear.

And that leaves the question the film circles, but never fully names: what responsibility falls to those who oppose the war in private, but continue to live as usual?

Some Russian citizens do their own small part to undermine the war effort at home at great personal risk to their safety. Some Russians even take up arms for Ukraine, knowing that any hope of a "beautiful Russia of the future" depends on the Kremlin's total military defeat.

Most, however, inhabit the space in between. Most people don’t want to be heroes, let alone martyrs. They do not actively commit crimes against Ukraine, but they do not actively resist the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin, either. In their silence and caution, the system endures. The documentary's uncomfortable truth is clear: an authoritarian regime is not sustained solely by ideologues. It is sustained by millions of people who calculate that the cost of refusal is higher than the cost of speaking out.

Yet fear, however legitimate, cannot become a shield against moral judgment. To watch this film from wartime Ukraine is difficult. On the one hand, it shows the world that this is not just Putin’s war. On the other hand, it shows how the fear of the masses enables it. How can anyone tell Ukrainians they have no right to look with anger at those Russians who watch the machinery of war grind forward while trying to preserve their daily routines? Who sees destroyed cities, mass graves, millions displaced, and decides that living as usual is an acceptable response?

These questions recall the unsettling power of the 2023 film "The Zone of Interest," whose horror came not from explicit violence but from the ordinariness of domestic life unfolding next to a Nazi death camp. Its genius lies in showing that proximity to atrocity — even intimate, everyday proximity — does not guarantee moral recognition, let alone action. The human capacity for compartmentalization is nearly limitless.

To his credit, Talankin appears to have understood this. He never claims equivalence between the suffering of Ukrainians and Russians. He explicitly acknowledges in the documentary that what is happening in Ukraine is infinitely worse.

Yet what are we supposed to do with this documented helplessness? The documentary struggles to answer this question. At the end, it even retreats into the quiet solace of nostalgia, to a time when the town seemed happier, more wholesome. The very title of the documentary also obscures the message. It is not just Talankin who is Mr. Nobody – it is the average Russian citizen. If they are nobodies, we are left to wonder, what can they possibly do to stop it?

Talankin's anti-war stance is sincere, and his horror at what is happening, especially when his older male students accept the fate of going off to war, is gut wrenching. But the documentary is also analytically evasive. The paralysis of non-ideologues becomes its moral center, and in doing so, fear is aestheticized, survival transformed into quiet heroism. What the documentary gives us is not judgment, but melancholy. And melancholy, however understandable, does not stop the world from burning.

Note from the author:

Hi, this is Kate Tsurkan, thanks for reading this article. There is an ever-increasing amount of films about or related to Ukraine, Russia, and Russia's ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine available to a western audience, and I hope my recommendations prove useful when it comes to what you watch.

If you like reading about this sort of thing, please consider supporting The Kyiv Independent.

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The Kyiv IndependentKate Tsurkan