Oscar-nominated ‘Mr. Nobody Against Putin’ exposes Russian passivity

"At the moment, I have no idea how much trouble I'm going to cause myself in the future," says Pavel Talankin at the very beginning of the documentary "Mr. Nobody Against Putin."

Not every story about Russian propaganda demonstrates its power. Some merely highlight the self-dramatization of the Russian people and their real position — that in their own country, they are nobodies and will not even try to change that. So the audience is left with a distorted sense of agency, shaped by the denial of collective responsibility.

Talankin, a Russian schoolteacher and co-director of the film, secretly recorded everyday life inside his school to show how it changed under the pressure of state propaganda after 2022.

International commentators have thanked the author for his courage, calling him "a teacher who challenged the system." The film has received an award at the Sundance Film Festival and a BAFTA award, and this year it was nominated for the Oscar's Best Documentary Feature Film category.

With all this in mind, I sat down to watch the documentary expecting to see something genuinely important and disturbing.

I know how aggressive and systematic Russia's actions in education can be. As a journalist,  I have been collecting and analyzing changes imposed on schools in the occupied territories of Ukraine for about 4 years now.

A few things crossed my mind after watching the film.

Pavel Talankin is a 34-year-old teacher-organizer and school videographer in the town of Karabash, a city of around 10,000 people. Part of his job involves filming patriotic events at the school where he works and submitting these videos as reports to the authorities.

Among the film's characters are Talankin's mother, a librarian who supports Putin; several of his friends who are drafted into the Russian army and go off to serve; and a teenage girl named Masha, whose brother fought against Ukraine and was killed.

One episode in the film focuses on a 49-year-old history teacher, Pavel Abdulmanov, who enthusiastically promotes Kremlin narratives about a starving West and openly justifies the invasion of Ukraine.

"In most European countries, there's no agricultural production either. No wheat, no oils, nothing," Abdulmanov tells his students in the film. "The French, okay — they're used to eating oysters and frogs, they'll hold out for a while. But what about everyone else?"

What genuinely surprised me was that Talankin excuses the history teacher's behavior, explaining it as the result of being "washed by propaganda."

In other words, an educated adult man — a history teacher whose profession is grounded in working with facts — was simply unable to resist Russian propaganda? Why does the filmmaker not consider the possibility that Abdulmanov sincerely supports Putin's ideology and the actions of the state?

In one of his interviews, Talankin reiterates this same idea when asked what he finds most alarming about the transformation of schools into a repressive instrument.

"I felt very sorry for the teachers who are forced to do this," Talankin says. "It feels like they are hostages of the system as well. So much is happening, the workload is so overwhelming, that sometimes they can no longer tell where the truth is and where the lie is."

This individualistic ethic runs as a common thread through both the film and Talankin's subsequent public statements. It is an approach that plays particularly well for international audiences, because it removes the need to speak about the collective responsibility of the Russian nation and reparations owed to Ukrainians. I can't shake the impression that the film indulges the infantilism of ordinary Russians.

At the same time, "Mr. Nobody Against Putin" does show several concrete examples of patriotic innovations introduced after 2022 at the Russian school where the co-director worked.

Fighters from the private military company Wagner give lessons to children, students write letters to soldiers at the front, and the Russian government has created an analogue of the Soviet-era Pioneer organization— the Movement of the First.

Yet the goal of the Russian authorities goes far beyond simply creating loyal youth out of Russian schoolchildren. All these measures — and sometimes far more aggressive and coercive ones — are applied across all territories of Ukraine occupied by Russia.  In the investigative documentary The War They Play, we exposed Russia's vast system of indoctrinating Ukrainian children, using education and leisure programs to build Russia's future army.

That investigation also features former Wagner fighter Yegor Sokov. He fought near Soledar and Popasna — cities in eastern Ukraine that were completely destroyed by Russia. Sokov was one of the instructors at the Avangard defense and sports camp in Russia, which hosted Ukrainian children.

Over the course of several months working on the film, we discovered that Russian military personnel use various youth organizations to train Ukrainian teenagers in the occupied territories in small arms combat and drone control. Young people are forced to obtain Russian passports, and any expression of Ukrainian identity becomes dangerous to these youngsters.

Judging by the activities shown at the Russian school where Pavel Talankin worked, those students were, in a sense, relatively lucky — especially compared to young Ukrainians in the occupied parts of Kherson and oblasts.

Meanwhile, in his film, Talankin also attempts what he describes as "super risky decisions" — playing the U.S. national anthem performed by Lady Gaga, or taping the letter "X" on school windows, which he claims symbolizes solidarity with Ukrainian refugees.

This was the first time I — as well as several dozen Ukrainians I asked — had ever heard of such a symbol in nearly four years of full-scale war.

By the summer of 2024, Talankin leaves Russia in order to work safely on the film, leaving viewers with the conclusion that "anyone who tries in some way to resist this system is Mr. Nobody."

Still, I did not notice these efforts to resist in the film itself. What I did notice was the canonical image of the "good Russian" — emotionally appealing to a foreign audience and convenient for empathy. After all, they are portrayed as a nation of "small people," sincere in their naivety, victims of state villainy rather than its accomplices.

Editor's note: The opinions expressed in the op-ed section are those of the authors and do not purport to reflect the views of the Kyiv Independent.

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