17 March 2026
‘Of course, the film won an Oscar not on its professional merits, but for the uniqueness of its material and message.’
Source: Facebook
After several days of dithering, in the end I decided I would write about the film Mr Nobody Against Putin. I’ve been in exile now for four years, and so I try to tread very carefully when talking about what’s going on in Russia.
I saw the film last autumn, having been invited to take part in a discussion about it at the Cottbus [film] festival. I immediately liked the film, although, to put it kindly, it can hardly be regarded as a masterpiece of documentary filmmaking. For me, though, it did have authenticity. Only now, watching the discussion, have I understood why – and, moreover, why I can be confident in my own assessment.
Mr Nobody Against Putin neither confirmed nor denied my understanding of what it’s really like in Russia. The film did, however, make it identifiable.
I remember it like that, too, in 1986 or ‘87. It was your average Soviet school – quite literally average. It bore no relation to so-called ‘good’ schools, like the Moscow elite schools that would appear subsequently, but it wasn’t half bad. It was in the town of Reutov, just outside the Moscow Ring Road.
My parents were told to buy me a neckerchief – it was this blue-and-white sailor’s tie that we had to wear over our school shirts for a while. I think it had something to do with 23 February [Translator Comment: Defend the Fatherland Day]. For some reason, our school was connected, through a sort of patronage arrangement, with the Northern Fleet. Wearing these neckerchiefs, we had to parade around and salute for the flag raising ceremony. The “lucky” few got to stand in the guard of honour by a bust of Lenin, raising their hand in a pioneer salute for 15 minutes. Grenade throwing formed a mandatory part of the PE syllabus, as did committing the stories of pioneer heroes and other ‘Alexander Matrosovs’ to memory. Later on would come assembly and disassembly of the Kalashnikov assault rifle and shooting with air rifles.
You could get away with doing all this half-heartedly, taking whatever shortcuts you could get away with. But if you dared to make light of these, what we would now call ‘militaristic’, rituals out loud, you might face not only a ‘dressing down’ from teachers but also the opprobrium of classmates who would suddenly reveal themselves to have, what we again might these days call, ‘traditional gender attitudes’ about men and war.
All this took place against the backdrop of the Afghan war. But despite being a regular listener of the BBC, I was only vaguely aware of the horrors of that war.
I’ve never been to a shipping out ceremony before, but the corresponding scene from the film (one of the most powerful, to my mind) is distinctly reminiscent of the attitude towards military service that I encountered as a child, among my peers down in the courtyard. On the one hand, it’s compulsory service, but at the same time it’s male initiation. “Are you trying to dodge the draft or something?” a big local bully once asked me spitefully when I reasoned that it would be better not to join the army. I then had to suffer several punches and having my hat pulled down over my eyes.
It’s not like Mordor [in Russia], not at all; it’s just a fairly unpleasant part of everyday life that quietly fuels society’s willingness to tolerate and participate in war. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in Afghanistan or in Ukraine.
And that is precisely what I saw on the screen, plain and simple.
I also got the impression that the protagonist-filmmaker is being accused of using distancing as a technique. While filming much of the material, Talankin (or the film’s hero, if this is an editing and script thing), seems to have already had one foot overseas. Pretending to be part of the school community, he watches it from afar with an outside, judgemental perspective.
And this again reminds me of how I felt in my Soviet school. Although, of course, when I was 10, 11 or 12 years old, I didn’t have any plans to leave. You and your friends play Battleships in class or you skip those lessons. You take part in the parades and target practice, all the while mentally “giving them the finger behind your back”. You look at what’s happening around you with a “second” sight, increasingly (as you read various banned books) convinced that the social world around you is wrong and abnormal.
Of course, in modern Russia there are probably both excellent teachers who try to shield students from propaganda and utter bastards who indoctrinate people with brutish severity. I won’t attempt to judge which sort of teacher outnumbers the other.
I think Mr Nobody Against Putin captures what things are like quite accurately, although it doesn’t describe it in its entirety. What it does describe says more about the banality of evil than it does about violent fanaticism, that’s for sure. Of course, the film won an Oscar not on its professional merits, but for the uniqueness of its material and message. Hopefully this will give it a wider release than it might otherwise have had. We watch films as art or for pleasure, but you get some films that are worth watching simply to understand how life works. And it’s not always about forming an all-encompassing view and doing deep analysis. Sometimes they are just a ‘valuable historical source’. Mr Nobody Against Putin is one of those cases.
Translated by Lindsay Munford
