19 March 2026
by Kirill Rogov
Source: Facebook
Mr Nobody against Putin, is certainly not a bad movie. It’s no blockbuster, but it’s not half bad. (I actually watched it a rather long time ago, so maybe I missed something.) The film doesn’t portray a Russian school as a concentration camp whatsoever. On the contrary: it’s much more multi-layered. It features your typical ‘Soviet school’. The missive? The district said we need to prepare students for the Unified State Examination, so we’re going to prepare them. We’ve also received orders from on high for “talks about what’s important” and a “hero programme,” so essentially that means “what’s important” and “heroes,” in exactly the same tone and without any shift in intonation, which makes you want to hang yourself a little.
We encounter a guy who’s going off to the ‘Special Military Operation’. It’s unclear why – most likely to relive that moment of farewell, when you’re right there in the centre, everyone’s hugging, the lads around you saying things like, “Andryukha, we’re always there you know, remember us as we are,” and so on. The heat of emotion, the thirst of the unsatisfied. We witness a girl in the throes of puberty with a burning desire to have sex. Her brother died in the ‘SMO’. She feels incredibly sad about it, but his death makes her more interesting in the eyes of “everyone”. What to think about this and how to deal with it is completely unclear.
It’s all in there, as far as I remember. And it’s interesting, while having almost no bearing on the current debate. BUT. There’s another problem. Many people in Russia, whose opinions matter to me, speak about the film with extreme irritation. I don’t feel that. And I’ve been thinking about this divergence for a long time. I need to understand it.
My hypothesis is this. It’s a difference in the languages of resistance. Those who left, they left so they could call war “war”, murder “murder”, and so on. And they maximize this function of their speech. They speak more radically to compensate for the censored reticence “within”.
Those in Russia understand that this isn’t an option. If you call murders “murders”, what will happen? At five thirty in the morning, the security forces will come, turn your house upside down, your mother will shake violently, the children will cower in a corner, and you’ll be dragged off to pretrial detention. And nothing will happen.
They’re inventing other languages of resistance. As N wrote, you’re riding on a train, and there might be a ‘special military operation’ officer in your compartment, so what are you going to do? You have to get there without causing a scene or giving up your position. You have to invent a different language of resistance.
The language spoken by those who left seems from this perspective false, almost mendacious, “designed for grants.” For those who left, on the contrary, this language of resistance, invented “from within”, seems equally false, a “Stockholm syndrome” that’s akin to capitulation.
Let’s remember these different perspectives. And many chairs will remain unbroken. It’ll be better that way. The argument “you should have left too” is the same as the argument “why did you leave? Were you scared? Did you run away to get grants?”
What we are trying to get at is this: there are different languages of resistance, and “S” in this context is “solidarity.”
Translated by Nathalie Wilson
