1. Get audio access with any FP subscription.

   Subscribe Now

   ALREADY AN FP SUBSCRIBER? LOGIN

Pavel Talankin, the unlikely star of the Oscar-nominated documentary Mr Nobody Against Putin, is, by his own account, a bit of an odd duck. He informs us that he owns precisely 427 books, all carefully arranged by color. He shows us a photo of himself as a little boy with a bright blue floppy ribbon on the top of his head. “As a young student I knew that I was different from the other boys, even if I had no idea why,” he says. “Maybe this is why I was always alone.”

Having read about Talankin’s film before I watched it, I expected to see trenchant commentary on the militarization of Russian schools in the era of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s all-out war on Ukraine. I wasn’t disappointed. Talankin worked as the events coordinator and videographer for the elementary school in his hometown of Karabash (a town of roughly 10,000 in the Ural Mountains). Using footage he took at the school, he offers a snapshot of Russia’s descent into fascism—from the school’s grenade-throwing competition to a history teacher who professes his admiration for Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s serial-raping secret police chief. (Imagine a modern-day German teacher saying, “Himmler and Heydrich were two of our country’s most impressive statesmen.”)

Pavel Talankin, the unlikely star of the Oscar-nominated documentary Mr Nobody Against Putin, is, by his own account, a bit of an odd duck. He informs us that he owns precisely 427 books, all carefully arranged by color. He shows us a photo of himself as a little boy with a bright blue floppy ribbon on the top of his head. “As a young student I knew that I was different from the other boys, even if I had no idea why,” he says. “Maybe this is why I was always alone.”

Having read about Talankin’s film before I watched it, I expected to see trenchant commentary on the militarization of Russian schools in the era of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s all-out war on Ukraine. I wasn’t disappointed. Talankin worked as the events coordinator and videographer for the elementary school in his hometown of Karabash (a town of roughly 10,000 in the Ural Mountains). Using footage he took at the school, he offers a snapshot of Russia’s descent into fascism—from the school’s grenade-throwing competition to a history teacher who professes his admiration for Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s serial-raping secret police chief. (Imagine a modern-day German teacher saying, “Himmler and Heydrich were two of our country’s most impressive statesmen.”)

Appalling as all this was, it didn’t come as much of a surprise. Anyone who has paid attention to Putin’s public statements about the war would have expected as much. What I didn’t expect from this film, however, was a nuanced study of the psychology of resistance told from the viewpoint of a person who realizes that his government is wrong and becomes determined to do something about it.

Talankin doesn’t dramatize his own role at all. When he thinks about the anti-war protesters he’s seen on the internet, he’s forced to admit that he would never be able to do the same: “I wish I could be as brave as them. But I’m not.”

Yet for some mysterious reason he just can’t help thinking for himself, despite living in a place where the overwhelming majority of people are willing to conform. Just to make things worse, he feels a deep and abiding affection for his community, the school where he teaches, and the people that surround him—all of which makes his own political estrangement, which deepens as the war (and the film) go on, especially painful. Seeing no other outlet for his frustration, he ends up surreptitiously collaborating with an American filmmaker based in Europe on a project to track the wartime deformation of Russian society from within.

He shows us military drills for sixth graders. He shows us a teacher tripping over government jargon in a statement she’s been ordered to read for his camera. He shows us a visit by Wagner Group mercenaries—notorious for the atrocities they’ve committed in Ukraine and elsewhere—who show off weapons and warn their elementary-school audience to leave helmet straps unbuttoned: “​​It will break your neck if you get shot in the head.” The Beria-admiring teacher informs his class that Western sanctions are hurting Europeans more than Russians: “In France, to fill the tank with petrol, you need more than 150 euros. So the French will soon be like musketeers, riding horses, and the rest of Europe too.”

The ground-level perspective of the footage—which documents life in a provincial backwater far from the well-reported worlds of Moscow and St. Petersburg—would have made this film genuinely compelling in its own right. But it is Talankin’s own presence that makes the story truly unique. As he eventually realizes, the point of all the indoctrination is not just to bring the majority into line with government dogma; it’s also to intimidate and marginalize the minority of citizens who, like him, are still able to think with a modicum of independence. “I love my job but I don’t want to become a pawn of this regime,” he notes at one point. Forced to film a pro-war rally, he feels an almost palpable disgust about his own role. “I feel like I’m an alien in my own hometown.”

In the pre-2022 era, Talankin tells us, he had managed to transform the school into a kind of surrogate family. He turned his own small room in the school into a safe space for pupils. It became a place where no one took offense at the pro-opposition flag on his wall and where venting about sensitive themes raised no eyebrows. But as his isolation deepens, he can’t help indulging in symbolic anti-regime acts with potentially devastating consequences—such as playing Lady Gaga’s version of the U.S. national anthem on the school loudspeaker during an official event. There is, indeed, a paradoxical lightness to his treatment of depressing material that saves the film from becoming a dreary screed.

The more manifest his opposition, the more those close to him fall away. One of his favorite students, a girl named Masha, loses her brother on the front in Ukraine; Talankin is clearly wounded by her refusal to open up to him about her bereavement. It gradually becomes clear to him that his work with the foreign filmmakers will have inescapable consequences: He is forced to emigrate, not knowing if he’ll ever be able to come back. (He left Russia in 2024.)

I’ve always been fascinated by those people who choose to do the right thing despite the rejection and hostility of those around them. For every heroic activist who receives accolades and support, there are uncountable others who face ostracism, isolation, even physical violence. Indeed, as we saw in January in Iran, public dissent sometimes translates into slaughter and a nameless grave. Why, precisely, there are individuals who opt for the high-cost path of resistance remains mysterious. Has Talankin become an oppositionist because he’s always felt like an outsider? Perhaps. But he is most certainly not a bitter and vengeful revolutionary. He’s actually a dedicated local patriot, which is even more remarkable when you consider that his gritty place of origin has been described as “one of Russia’s most polluted towns.” One wonders how he will fare in exile. It is not going to be easy.

“Love for your country is not about putting up a flag,” Talankin says in a voice-over. “It is not about singing the anthem either. It’s not about exploitation and propaganda.” Sometimes, indeed, it can mean taking the lonelier path. Mr Nobody Against Putin is a minor miracle.

This post appeared in the FP Weekend newsletter, a weekly showcase of book reviews, deep dives, and features. Sign up here.