As Russian tanks advanced into Ukraine in February 2022, Vladimir Putin was waging a parallel battle on the home front – one fought not with weapons but with ideology, reaching deep into the nation’s classrooms.
In a high school in Karabash, a small industrial town in the Ural mountains, teacher Pavel Talankin knew he had to document it.
Almost overnight, the school – and the tight-knit community where the free-spirited Talankin, known as Pasha to his students, had embraced his role as a nonconformist educator – was overtaken by militarisation and war propaganda. As the school’s longtime videographer, Talankin was instructed by his superiors to document the implementation of the Kremlin’s new directive: shaping a generation steeped in ultra-nationalist views and ready to soon join the ranks of the army fighting in Ukraine.
Fiercely against the war, Talankin instead set out to capture and showcase to the world an unfiltered, insider’s view of how Putin’s war on Ukraine was shaping the lives of Russia’s children. “I immediately knew this had to be preserved for the historical record. I quickly realised this material can’t be lost,” Talankin told the Observer.
The recordings would turn into Mr Nobody Against Putin, a thrilling documentary that premiered last month at the Sundance film festival, where it won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award.
The idea for the film emerged in the early days of the war, when Talankin began reaching out to independent outlets, offering them his footage. Eventually his story reached David Borenstein, a US filmmaker who co-directed the project alongside Talankin.
Under the cover of following orders to meet the school’s propaganda quota, Talankin proceeded to take on a secret and extremely risky mission to document Putin’s information war at home. In a country where all independent journalism has been banned, Talankin said he had an unparalleled front-row seat to history. “Any journalist trying to film what was going on in schools would be immediately jailed. I was put in this unique situation,” he said.
“The Russian ministry of education would send extremely detailed orders that certain lessons had to be filmed, and I would go and film.”
In the documentary, Talankin shows how children are ordered to march with the Russian flag, read freshly printed history books that defend Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and compete in grenade-throwing tournaments.
War veterans, often former convicts from the notorious Wagner paramilitary group, visit schools to preach “patriotic values” to the children. Since the war began, Moscow has been spending millions of roubles to mould a new generation willing to give their lives in military service. Russian analysts have described the ideological indoctrination of teens as one of the areas where the Russian state comes closest to being totalitarian.
“Schools are one of the main places where they spread propaganda,” said Talankin. “Fascism can take root in the simplest ways – starting in schools, with children,” he added.
Shedding light on the campaign to transform Russian schools into instruments of militarisation, Putin himself declared last year: “Wars are won not by commanders but by schoolteachers.”
after newsletter promotion
In the film, Talankin offers a nuanced portrayal of how Russia’s militarisation seeps into his school. He captures teachers navigating the complexities of their roles – some fully embracing the country’s fervent pro-war sentiment, others quietly resisting. Among the former is Abdulmanov, a history teacher and staunch Putin supporter, who openly admires some of Stalin’s most infamous henchmen.
Others, however, struggle with their new roles as propagandists, confiding in Talankin their unease with the school’s shift in direction. “Many teachers don’t want to do this, but they’re trapped,” Talankin said.
“People study to become teachers and dream of educating children, then find themselves forced to spread propaganda.”
In Karabash, jobs are scarce, Talankin said, and for many – especially older teachers – uprooting their lives wasn’t an option. In the end, much of what happens in the classroom feels like staged roleplay for the cameras, with both teachers and students reading from prepared notes, reciting the answers the state expects.
“A Potemkin village,” Talankin remarks.
Yet, he warns, the effects of militarisation are real and tangible: “For younger children, everything their teacher says is taken as truth. The long-term impact of the military propaganda will be felt.”
Older students are often more sceptical, Talankin said, but he witnessed first-hand the power of propaganda on those around him. A few of his former classmates and friends decided to sign military contracts and fight in Ukraine – some coming home in coffins.
By the summer of 2024, Talankin felt the walls closing in. A police car lingered outside his home, and his anti-war views were becoming increasingly visible in Karabash just as Russia was tightening its grip on dissent with a wave of draconian laws. Without telling anyone – not even his mother – he fled Russia in June 2024, carrying with him seven hard drives of footage.
Since the release of his documentary, reactions in Karabash have been mixed. “Just yesterday, I got a message of support from someone back home. But before that, I received a lot of threats, long voicemails calling me a scumbag, a traitor to the Motherland,” he said.
Still, he hopes that many people in his home town and his native country will be able to watch the film. “I want as many people in Russia to see this as possible – not just in Karabash, but everywhere. For their own good.”