Mr Nobody Against Putin
A film by David Borenstein and Pavel Talankin, 2025
The Good Russian
By Jana Bakunina
Published by The Bridge Street Press, 2025, £12-99
Reviewed by Clare Doyle
For anyone outside Russia struggling to understand the apparent quiescence of its population towards Vladimir Putin and his war-mongering machine, a new film, Mr Nobody Against Putin, and a new book, The Good Russian, go a long way in portraying – if not totally explaining – the phenomenon.
Severe punishment for the slightest dissent is one factor that has put a stop to nearly all street protests and public criticism in the media. But this film and the book dig deep into the way Putin’s propaganda is put over and assimilated by a population – young and old – who have no access to alternative ‘explanations’ of how things have come to the state they are in now.
The film is mostly made up of footage taken by a ‘concerned’ and courageous media studies teacher – Pavel Talankin. The school is in Karabash – a run-down copper-mining town in the west of the Ural mountains. It captures the daily life of students, and their teachers. Talankin films lessons, ‘playtimes’, sports and social events (and even his own mother in her role as librarian at the school). He shows students seeing off friends and brothers to the killing fields of Ukraine and so-called history lessons that are little different from those of the Stalin-era.
Talankin is obviously loved by his students for his honesty and thoughtfulness, but he can no longer stay safely in his homeland. His heart bleeds as he leaves his home country to tell the truth, with his film, of what is going on in Putin’s Russia.
The teacher/film-maker – the ‘Mr Nobody’ of the title – films his own escape across borders to Denmark, where he now lives in exile. At a showing of his film in London, Talankin spoke of the compulsion he felt to tell the truth about Putin’s iron grip on society. But like most such conscientious critics of Putin, he has no conception of how a fight can be waged for an end to Putin and his oligarchic and dictatorial rule.
Jana Bakunina, author of The Good Russian, has now lived for several years far away from her native city of Ekaterinburg. It is also in the Urals but far more prosperous than Pavel’s home town. As she visits her now ageing parents, they plead with her to return home. Naturally, they miss seeing their children and hearing about their lives.
Also, naturally, as Jana explains, exiles from the vast Russian Federation still want to be reading Russian classics, preparing and eating Russian food, listening to Russian music, watching much-loved Russian films. They would very much like to return home but it is the stifling of all honest debate and discussion about what is happening in their country and in Ukraine – even amongst family members – that keeps Jana from going back. So many of her family and friends tell her things like: “The majority of Russians are genuinely happy with Putin”… “Russia isn’t suited to democratic rule. We are better off with a tsar. Even if the tsar locks up activists like Kara-Murza for saying ‘No to war!’”. This is what the ‘Good Russians’ of the book’s title say – people who defend Putin’s ‘Special Operation’ (war) in Ukraine, even when their own sons and husbands are mobilised to the killing fields.
Jana is also appalled that “horoscopes have become a regular feature of TV and radio shows, newspapers and on-line media portals”. “It is a curious development”, she comments, “in a country that in Soviet times took pride in its science and technology, economic progress, rationality and atheism”. She is also appalled that so little has been done to “process the Stalinist times as a nation”. Instead, new statues and portraits of the ‘Red Tsar’ (Stalin) have been erected again all over Russia. And, she writes, “in 2021, Russia’s Supreme Court ordered the closure of Memorial International, a human rights group founded in the 1980s, that built a database of the victims of Soviet (sic) repression”.
The author of The Good Russian grieves for the lost values she was brought up on such as the pursuit of world peace. “Russia in 2024”, she writes, “is Nineteen Eighty-Four on steroids”. The author takes a few crumbs of comfort from the fact that at least one or two independent news outlets survive. Also, across the vast country you still have something I personally witnessed in the early 1990s, “the uncensored discussions at the kitchen tables”.
Jana reminisces about her relatively care-free days at university in the Northern city of Leningrad and about summers at her family’s dacha in the countryside. She also recalls conversations with her grandfather. His family had been victims of Stalin’s purges, banished to concentration camps. He had been enthusiastic about Gorbachev’s ‘Glasnost’ and ‘Perestroika’ at the end of the last century. And then very disappointed with Boris Yeltsin, Putin and Dmitry Medveyev. This author also touches on the fate of those who are not such ‘Good Russians’, modern dissidents and journalists who long for (the impossible) clean, ‘democratic’ capitalism. Some of them have been involved in high-profile prisoner exchanges; others languish (and also perish) behind bars.
What is lacking in both the film and the book is any clear explanation of Putin’s rise to power and his apparently permanent hold on it. This is undoubtedly because neither the film-maker nor the writer has been able to assess the real history of their own country – the truth about Stalin, his political counter-revolution and his crushing of all democracy for generations. The reform from the top with Gorbachev and brutal gangster capitalism have failed to establish even the limited democracy of capitalist societies elsewhere.
In today’s Russia, and in all the countries of the former Soviet Union, the task is to build a movement to throw off the shackles of private ownership of industry, banks and land – of the gangster capitalism of the war-monger Putin.