By A common teacher from rural Russia unmasks how the state propaganda works.
Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000 and began his fifth term as the country’s president in 2024. If he fills this out, he will rule for at least thirty years, just like Joseph Stalin. The war against Ukraine has not weakened Putin’s power, but rather consolidated it, and the regime is now trying to turn the entire Russian society against the West.
Pavel “Pasha” Talankin, as a videographer at a rural school, documented the pervasive influence of propaganda within the institution and the pressures to comply. His film, Mr. Nobody Against Putin, which was recently nominated for an Academy Award, illustrates the mechanisms of Russian war propaganda. Talankin left Russia in 2024 and now lives in Europe. We talked with him during the BIDF, the Budapest International Documentary Film Festival.
A Filmmaker’s Perspective on Propaganda
Everything changed on February 24, 2022, when Vladimir Putin launched a war – officially a special military operation – against Ukraine.
“Almost immediately, schools received directives to implement ideological education, including defense lessons, morning flag-raising ceremonies, marching drills for elementary students, and lectures describing how Western sanctions were self-destructive and aimed at destabilizing Russia through Ukraine,” said Pavel.
Talankin, who also worked as a teacher-organizer at Karabash School #1, was given the task of recording these events and forwarding them to the state organs in order to prove that the school met the prescribed patriotic educational task.
“The schools were forced to hold ‘patriotic lessons’ at the expense of school learning.
The compulsory teaching of ideological subjects, which they called ‘Conversations About Important Things.’ This is relatively mild propaganda,” he recites.
Politics in Public Institutions
Talankin comes from Karabas in the South Urals, known for its poor air quality and unhealthy environment due to mining, which he spoke fondly of despite the greyness, as well as his former school.
A screengrab from the documentary Mr. Nobody Against Putin BIDF.hu
However, as he documented in the film, apart from the parade of the tiny pro-war crowd, “there are no political demonstrations in Karabas, and you don’t just start talking to anyone about what you think about a political issue.”
On the other hand, in his school, as a public institution, politics is very much present. Teachers featured in the film discuss the decline in academic performance resulting from the stress induced by ideological classes. Educators are required to follow specific themes and materials provided by the Ministry of Education. Government propaganda employs language that obscures reality and attempts to conceal the fact that Russia has initiated a war against Ukraine.
“Their task was to recite state propaganda, using terms such as ‘demilitarization’ and ‘de-Nazification’—words they could not even pronounce,” Talankin recalls, referencing a scene from the film.
“And there were the occasions when soldiers of the Wagner private army, which also recruited from prison, came to the school to talk about weapons and landmines.”
Discrepancy Between Rhetoric and Reality
The result is very effective; even the older students are somewhat critical of these subjects, the younger ones mechanically recite what they are taught and believe it. They hate Ukrainians and everything that is “Western”.
Although the number of fallen soldiers is not officially recorded, propaganda efforts seek to construct a hero cult around those who have died.
However, cynicism persisted even after the death of Pavel’s friend, Artyom: although a military representative attended his funeral and he was buried as a soldier, he was not included in the official statistics of Russian military casualties in Ukraine. Consequently, his family did not receive the burial allowance to which they were entitled.
A screengrab from the documentary Mr. Nobody Against Putin BIDF.hu
Talankin believes that numerous fallen soldiers are similarly excluded from official casualty figures.
Effectiveness of Propaganda
When asked about the source of Putin’s propaganda’s effectiveness, the co-director responds: “To lie, lie again, and to repeat it unscrupulously.”
“My film shows how Putin is raising a generation of children who are loyal to him, so the Putin regime will not end with Putin but will live on,” Pavel states. He adds, “people might feel a slight sense of relief, but just like in the late 1990s, things would quickly revert back to how they were before.”
Whatever the end of the war against Ukraine, it will be sold as a victory. Now the words are far from reality. For example, there was the Year of Families, while the birth rate has been falling, or there was the Year of Teachers, announced in 2023, when 193 thousand teachers left the profession in a single year,” summarizes the former teacher.
