I’ve always held a deep interest in the Russian people—their resilience, their history, and the reality of their daily lives far away from the geopolitical grandstanding in Moscow. The Oscar-winning documentary Mr. Nobody Against Putin provides a rare, unvarnished window into that world, exposing how deeply Vladimir Putin’s propaganda apparatus has penetrated ordinary Russian society and its school systems.
Set in Karabash—a small copper-mining town of around 10,000 people near the Ural Mountains—the film doesn't rely on outside commentary or dramatic staging. Instead, it lets the everyday reality speak for itself. We watch as mandatory "patriotic education," military lectures by mercenaries, and state-directed rituals slowly reshape the minds of young children. Seeing innocent school halls transform into pipeline centers for wartime ideology is both heartbreaking and chilling.
What makes the film truly devastating is how it charts the gradual, almost imperceptible psychological shift among the students.
Initially, the state-mandated weekly "Conversations about Important Things" assemblies and flag-raising ceremonies are met by the children with typical adolescent detachment—boredom, eye-rolls, and polite indifference. But month after month, the state's saturation tactic wears down that natural resistance.
The film captures a terrifying normalize-and-militarize pipeline:
Play turned into combat preparation: Playground games and routine gym classes shift into grenade-throwing exercises, assembly lines for packing medical kits, and drills disassembly-assembling semi-automatic rifles.
The presence of violence as instruction: Mercenaries from the Wagner Group enter classrooms in full combat kit to deliver guest lectures, reframing violence not as a tragedy, but as a noble civic duty.
Rebranding grief as honor: When former students die on the front lines in Ukraine, their deaths aren't mourned as waste; they are canonized in mandatory memorial events, teaching younger students that their highest potential value to society is self-sacrifice for the regime.
Through Pasha’s lens, we see how propaganda in an isolated environment doesn't always rely on active belief; it relies on inevitability. Over two years, the kids stop questioning why they are writing letters to soldiers or practicing war drills. War ceases to be an external event—it becomes their identity and their default baseline of reality.
I first learned about this from This American Life episode, Act 2.
I recommend you do not listen to Act 1; it can be very graphic listen (although absolutely important and relevant). Act 2 is about the current topic.
What makes this film extraordinary, however, is Pavel "Pasha" Talankin. As the school’s videographer and event coordinator, Pasha took an unthinkable risk. tasked with filing official proof-of-compliance videos to state portals, he quietly kept the raw hard drives, documenting the regime's indoctrination from the inside over two years before smuggling them out of the country.
Winner of the 2026 Academy award for the Best Documentary
Available on Amazon Prime Video. You may have to purchase, based on your country and subscription levels.
Sometimes they wear a quiet smile, hold an amateur camera, and risk everything simply to ensure the truth isn't erased. Pasha’s quiet defiance proves that even in the most isolated corners of an authoritarian regime, moral clarity and individual courage still exist.If you want to understand what is truly happening to the hearts and minds of everyday Russians today, this documentary is required viewing.
