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Russia’s War in Ukraine

Understanding the conflict four years on.

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........

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