The Guardian

03/02/2026

In order to watch the Oscar-nominated documentary in which many of them have starring roles, pupils at Karabash School No 1 have had to source bootlegged copies, viewing the film in private, on their phones or their laptops.

Last week’s Bafta best documentary win for Mr Nobody Against Putin has been studiously ignored by Russian state media, and the prize the film won at Sundance last year was also met with silence. Staff at the school and government officials in the Kremlin seem united in their desire to pretend that they know nothing about the film.

But Pavel Talankin, school teacher, co-director and hero of the documentary, is hopeful that the film’s inclusion at the Oscars later this month will make more Russians aware of its existence.

His footage shows his colleagues grappling with the rollout of a new government-mandated, patriotic education programme designed to mould primary schoolchildren into Putin enthusiasts and supporters of the war against Ukraine. The documentary reveals Russia’s potent propaganda machine in action.

“I hope it will help these children in the future to understand that they were the victims of all this,” Talankin says. “This film is primarily aimed at Russians, showing them what is happening inside their schools now.”

Talankin, whose role at the school was to coordinate and film school events and extracurricular activities, spent two-and-a-half years documenting the mass indoctrination drive. Footage of the classes had to be uploaded regularly to a government website as evidence that staff were fulfilling the education ministry’s required quota of patriotic teaching.

He was also, at great risk to himself, sending the footage out of the country to US director David Borenstein, who began working on editing it into a film.

The documentary shows pliant, obedient children, who initially seem bored and confused by the classes, slowly absorbing the new material. Before the start of the war against Ukraine, they line up to sing cheerful choruses declaring: “May there always be sunshine; may there always be sky.” A few months later, we see them holding their heads in worried incomprehension as their teachers read out government scripts about the goals of the Russian army in Ukraine, and stumbling over unfamiliar words such as “denazification” and “demilitarisation”.

Soon, the school’s corridors echo to the noise of children soberly marching through the building, their backs straight, their arms swinging in unison. Representatives from the Wagner paramilitary organisation visit to teach them how to identify and step around mines that could blow their legs off. Grenade-throwing competitions replace regular sports classes. Meanwhile, at home on television, the children are watching chatshows on which Russian soldiers discuss the war, and utter phrases such as: “We mustn’t kill them [Ukrainians] out of hate, we must kill them out of love for our own children.”

“The propaganda is very effective,” Talankin, 34, says, speaking in London two days after the Bafta win. “The state spends a lot of money on it; they wouldn’t bother if it didn’t work.”

The cumulative effect of introducing these classes in thousands of primary schools across Russia’s 11 time zones is significant. “Putin’s government is doing everything it can to create a generation loyal to his politics. The film highlights not just what is happening now, but how when these children emerge from education, in 10 or 15 years’ time, a new generation of pro-Putin loyalists will have been created,” he said.