Mr. Nobody Against Putin Review

The measure of bravery is what you sacrifice for it. I consider Sasha Skochilenko brave - her case served as one of the flagship example of how Putin intimidates the public. Not only does she have health problems, her act of disobedience was so minute in comparison with the protest activity one could find during the first months of the war. Her getting the sentence was grotesque; it was a cruel joke played on every Russian. The Moskalyov family are brave, terrorized by the government to this day for a child’s drawing. There are countless other political prisoners in Russia who are brave - they put their principles before anything else and paid with their livelihoods, not to mention the risk of being broomstick raped in Russian prisons.

These cases serve as the reminder of The Wall for the Russian population. The Wall lives in the mind of every Russian and it separates politics and your personal life. It says: Stay within the borders of your own life, and you can live quite comfortably1. Cross that line, meddle in politics, and you will be punished - we don’t care whether you are sick, whether you are a child, whether you have to care about your sick parents - you crossed the invisible border and thus you shall be punished by the laws that were created to empower The Wall in your mind.

Few people can afford martyrdom. The life of a dissident is not for everyone, so many Russians today face this moral calculus and behave rationally: they do not dissent because they are rationally afraid to dissent. The violence is real. They have lives to live. Being brave is nice, but what’s nicer is staying out of prison and eating dinner with your mom every once in a while. Seeing your friends. In a country where everyone survives, this is just another mode of survival.

My main gripe with Mr. Nobody Against Putin is that it is pitched as an act of bravery. Is Pasha playing The Star-Spangled Banner at the morning assembly transgressive? Yes, at a glance. But there’s a deeper problem: Pasha can’t really get people to say what they think, because they have lives to live in Karabash, so the documentary ends up manufacturing its central conflict by making Pasha himself the dissenter.

The problem is that transgression has a price, and people pay that price differently. Some pay it with prison sentences. Pasha gets something closer to a reward: a safety cushion. He was offered the chance to film a movie and then flee to Europe. Almost nobody else has the option of uprooting their life and leaving the country so easily. So even if his students or colleagues agree with him, they are forced into silence if they want to preserve their lives, just like millions of other Russians.

And those Russians are exactly who I want the film to stay with. I don’t want Pasha at the center. By Russian standards, he’s a boring normie millennial lib. I want the camera on his colleagues, on his students - the people far more stifled than he is but who have just as much to say. They don’t have the luxury of speaking openly, and that’s what matters. That’s what the outside world needs to see: the all-encompassing atmosphere of fear, the risk of persecution for saying the wrong sentence, everybody living in a jail of self-censorship.

Footnotes

  1. In fact many of my Russian expat friends still fawn over how much more comfortable their life was in Moscow in comparison with abroad. For one, you could order a bottle of water at 6am in the morning and have it at your doorstep in 5 minutes! ↩