Pavel Talankin is, by his own admission early in the extraordinary documentary Mr Nobody Against Putin, not the person you or he would pick to be the hero of the story or to take on an oppressive regime. To stand up to Vladimir Putin takes a considerable amount of courage and a not inconsiderable amount of resources; Pasha, as he is known to his students, is a teacher at a small primary school in Karabash, a mining town in the Ural mountains remarkable only for its renowned levels of toxic waste, and would have been more or less content to remain the titular nobody far from Moscow. He loves his hometown, its smokestacks and Soviet buildings, but most of all loves the curiosity and enthusiasm of his students, all filmed by Talankin in his capacity as school videographer.
But Talankin has always cut a bit of a non-conformist streak – he is the one teacher with a Russian democracy flag in his classroom, a safe haven for the school’s punks and artsy weirdos, or anyone with a desire to speak freely. He is openly alarmed, to the extent one can be, when the school begins enacting Vladimir Putin’s new “patriotic education policy” following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He keeps doing his job, filming the new blatantly nationalist curriculum, the lies about the necessity of invasion told as fact, the forced military drills and oaths of loyalty forced on initially bored and apathetic children.
