We the Nobodies
[See the Postscript at the bottom to play the game Guess the Autocracy.]
It’s Presidents Day, an apt time to direct your attention to a bold documentary that is chilling in both its global relevance and its uncanny and unintentional similarity to America’s president.
The documentary is Mr. Nobody Against Putin. We saw it the other night and we’re rooting for it to win best documentary at the Oscars on March 15.
It’s the story of Pavel (Pasha) Talankin, a teacher and school videographer in the small, pollution-ridden town of Karabash, Russia whose isolated implosion leads him to surreptitiously document by video the evolution of the school into a Putin-propaganda indoctrination of the students.
The parallels between his world under Putin and ours under Trump only a couple of years later inspire a belief that each of us has a duty to overcome silence and acquiescence in answer to the call of the soul. What Talankin does is the stuff of fantasy and savior complexes that has him relocate via Turkey, Prague, and the Sundance Film Festival to Los Angeles where he awaits the Academy Awards.
The film has replaced my default of measuring Trump and his henchmen against Nazi Germany with a vivid, more contemporary reality.
The film shows Putin on TV announcing apparently out of nowhere: “I decided to conduct a special military operation” and I think Venezuela, Greenland, Iran.
The film heralds the New Federal Patriotic Education Policy and I read Trump’s executive order of Jan. 29, “ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.”
The film introduces us to Pavel Abdulmanov, a by-the-book, patriotic teacher, who somehow wins the area’s best teacher award, lecturing the grade school students on the “economic component of hybrid warfare” and the way Europe is suffering at the hands of Russia’s superiority. The “French will soon be like the musketeers,” he boasts, and I think of Lutnick and Bessent.
He regales the students that in the U.S., there are demonstrations supporting Russia, and I think of Trump boasting that he knows Putin and can end the Russia-Ukraine conflict in a day. Two years later, there’s Trump with an adjusted boast that he’s ended eight wars but that the Russia-Ukraine conflict is a mess, needing two to tango.
The film has Mr. Nobody arguing with his mom in a library, complaining that with Putin, “one idiot decides to do this, and the whole world is afraid.” I think maybe it takes two idiots to have the whole world be afraid. “It would have been better if he just sat at his desk and did nothing,’ Mr. Nobody vents. Is he the brother I never had?
Mr. Nobody feels trapped and bemoans that “even a guy like me should have some principles.” I feel the same, an alien in my own country, as he put it.
The film turns to some protests in the streets and to women on the street being interviewed and asked, “Is there anyone against the war?” They say no, laugh and one adds, “they won’t even dare to be against.” And I think of Minneapolis and the Trump HESTAFO being accusatory and vocally unapologetic about killing two people protesting the government’s anti-immigrant excesses, though looking fetching with hair flowing off her shoulders, teased eyebrows and bubbled lips.
The film revisits Abdulmanov, who’s asked whom he most admires in Russian history. He mentions Stalin’s KGB chief and father of the Gulag system, Stalin’s spy hunter, and a person responsible for how Trotsky was killed. I think Homan, Bovino, and Miller. (He even looks like Miller).
Abdulmanov tells the students, “If you were born in this country and don’t believe we’re doing the right thing, then leave,” and I think of Trump lashing out at Olympic athletes competing for Team USA.
Mr. Nobody reflects on what it means to love his country; not the flag or the anthems or the propaganda, but the memories, the cold, the seasons, the people, and the ability to say, “we have a problem.” I envision the bombast of the year ahead, of America’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, dubbed Freedom 250, replete with military fanfare and a prayer event on the national mall.
The film reports that in April 2023, Putin released updated laws on treason, making it easier to punish people for being a traitor to the motherland. I recall the fake video Trump helped circulate showing former President Obama being arrested by the FBI, to underscore his and U.S Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s claims that Obama was guilty of seditiously trying to steal the 2016 election.
I read the other day that a five-country analysis of the death two years ago of Putin critic Alexey Navalny while in prison was caused by a lethal toxin found in poison dart frogs in South America that they concluded only “the Russian state had the combined means, motive and disregard for international law” to contribute to Navalny’s death. I think Epstein. You?
Postscript: You now should be ready to play the game Guess the Autocracy.
(No deep fake or AI tools were used or abused in choosing these photos.)
Russian or American?
A. B. C.
D. E.
[Update: Also on Presidents Day, Federal Judge Cynthia Rufe, ruled that the exhibit about nine people enslaved by George Washington must be restored at his former home in Philadelphia (see details at Sinners who brandish the torch). The Trump administration had taken it down last month. Judge Rufe’s ruling was yet another stinging judicial slap at Trump’s decision making.
“As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims—to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts.” The judge, an appointee of George W. Bush concluded, “It does not.” The Trump administration immediately appealed.]
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I saw the film a couple of weeks ago. Brilliant! Pasha has tremendous courage. Hopefully this will serve as a warning to a lot of naive Americans.