The Oscar-winning documentary reveals Putin’s increasingly tight grip on children

What what happens to a normal school when teachers are forced to feed the children extra patriotic garbage? That’s exactly what the winner of the Oscar for the best documentary tells about Alone against Putinwhich can be seen at Yle Areena.

Despite the sad subject, the film is also surprisingly fun to watch at times.

Alone against Putin belongs to those documentaries that were born in exceptional circumstances and required rare courage from its author. Its second author, a Russian teacher Pavel Talankinsuddenly notices in 2022 that his job is starting to turn into something completely different than teaching.

The first sign of this comes when the school receives an order that the students must learn to perform victory poems. At first, many teachers are horrified.

“We have to take photos or video while the children are reading them,” one teacher tells Talankin.

“Are we that messed up?” Talankin answers exhausted.

“The order came from above.”

“Oh crap! So what are we going to do?”

Gradually the school, which used to be full of drawn suns, turns into a propaganda center where children are brainwashed into the rebuke of the Lord, or Putin. Flags are brought to classes, slogans appear on the walls, and students practice marching in physical education classes. Talankin does his job as the school’s video supervisor and records everything, even if a soul is at stake.

One of the most revealing points of the documentary is the slipping of other teachers into parts of the patriotic propaganda machine. One blushing colleague has difficulty pronouncing new terms such as denazification and demilitarizationwhich will apparently be part of children’s vocabulary in the future.

Famine threatens Europe, the history teacher tells his students.

However, the most fascinating thing is to watch the history teacher who gives everything to mother Russia, who also acts as a party representative in the school. He proudly tells the students how Europe is about to collapse without Russian oil.

“In France, we move around on horses,” he explains. Famine also threatens Europe without Russia’s food reserves. France may still survive because “they eat frogs and oysters”, but elsewhere the bread is running out.

It is equally clear that Russia could have conquered Ukraine in a day if it wanted to.

Although Alone against Putin depicts the time of the Russian war of aggression, in reality Putin has understood the importance of children’s minds much earlier. For example, in 2015 he launched Patriotic education of the Russian people 2016–2020 program, whose purpose was to bind the youth to nationalist values. In practice, it meant rifles given to children and gas masks strapped on their heads.

In total, more than 200,000 children and young people belonged to patriotic organizations at that time. Now the documentary shows that the same spending has now expanded to all schools.

At the same time, teachers’ professional pride has been completely crushed. One teacher reads the students a “pro-army statement”, another teaches how to expose spies, and at one point even Wagner soldiers give lessons.

Putin’s the hustle and bustle will hardly come as a surprise to anyone, but the value of the documentary lies elsewhere: it describes ordinary people. Students and teachers are decent citizens who would like to do the right thing, but they are drawn into the bloody special operation of the state.

And as is often the case elsewhere, going barefoot is rewarded. The previously mentioned history teacher will receive the title of favorite teacher at the ceremony and will be rewarded with a brand new apartment in the city center. It’s a bit chilling when the same people’s candle says that it has its role models Stalin’s closest assistants, torturers and assassins.

At the end of the documentary, Talankin’s first students come home in zinc trunks.

Although the documentary is about contemporary Russia, the same ingredients exist elsewhere. For example in 2015 Filmed the enthusiastic weapons exercises of the Putin youth photographer Sarah Blesener has taken very similar pictures of the United States.

“The motherland is like a mother, you should love it automatically,” says a history teacher who admires Stalin in the documentary.

That idea should be chewed a couple of times before swallowing.