The Camera Inside the Kremlin’s Classroom

In a Russian classroom, propaganda replaces lessons, fear replaces trust, and children rehearse war. Pavel films it all, and risks everything, quietly.

We sat down to watch a documentary film on BBC iPlayer called “Mr Nobody Against Putin”¹, and what unfolded before us was not some distant, abstract political argument about geopolitics or ideology. It was something far more unsettling. It was the slow suffocation of a society from the inside. It was the quiet dismantling of childhood. It was the transformation of classrooms into barracks. It was the story of Pavel Talankin, a school videographer in a small industrial town in the Urals, who picked up a camera and, almost by accident, became a witness against his own state.

He begins simply. “This is me. At the moment I still have no idea how much trouble I am creating for my future self.” He tells us he works as a school organiser and videographer in Karabash, a town of 10,000 people, known internationally as one of the most polluted places on earth. Life revolves around the copper smelting plant. He loves his town. He loves his students. He loves arranging books by colour in his small …