France 5 is broadcasting the documentary “Russia: a people marching in step” on Sunday, a dive into the heart of the Russian population, subject to the will of an omnipotent head of state.
For more than a year, the war between Russia and Ukraine has upset geopolitical balances in the world. French journalists of Russian origin Ksenia Bolchakova and Veronika Dorman, long correspondents in the country of Vladimir Putin, have teamed up to make the documentary Russia: a people on the move walking, aired Sunday, April 16*. A dive into the heart of a disoriented Russian population since the beginning of the conflict. The two directors deliver their impressions to franceinfo.
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Franceinfo: In your film, you present military-patriotic centers that recruit Russian children. How were they created?
Veronika Dorman : These centers which enroll children, called “Iounarmia” (“the army of young people”), were set up in 2016, because the war rumbled in the Donbass. We do not know when Vladimir Putin decided to really invade all of Ukraine, but what is certain is that since 2014 and the annexation of Crimea, we have been in a situation of war. The Kremlin explained to the Russians that there is a Russian-speaking population in the Donbass victim of a potential genocide and that it must be protected. We are in a martial situation. This movement Iounarmia emerged at that time, first as a kind of experimentation. Taking control of childhood has become a necessity.
Ksenia Bolshakova : It is a process that is going crescendo. The militarization of Russian society has taken place in several stages over the past fifteen years. It starts with the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbass in 2014. But there were already military academies in which parents could put their children if they wanted. From 2015, the military world arrived in the normal schools. And in 2016, the Ministries of Education and Defense created this famous Iounarmia. The idea is to focus education on a military-patriotic bent and to prepare children for military service at an early age.
Gradually, it is encouraged by the heads of establishments, who are all members of the United Russia party of Vladimir Putin. What’s crazy is that between 2016 and 2022, we went from 25,000 members to almost 1.5 million kids in this movement. Because from kindergarten, people from the Ministry of Defense will persuade mothers to enroll their children there, telling them: “We will teach them the history of the country, our good values. They will play sports, it will do them good.” There was a lot of proselytizing work carried out by the authorities.
Veronika Dorman : This contributes to the “martialization” of Vladimir Putin’s relationship to his power. To the way the power wants to hold society, to geopolitics as well. He insists that Russia is a fortress under siege, that everyone must be ready to protect it and shed their blood for it.
Did Russian society easily adhere to this discourse?
KB: It resonated with society. With the fall of the USSR, people like Olga Zakhran, the director of a Russian military-patriotic sports center who appears in the film, felt like they were losing a structure. This famous outer structure that you are given when you live in a strong state. Suddenly, with a very patriotic speech, these people regain a kind of spine that resembles the one they had when they were children.
The reality is that this structure is much more violent, fundamentally frightening, because over the last thirty years of the USSR, the leaders did not put in people’s heads the idea that one had to die for the country. There was a strong patriotic feeling, but not this notion of self-sacrifice in the name of the state. Sometimes, when we spoke to Olga, we had the feeling of being in front of someone fanatical, like a jihadist from Daesh who is ready to go and blow himself up somewhere. Today in Russia, sacrificing oneself for the fatherland is the only way to die with dignity. We did not expect to see this.
DV: In the film, at one point, we use the images of a governor chanting: “War is life. War is love. War is our friend.” For me, this best sums up this change in the minds of some Russians. We tame war, we put it in the middle of our life, in the middle of the city, and we live with it.
Is it possible to measure the number of refractory Russians to the regime?
DV: It’s difficult. There have been no independent polling institutes for a year. People don’t answer what they really think. Even the 80% who say they support Putin are to be taken with a grain of salt. There, many people are neither for the war, nor for Vladimir Putin, nor against the Ukrainians. But they will not resist.
KB: About 20% of the population believe in Putin, are pro-war, believe that NATO is at the country’s doorstep, that a nuclear bomb will explode in Russia if it does not destroy all of Ukraine, and that this it is populated by Nazis. These are beliefs that have been drip-distilled into people’s heads since 2014.
How do you no longer recognize the Russia you once knew?
KB: We were overwhelmed to see that people around us were in a form of acceptance. They told us: “Yes, war is not good. But if tomorrow I receive a summons to the military office, I will go.”
DV: It’s a particular acceptance, because there are, for example, people who have always been against the war and who don’t want to leave, because they have an apartment, a house, children who are in good faculties. They say to themselves: “What are we going to do? To become beggars in a Europe that doesn’t want us?” They participate in this acceptance. They don’t want to take the risk of being arrested while demonstrating.
And then there is the discourse of power which manipulates the population and the enemies as well. Vladimir Putin wants to project the image of a country united behind his regime, but when you enter people’s private lives, it’s much more tragic. In the same person, two contradictory things can coexist: the belief that one is a coward because one is not going to denounce a war that one despises, and the fact of kowtowing, continuing to live more or less normally. without liking Vladimir Putin.
What impressed you the most during this trip?
DV: I kept thinking that this might be the last for a very long time. I wanted to fill myself with lots of images, smells and sensations, because we know that the country is closing in and that borders are becoming more and more impassable. It was a trip like a requiem, a farewell to this country. And the scraps that we picked up were a bit of scraps of the Russia that we had known and which was disappearing before our eyes. Beyond the meetings which were very strong, and the suffering for all these people who remained there, in an open-air prison, it is really this feeling of goodbye which accompanied me throughout this report.
KB: Like Veronika, deep sadness. We were in a form of emergency, because we were aware that, potentially, in several weeks or months, we would no longer be able to go there. We absolutely wanted to witness everything that was happening there, because we both lived in this country. There was a thirst to capture everything, because we said to ourselves that this might be our last time. What upsets me above all is that there are three generations that are lost and that even the younger generation has given up. Vladimir Putin and his regime have succeeded in smashing all intellectual independence, shattering any hint of free will. They cut off the legs of the youth. It’s tragic.
*The documentary Russia: a people marching in step, directed by Ksenia Bolchakova and Veronika Dorman, is broadcast on Sunday April 16 at 8:55 p.m. on France 5 and on france.tv.