A new documentary, entitled “Russia, a people marching in step”, broadcast on France 5, immerses itself in a Russian society that the war in Ukraine has dislocated.
On February 24, 2022, Russia launched its “special operation” of “denazification” from Ukraine. A war, whose name Vladimir Putin has long refused to say, which has been raging for more than a year, is undermining geopolitical balances and dividing the Russian population. On the one hand, the unconditional support for the master of the Kremlin, favorable to the conflict. On the other, opponents of the regime reduced to silence. Ksenia Bolchakova and Veronika Dorman, the directors of the film Russia: a people marching in step, attempt in this documentary to understand how this country has become radicalized and closed in on itself. They auscultate a torn local society, prey to violence, in which propaganda and disinformation make their bed on the credulity of a manipulated people, and whose education of the youngest has a single objective: to shape them in order to make them docile patriots, ready to die for their country.
Child enrollment
Nostalgia for the USSR, dream of empire, exacerbated patriotism, animosity towards the West… These feelings intensely inhabit a fringe of the Russian population and have been amplified since the war in Ukraine, according to the directors. Olga Zakhran, a former lawyer converted into the army who testifies in the documentary, is one of those nostalgics who aspire to the return of the myth of a great Russia. She never recovered from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and has a fierce hatred for the rest of the world. Olga leads a military-patriotic sports center, created in 2016, under the aegis of the Russian Ministry of Defense.
A place in which she trains children aged 6 to 18 for war. Schools transformed into barracks in which compulsory military training exalts their nationalism and places weapons of war in their young hands. “We train children to be ready for the dark times ahead.she says. What we put in their heads today will determine what they will be in the future. They have to know how to handle a weapon, they have to be physically prepared, morally prepared.” These military-patriotic centers, scattered throughout the country, now have 1.240 million members, according to the directors.
Russia against the rest of the world
These conditioned children are raised in the idea that Russia is the supposed victim of a cruel West which has for only goal the destabilization and the ruin of the country. This conviction, which has insinuated itself into many minds, is the illustration of the conspiracy theory put in place by a weakened Vladimir Putin during his re-election in 2012. That year, monster demonstrations by a large part of the Russian people had agitated the country in order to denounce a rigged election.
For fear of a major revolution, the Russian president then accused the West of having manipulated his people against him and put in place a repressive legislative arsenal. A vision to which Olga Zakhran adheres. In the future, she also sees very big for her country. “I see her [la Russie] powerful. It is not only a question of demilitarizing, of denazifying Ukraine… It is the whole of the hostile and unfavorable western world that we must reformat. Russia will crush them. “
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.