Hey, you're listening to the On the Media Midweek podcast. I'm Michael Lohinger. Apparently, the Russian

state news agency, RIA Novosti, left out the documentary film category from its Oscars roundup this

week. Maybe to avoid having to mention that the Academy Award went to a film that painted an

unflattering portrait of the state of propaganda in Russian schools.

Mr. Nobody Against Putin is about how you lose your country.

Director David Borenstein accepting the award on Sunday.

And what we saw when working with this footage, it's that you lose it through countless small

little acts of complicity.

When we act complicit, when a government murders people on the streets of our major cities,

when we don't say anything, when oligarchs take over the media and control how we could produce it and consume it.

In honor of the win, we thought we'd rerun Brooks' interview with the star of the documentary.

I'll let her take it from here.

What follows is a detailed account of the effort to indoctrinate school children by revising

history, authorizing new texts, and monitoring teachers to ensure they follow the new rules.

And no, it's not happening that way here yet, though it could.

It's happening in Russia, and we can watch it happen in a new documentary called Mr. Nobody Against Putin.

The titular Nobody is Pavel, nicknamed Pasha, Talanquin, the social director, AV guy,

an all-round sounding board for students at the biggest primary school in Karabash,

a small town in the Ural Mountains, where Stalin once sent undesirables to work in the copper smelting plant.

Pasha was happy there until February of 2022, when the war in Ukraine came to town,

in the form of government directives to radically change the curriculum in an increasingly stomach-churning effort to prepare

the young for the battlefield, because, as Putin once said, commanders don't win wars, teachers win wars.

...