Inside Russia: Traitors and Heroes, review: a revealing portrait of a country silenced by fear
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“Ukraine should cease to exist.” “After we kill all the fascists we’ll have peace.” On the streets of Moscow the messaging from the Russian state media seems to be doing the trick. It spouts, bilious and unfiltered, from the mouths of pedestrians. Volodymyr Zelensky, says one such after a reflective pause, is “a puppet”.
The owners of these second-hand opinions are not the story in Storyville: Inside Russia: Traitors and Heroes (BBC Four). Alla and Misha are: a courageous pair of vox-popping YouTubers who are doing their bit to nurse the flame of independent thought.
What happened to freedom of speech in Russia, Alla asks while Misha points the camera. “Did it ever exist?” answers one man. “Life without freedom of speech,” says a teenage girl, “is impossible.” She and her group plan to leave. Others do leave. Nina, an intrepid local councillor in Voronezh who filmed herself speaking out against the war, avoids arrest by fleeing. Then there’s Lyonya, a zesty art activist who bill-stickers Ekaterinburg with canny anti-Z messaging. The state sticks him in a psychiatric hospital – a very Soviet solution to dissent. Upon release he flies to Kazakhstan only to feel a very Russian nostalgia for home, even if Siberia beckons.
The Russia that found its voice in glasnost but has since seemingly vanished, comes up for air in this refreshing, revealing and nuanced patchwork portrait. Furtively shot on the fly by two crews, it feels like a throwback to the USSR when unpoliced information was rare and precious contraband.
Of the half-dozen participants, the only one to be engulfed in personal tragedy is Uliana. Grief-stricken when her brother Vanya is killed in Ukraine, she takes a break in sunny Tbilisi, only to encounter the overwhelming force of visceral Russophobia. But there’s no solace back in Arkhangelskoe. Her father swallows the bromide that his son, who has a street named after him, is a hero. “I can’t declare war on my own father,” Uliana says.
This absorbing dispatch argues that, publicly and bravely saying no to war, the real heroes are not in uniform, or zinc coffins, nor – in the case of Lyonya – yet in a Siberian prison.
Source: telegraph.co.uk