The trouble with "Russians at War"
I resent that this movie was made with my tax dollars. And yet, I cannot support its cancellation at the hands of an angry crowd.
In America, Russia pays content creators to spread pro-Russian propaganda. And here in Canada, it seems like Canada pays Russians to spread pro-Russian propaganda.
That’s the impression many of us had when news came out about Russians at War, a documentary currently making the festival rounds (including the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival) portraying Russian soldiers invading Ukraine, and financed with a six-figure sum of Canadian taxpayers’ money. I’m sure emergency-room patients lying on gurneys in hospital hallways will understand.
A documentary accused of portraying Russian soldiers as victims and legitimizing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked outrage at film festivals in Venice and Toronto.
Russian-Canadian documentary filmmaker Anastasia Trofimova’s “Russians at War,” which follows soldiers through seven months of war, premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday.
“It’s so confusing here,” one soldier states in the film. “I don’t even know what we’re fighting for.”
“Russia and Ukraine have always been inseparable,” said another. “I miss the brotherly union.”
Tens of thousands of Ukrainians have been killed and millions displaced in the two-and-a-half years since Russia launched its brutal invasion of the country.
United Nations investigations have found evidence of war crimes by Russian forces, including rape and the deportation of children to Russia.
But Trofimova said she never witnessed that during her time embedded with its troops.
“To me, the biggest shock was to see how ordinary they were,” she said, according to Euronews.
“In Russia, they are these heroes who never die,” she said. “In the West, they are mostly war criminals, war criminals, war criminals.”
Further blowback came over news that the film is set to be screened at the Toronto International Film Festival on Tuesday, and that it received over $250,000 in funding from the Canadian government, the Kyiv Independent reported.
I’ve repeatedly pushed back online when NAFO social media accounts cross the line from anger at Russia to near-fanatical hatred of Russians as individuals,1 and I have no time for “cultural boycotts” of anything remotely Russian, which smack of “Ground Zero mosque” hysteria. (Forgot about that moral panic, didn’t you?)
And, not having seen the film, it’s unclear if Russians at War is the propaganda piece it’s made out to be. TIFF’s official description portrays something very different:
As Russia’s unjust war on Ukraine rages on, it is critical to understand the long history of colonization that has led to this current moment. Russian Canadian filmmaker Anastasia Trofimova’s gripping first-person documentary takes us beyond the headlines to join Russian soldiers as they place themselves in a battle for reasons that become only more obscure with each gruelling day, each confusing command, each gut-wrenching casualty.
Russians at War was born of a chance encounter between Trofimova and a middle-aged man on a train. That man, a Ukrainian named Ilya, was about to leave his family and go to war — for Russia. Intrigued by his story, Trofimova, though lacking permission, joins Ilya and his supply unit as they make their harrowing journey to the front line. Many soldiers fighting alongside Ilya are very young. Some believe they’re going to vanquish Ukrainian Naziism. Others go out of belief in cultural unity between Russia and Ukraine. Eventually, they all come to realize that everything they heard about the war in Russian media is false. They begin to doubt their purpose — and fight only to survive.
People are angry about a documentary which “humanizes” Russians and portrays them as “ordinary men,” at a time when the Russian military is carrying out war crimes and atrocities on a truly shocking scale.
But they are humans. War crimes are carried out by humans. One of the best-known books about Nazi atrocities in Poland (which I haven’t yet read) is literally called Ordinary Men. That’s the point.
So, I think a documentary showing the war from the Russian lines could be insightful.
…After the war is over.
At a time when Ukraine is literally fighting for its existence, and the Russian armed forces are attacking civilian targets and wiping out entire families far from the front lines for no other reason than to kill and terrorize, yeah, it’s kind of kind of understandable why Ukrainians and their supporters are in no mood to see anything which might make their killers look sympathetic.
There’s a time and a place for everything, and this ain’t it for Russians at War. If I were running TIFF, I would not have accepted it for showing at this time. And I definitely wouldn’t have thrown any Canadian public money toward its creation. I’m damned if I know what we’re supposed to be getting out of this.
The Ukrainian Canadian Congress is calling for the movie to be withdrawn from the film festival, not surprisingly. And I agree it shouldn’t have been admitted and publicly funded in the first place.
And yet…now that TIFF has decided to show it, I’d honestly prefer than the organizers not back down in the face of angry critics demanding that the screenings be cancelled.
“Cancel culture” is a term that doesn’t seem to have much meaning anymore - in practice, it’s when my righteous and brave opinions being stifled, but not when you are held accountable for your problematic and dangerous actions - but I get angry when creators whose beliefs appear close to my own, or at least seem relatively innocuous and might have been downright progressive until the rules were abruptly changed without notice five minutes ago, are forced to shut up in the face of online mobbery.
It’s not “censorship” per se, since no government is involved. But the culture of free expression is chipped away a little more each time.
In this case, the offending movie is one with which I have serious problems. Next time, it might be something I really want to see. And if these showings are cancelled because of public pressure, it sets a precedent which could be used against my team - perhaps even when the film is pro-Ukrainian - in the near future.
Sometimes your strongest opinions come into conflict with your most cherished principles. In cases like that, I try to grit my teeth and stand on my principles, even if in this case it helps the “wrong” people.
Buy me a drink some time, and I’ll expound on my theory that some “Ukrainian” and “Baltic” social media users might actually be Russian trolls trying to make the pro-Ukraine side look worse.
I can vouch for Ordinary Men. It's excellent, if rather disturbing.