“What made those people burn houses and slay their fellow men?” Leo Tolstoy wrote in 1863. “What force made men act so?”
These were no new question, Tolstoy admitted. “These are the instinctive, plain, and most legitimate questions humanity asks itself when it encounters the monuments and tradition of [the past].”
His predecessors, Hegel and Nietzsche, were convinced that great men and world spirits moved history. Tolstoy wrote War and Peace as a rejection of these grandiose theories.
“What causes historical events? Power. What is power? Power is the collective will of the people transferred to one person,” Tolstoy wrote. For him, the interesting question was why people entrusted this power to a single person, and why they tolerated it being wielded in their name. “Power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand.”
Anastasia Trofimova armed herself with a similar question when she set off for occupied Eastern Ukraine in early 2023, intent on joining a battalion of Russian forces heading to war. For seven months, she watched these men head to the frontlines and watched their corpses return.
The record of her journey, Russians At War, sparked enormous controversy when it was cancelled, then screened, at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month. I saw the film amid the fracas. I reviewed the film and interview Trofimova for for The Toronto Star: While this is not the grotesque propaganda film some made it out to be, it suffers from a profound lack of curiosity.
As she explained to me, her mission as documentarian was to understand the pawns and not the grandmaster. In so doing, she invoked War and Peace: “Is there a place where [Tolstoy] should say: Well, down with the tsar?” She told me. “No, they're giving you a picture of people who were caught up in this completely tragic historical whirlwind.”
Having never read War and Peace — and not being ready to read all 1,225 pages for this week’s dispatch — I turned to Tolstoy’s second epilogue and found it so much more curious about the relationship between power and subject than its derivative work would suggest. Tolstoy writes of how “this relation of the men who command to those they command is what constitutes the essence of the conception called power.” Trofimova might care for the commanded, but she cares very little about those who command.
This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless: A conversation with the director of Russians At War about the conflict, the art of the documentary film, and what the West gets wrong about Putin.
A couple of editorial notes, up top: One is that this interview was conducted with the plan that it would be synthesized into a column, not broadcast in full — so there are multiple spots where Trofimova makes claims that I think are factually untrue or worth challenging. But for the sake of time, I just let them go. I tried to hyperlink corrections where possible. That said, I do think the conversation is pretty fascinating, and I genuinely enjoyed hearing Trofimova’s point of view. Paying subscribers can access the audio of the conversation further down in the post.
The other note is probably only relevant to the Canadians and/or Canadaland listeners. If that’s not you, just skip to the next section.
On Canadaland’s Short Cuts today, on which I was filling-in as host alongside my guest Paris Marx, we had a fascinating chat about the enshittification potential of generative AI, as well as Russians At War, which I highly recommend. We also talked about the war in Gaza.
Unfortunately, the show was edited over my objections and I feel the need to highlight it. Yesterday evening — after the show had passed a fact check — publisher Jesse Brown decided to impose some unusual and fairly sweeping cuts to our conversation about weapon sales to Israel. I objected to these cuts and Jesse relented on some. But he insisted on two cuts to Marx’s comments: One, which noted how Western weapon sales are offensive as Israel “continues to bomb Gaza and kill so many people”; two, that Israel is engaging “in what many people are claiming is a genocide against the people of Gaza.”
Jesse claimed the comments were too vague. I think that is obviously untrue. Jesse’s decision to remove them, particularly over my objections, is an editorial over-step and, I think, made because he simply disagrees with the allegations. Cutting the phrases robbed Paris’ comments of their intention, which is a significant editorial mistake. The line was re-recorded and added back in after the episode was posted, but the damage is done.
I absolutely despise the deluge of hate, often veering into antisemitism, that Jesse gets. But I also don’t believe Canadaland is a free and neutral place to discuss this issue in particular, given that Jesse — as publisher and owner — frequently imposes his editorial line on others’ work. (A little addendum: Karyn Pugliese, the Editor-in-Chief, was on leave when this all went down.)
My position on the war and the allegation of genocide is, at this point, fairly clear. (Dispatches #74, #76, #77, #78, #82, #101, #109) But as I wrote recently, we are making this debate more difficult and vitriolic by aggressively policing each other’s speech, and I think that’s what’s happening here. I certainly respect Jesse’s position on the conflict, and the deleterious knock-on effects here in North America, but I don’t respect his willingness to let his personal beliefs cloud his editorial judgement.
So, in keeping with my relatively long tradition of quitting gigs on matters of principle, I’ll be ending my recurring hosting gig at Canadaland.
Anyway, on to the interview.
Let’s jump right in. I just finished watching the film. Certainly provocative and interesting — I have a lot of thoughts. But let's start with some of the backlash to it. What's the past couple of weeks been like?1
Anastasia Trofimova: Well, I mean, it's been a bit of a roller coaster. As a Canadian, I wanted to bring a story to Canada first and foremost. A story that pretty much no one has seen before, because no one really was able to get this type of access. At the same time, I understand that some people, especially from the Ukrainian community, might have found it to be a very sensitive topic. And I fully empathize. Because I understand when people lose someone, it's incredibly hard — and you want to lash out at someone, at anyone, because you feel pain. But, at the same time, to lash out at a film that they have not seen, which is an anti-war film, because it shows the horrors of war?
Despite the fog of war, it's still as awful and as tragic for both sides as pretty much any war that we get to examine after the fact. But now we're getting to examine while it's still going on.
So, it's been a roller coaster. I would never have thought that we would have the Deputy Prime Minister repeating the words of a Ukrainian official and hinting that this film should not be shown. This was completely unexpected because she has not seen the film. So she just repeated the comments of a foreign diplomat instead of protecting Canadian artists. And the ripple effect — we see that TVO has suddenly pulled out, even though we were always in touch with them for the last two and a half years while we were making this film.
It feels like, perhaps, the protests were empowered by her [Freeland's] words to take it up a notch and to use threats of violence.
Censoring the film doesn't strike me as a very useful avenue. But the one thing that I think many have seized on: Are you able to say categorically, across the board that — I know you received at least tacit approval from the local commanders — but have you had any other sanction, cooperation, even tacit or hinted acceptance from Russian officials at any point in time during the filming or subsequently-
I can say explicitly, unflinchingly, 100% — whatever other adjectives you want to use — that I have not received any support, any permission or anything of the sort from the Russian Ministry of Defense, the Russian authorities, or any other Russian state organization, including RT Documentary and all its affiliates. I have been doing this film by myself because I understand the dangers involved, and I didn't want to put anybody else in danger.
People might not really understand the media climate in Russia. I mean, they sort of know that it's quite censored. So it's very hard for anyone to imagine that such a film would be approved of by any Russian institutions, because any Russian media that goes to the front doesn't go there for a long time. It's very heavily monitored and, definitely, they will not be able to stay for seven months. To do these stories and to get people to speak so candidly on camera, this is not possible in Russia. This is not possible to be done officially.
Let's talk about some of the actual film more properly: What is the story of this film?
It started off as my personal journey to understand my country and my compatriots at a time of a huge historical tragedy and national catastrophe. And my leading question was: Who are the people who are fighting this war on the Russian side? There's not much media that's allowed to work on the Russian side of the front. So what we have is a lot of presuppositions and assumptions about what these people are like. It's not the strategy of the war, but it's an attempt to create a portrait of a person who's fighting this war. It was interesting to actually see for myself what kind of people there are. It’s a portrait of ordinary men and their motivations at a time of this big national tragedy.
What strikes me is that in hearing directly from these men — and, in some cases, women — there is this profound frustration in the fact that the war is happening. There may be patriotism, there may be nationalism there. There's a ubiquitous feeling that this war is wrong, that it ought to end. But I hear a lot of criticism of the Ukrainians, I hear this idea that they were one slavic people and the Ukrainians decided to pursue this divorce, that they're trying to rip up this history. But I hear this lack of curiousness or lack of criticism about Russia's own involvement in starting this war. And I wonder what you make of that. Is it that you genuinely didn't hear it? Is it that it was just less interesting? Tell me a bit about where this blame was being placed by these soldiers.
I don't think it's the most accurate thing to say that they were placing the blame on the Ukrainians, because there were Ukrainians who were fighting in the Russian ranks. It was more like an ideological divide. And this feeds into old ideological divides from the cold war, from the Soviet Union, and prior. Ilya [one of the main characters], for example, is himself Ukrainian, who is fighting on the Russian side. He felt like Ukraine became divided.
So there was a part that was looking favorably toward the West, which meant changing a lot of policies internally and externally and cutting ties with Russia. And there was a part of Ukraine that wanted the opposite, to not have as many ties with the West and have more ties with Russia, or just to keep things the way they were. And so this ideological divide was something that I felt was more prominent than any sort of ethnic divide, because I don't believe there's much of an ethnic divide. Because it's so close. You can't cut a straight line and say: Well, this is a story about Russians versus Ukrainians. That's the tragic thing.
There are Ukrainians fighting on the Russian side, there are Russians fighting on the Ukrainian side. And this conflict ran through families and friendships.
Is that not a forced ideological divide? I think that's what I find really stark is that so much of what I hear these soldiers talking about in your film is invented, right? It was a division that was created on purpose. At the end, you kind of cast a pall on “big politics” that drove this war, but it feels like there's not a lot of probing of those ideological divides. It feels like I don't really hear them actually try to break down why they feel it is like they've become divided. Why they feel it is that it took a war to resolve this ideological divide. And I'm wondering what you make of that.
It's a great question, actually, because you're right. We had a 2 hour, 47 minutes version of this film where we went a little bit deeper into this, into the explanation that they gave of this existing ideological divide. I was mainly speaking to Ilya because he lived in Ukraine. So he was particularly interesting for me, to see how everything went sour. Because at the end of the day, Russians and Ukrainians lived well together. Everybody intermarried, everybody made friends. Why did it go badly? And in his mind — he's not really alone in thinking this, there are a lot of people that I've met in eastern Ukraine, that repeat the same thing — in 2014, the government was changed, in an illegal way, from this pro-Russian president, who fled, to a pro-Western president who started enforcing Western policies that some people didn't agree with.
So Ilya's problem with that was that he felt that the Russian language came under attack. They felt like the world around them, their country started to change, and they were not okay with that.
Now, we had an explanation of that, and we found it to be somewhat confusing because this was supposed to be a portrait of people, ordinary people, who are fighting this war.
What role do you think propaganda plays in this film? And I mean that in the sense that a lot of those beliefs — whether it's this idea that Ukrainians are Nazis, whether it's this idea that NATO was getting ready for war with Russia, whether it's that the Russian language was under attack — these are all propagandistic ideas that were helped fostered by Russia, right? And there's a scene that I find really striking where you're sitting with Vitaly, the cook, and he's flipping through the paper and he says: Oh, it's all propaganda. And then he's reading every single article intently. There seems to be a recognition that they're being lied to and there seems to be a acceptance of it, and I find that really fascinating.
He was just browsing through it because he was bored, because boredom is actually a big part of being on the front. You have to find something to do.
But in the same vein, many of them said: The TV lies to us, and they always have the TV on the news.
First of all, you have to understand that there's no nationality or nation that's immune to propaganda. So we have Cartoon2 who's 20 years old, who has been watching state TV. And I was very curious to film him and to have the opportunity to see if his ideas changed, if the way he explains the war to himself changed. And it's very important to sort of take the temperature of people before and after, and lead them with certain questions and observe how they change in explaining the situation around them. So if you remember, Cartoon was very, very fervent the first time we saw him, where he believes that he's fighting Nazism — and you have to understand, for Russians, Nazism is like a red flag to a bull. It's the worst thing, you have to fight it. But ten months after you see Cartoon, he's confused. What he's fighting for? He doesn't really know why he's there. And that change, that subtle change, speaks a lot about the fact that we have certain reasons for this war that are given for both sides. But at the end of the day, people are still confused. And it's very important to monitor that change in real time.
I was reading an interview you gave, where you talked about convincing some of the commanders to let you stick around by likening your work to some of the early Soviet films that were filmed during the Great Patriotic War, World War II. I thought that was really interesting, because I think it speaks to their belief that they are on a mission of liberation and a mission of honoring the motherland. To some degree, that is the byproduct of propaganda. Again, how much is that manipulation driving these men — to what, in many cases, is their death?
This is actually a cultural context that, perhaps, would be unclear to many people from outside of the region. The Great Patriotic War is the biggest sort of cornerstone of our collective history and collective trauma, for Russians and for Ukrainians. That's why, if you monitor the communications of both sides, they all refer to each other as fascists or Nazis, because in order to get people to rise up against someone, you just tap into that collective memory. And the ironic thing about this is that both sides have the same collective memory. That's why it's not just about propaganda.
So much of the belief of these men — I think you even hint at it — is that this is a war of two sides. In some cases I hear it referred to as a civil war in Eastern Ukraine. In some cases I hear it as a conflict with the West. But it is hard to get past the simple reality that Russia was responsible for the invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and it was responsible for the full scale invasion in 2022. And it just does feel like that fact, which it is a fact, is obscured in the film. And I appreciate that these men have both a level of nihilism about it and frustration and anger. But why does it feel like that fact is so far away through most of the film?
Well, first of all, it's not an analytical film. And, by the way, you can't say they invaded [Ukraine in 2014] because they, legally, did not.
[Incredulous come on, man look]
I know exactly what you mean. But, legally — and we have to stay within the legality — it was not. So it seemed like there was a lot of support from NATO states for Ukraine in 2014 and there was support from Russia for the separatist rebels in Eastern Ukraine. So at least this was the explanation that I kept getting from people in Eastern Ukraine. And for me, it was fascinating because I was not following that conflict in 2014, 2015, 2016, onwards. I was in Iraq and Syria chasing ISIS. So I had no idea about this stuff. So for me, when they were speaking, I was listening. It was very interesting. And of course, at that point, I started also to monitor Ukrainian Telegram channels and to see how they were explaining this conflict. And I understand that there are two sides to this when it comes to the civil war.
I'm going to assume that you know a fair chunk of Russian film history. I hear you often talk about this film as Cinéma Vérité, which I find interesting because I think the more accurate term is Kino-Pravda. (Dispatch #60) I understand that's not an analytical film, but can you talk to me a bit about the style and the format of the film?
It's great that you brought up Kino-Pravda, because if you remember one of Dziga Vertov's films, it was revolutionary. You have this uprising and you see all these civilians running away from all these soldiers marching and all that kind of stuff. There's not a single explanation of what these soldiers are doing. What is their motivation? Who sent them? Was it the tsar? This is Cinéma Vérité, and that, by itself is a very, very strong medium.
We have not been able to see past the fog of war. And we understand that there are two sides fighting. You don't have to agree with them, you don't have to like them. But if you just see them and understand where they're coming from, they don't become this evil, faceless thing that it's okay to kill and it's okay to massacre, which is the fuel that would keep this war going forever. I know I've been accused of being overly idealistic, but I think we should be overly idealistic when it's very dark. And it definitely has been dark in the past two-and-a-half-years. We should try to maybe reach some sort of understanding. Maybe that could be the basis for some sort of future piece, whenever that is possible.
Forgive me, this is going to be a little analytical: One of Vertov's later films, Enthusiasm, is actually filmed in the Donbas. And it is a fascinating piece because it is Cinéma Vérité, but it is functionally becomes propaganda. Not because anything it shows is a lie, or because any of the people that it portrays are not wonderful and industrious. But it's being filmed in Ukraine at the exact same time the Holomodor is happening, and grain is being withheld from millions of Ukrainians who starve to death. I'll keep reiterating it: Russia started this war. Russia could end this war tomorrow. It is not up to the men who are fighting it to end it — although we could have a side conversation about the lasting symbolism of Battleship Potemkin — I don't think anyone disagrees with the mission of humanizing these men. But to have this be the focus at a time when the war continues unabated, when the shelling of Ukrainian cities continues?
We have to understand that reality of a war is very contrasting. So in the film, you have these three medics picking up a dead body and singing to a pop song. That's the contrast of war. You could have something absolutely terrible happening over there and, over there, have people celebrating the birthday party. That's what war is.
I guess our job as documentary filmmakers is: You capture one reality, I capture another reality. But to say: Here's a film that captures all of it, we know that's impossible. When we studied documentary, we were always told: Keep it narrow, don't go too wide, because you will not be able to make a strong film. Anything that doesn't relate to that subject, that place or that idea or whatever it is you're trying to say, throw it out.
All the films that we've seen from Ukrainian filmmakers — and some of them are fantastic — they were never really asked: Why you didn't go to the Russian side of the front? Why you didn't talk to the people of Donbas, who have been uprising since 2014? What is the problem that they have with you? Why are they fighting for the Russians? And I think that's fair that we don't ask those questions because we know that they will not be able to go to the Russian side and do that kind of story.
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