A few days into Russia’s full-scale invasion of his native Ukraine in 2022, film producer Alexander Rodnyansky learnt that Vladimir Putin’s defence minister had personally demanded that he be “excluded from the Russian cultural agenda”. Rodnyansky, who had loudly denounced the war from his home in Moscow, stuffed a few of his most treasured awards into a suitcase and left for the airport that same day.
Since then, in between producing films in the west — Michel Franco’s Dreams, starring Jessica Chastain, premieres this weekend at the Berlin Film Festival — Rodnyansky has spent the war’s three years re-examining his own work in Russia and the dark path the country has taken under Putin. “Film and TV share a significant part of the responsibility [for the war],” Rodnyansky says. “They built a world view for Russians who started sympathising with fake heroes more than real people.”
Rodnyansky, 63, has just published a book, Loveless, reappraising nine films he produced in Russia during the first two decades of Putin’s rule. The book uses them to explore the cynicism, resentment, paranoia and indifference in Russian society that, Rodnyansky now realises, helped lay the groundwork for the war. It takes its title from Andrei Zvyagintsev’s 2017 Oscar nominee, produced by Rodnyansky, an indictment of how Moscow’s commercialist glitz had blinded Russians to the horrors already unfolding in Ukraine and nurtured a callous emptiness inside themselves.
“What we didn’t understand was that being part of that [Moscow] scene meant accepting the logic of those in power,” Rodnyansky says. “The people who accepted that were smarter than us, because they knew they were selling out.”
Rodnyansky moved to Moscow in 2002, when rising oil prices had begun to fuel a newly resurgent Russia under Putin, to head up entertainment network CTC. A return now seems impossible: his anti-war statements have earned him an eight-and-a-half year prison sentence in absentia in Russia, where he was convicted last October of “political hatred” and spreading “fake news” about the Russian army.
In the 2000s, however, Rodnyansky paradoxically saw Russia as a safer place to work than Ukraine — where news coverage at 1+1, the channel he co-owned, was under constant political pressure from the Moscow-friendly oligarchical regime then in power.
CTC’s young, upwardly mobile audience, on the other hand, was sick of the constant mudslinging between oligarchs that dominated Russian TV in the 1990s. The channel’s mostly western investors were eager to make money under Putin’s flourishing new regime and wholeheartedly agreed. “The Russian audience didn’t want anything to do with politics and kept well away from it,” Rodnyansky says. “We gave them the hits.”
Rodnyansky’s first Russian blockbuster was 9th Company (2005), a Band of Brothers-style account of a Soviet army unit fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Shot in Crimea with tanks borrowed from the Ukrainian army, the film offered viewers in both Russia and Ukraine a nostalgic look at a recent past in which they lived in one country and fought alongside each other.
At one point during filming, Rodnyansky told director Fyodor Bondarchuk they could either make a domestic hit or an international festival darling. To achieve the latter, however, would require a scene depicting “our boys” killing some of the estimated 1.5mn Afghan civilians who died during the Soviet invasion. Bondarchuk, who Rodnyansky thought could become Russia’s answer to Michael Bay, said no. Largely ignored outside the former USSR, 9th Company drew a 40-minute ovation from Russian Afghan war veterans, and an approving review from Putin after the Kremlin screened it for him at his residence.
“Back then it was an anti-war film about the end of the Soviet era and the unjustified, awful war in Afghanistan.” But its depictions of camaraderie mean “it looks totally different now — a movie about ‘our boys’,” Rodnyansky says. “The state is bad, the generals have sent them off and forgotten about them, but they are fighting for each other. That cultural code justifies the war, even if we didn’t think so.”
By this point, Ukraine’s Orange revolution a year earlier had put Rodnyansky in an awkward position with the Kremlin. During protests against a Russia-backed candidate’s fraudulent victory, Rodnyansky had apologised on air to 1+1’s viewers for complying with official censorship. He was pointedly not invited to Putin’s screening of 9th Company and pushed out of CTC in 2008 after, he says, Russia’s top ally in Ukraine complained about him to presidential stand-in Dmitry Medvedev.
But the public’s appetite for hits was only stronger. Stalingrad, a second world war popcorn flick filmed in 3D, broke box office records in 2013. The head of Imax attended its Moscow premiere alongside the likes of Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov and Kremlin political impresario Vladislav Surkov, who kept a close eye over Russia’s cultural scene — and wrote fiction under a pseudonym in his spare time.
And Rodnyansky was still convinced that Russia was moving in the right direction. “I could see a lot of young, middle-class people who studied abroad, worked for us, voted for us and went to protests. Eventually, I thought, there’d be generational change and it’d become a normal country.”
He saw that generation reflected in the audience for Zvyagintsev’s films, which offered scathing critiques of Russia’s pervasive corruption and moral degradation. Loveless juxtaposes the volunteers helping search for a lost boy with the emptiness of his parents, who are shown, years after the search has been abandoned, casually watching state television propaganda about Ukraine.
But playing the game required increasingly uneasy compromises. After Zvyagintsev’s 2014 Oscar nominee Leviathan faced a hail of Kremlin criticism for its depictions of corruption and the church, state television asked Rodnyansky to make amends.
Atonement meant producing a series based on an early modern history book that Russian culture minister Vladimir Medinsky — Leviathan’s loudest critic — had written for young adults. Leviathan’s star Aleksei Serebryakov accepted the lead as a way to get off a blacklist for having said that Russia’s national idea was “force, impudence and boorishness”. The resulting series was so bad that Medinsky tried to take his name out of the credits. “I knew the rules of the game,” Rodnyansky writes. “Everyone involved tried to forget about it as quickly as possible.”
The invasion made compromises like that impossible for Rodnyansky and several other actors and directors, such as Zvyagintsev, who have criticised the war and left Russia. (The director is shooting a new film, Jupiter, from exile, though not produced by Rodnyansky.)
But many of his former collaborators have found ways to make peace with Putin’s invasion, Rodnyansky says. One of 9th Company’s stars, Soslan Fidarov, even fought in Ukraine. “At some point you either realise what you were doing is wrong and you stop conforming, or you deliberately look for ways to live with it. You get back up, talk yourself into it and go on living.”
Any illusions Rodnyansky had fell in the early hours of the war, when his son — an economic adviser to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president — called him as Russian air strikes rained down on Kyiv. That same day, the head of Zelenskyy’s office asked Rodnyansky if he knew any members of the Russian elite who could convince Putin to end the war. Rodnyansky put the Ukrainians in touch with former Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich, who emerged as an important go-between in peace talks that spring. Russia’s delegation was headed up by Medinsky, as if to underscore the outsized role that history and culture play in Putin’s invasion.
Many Ukrainians believe the kind of Russian historical revanchism preached by Medinsky are the real driving force for the war — leaving all Russians with a share of guilt. Rodnyansky, however, has rallied support for exiled Russian artists, and cannot bring himself to criticise the likes of Bondarchuk, who has been notably silent about the invasion. “For a lot of Ukrainians, it’s a war between Ukrainians and Russians. But for me it’s a war between freedom and totalitarianism.”
Rodnyansky also points to the dwindling star of Zelenskyy, who spellbound the west with his defiant leadership in the early phases of the war, but has struggled to rally support — particularly from the US — as it drags on. “Words have a way of losing their value and things that used to work perfectly stop working at all,” he says.
He thinks Donald Trump’s re-election has opened a window of opportunity for peace, but warns that Ukraine will probably have to make painful concessions. Ukraine “needs to explain to Trump voters why they should support them,” he says. “Talking about how we’re suffering for your values and are all in it together doesn’t work on isolationists . . . At the start people wondered how to go on living when Europe is facing aggression in violation of all international law, norms, standards, and guarantees. And now everyone’s used to it. This is just how we live now.”
Max Seddon is the FT’s Moscow bureau chief
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