If all the countries of the world were school kids, no one would talk to Russia any more, mainly because they tried to take all of Ukraine’s lunch money.
It’s easy to forget Russia is a country of 144 million people who have, for the past century, been through the wringer.
Revolutions, world wars, totalitarian dictatorships, oligarchs stripping their assets and now a cynical strongman dictatorship under Vladimir Putin.
Adam Curtis, documentary maker extraordinaire, turned his attention to Russia and its people in Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone with his familiar blend of dizzying, hypnotic footage. Obscure clips are plucked from archives so deep you can picture Curtis deep in post-Soviet archives in Volgograd, holding up strips of film accompanied only by the buzz of an electrical lamp installed sometime during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
This fascinating glimpse of Russian life shows how the people there these days have nothing much left other than a collective shrug of the shoulders.
“I don’t have any dreams and even if I did they wouldn’t come true,” says one woman dismally, a babushka before her time, as she’s filmed in her poky Moscow apartment.
Still, it must be difficult to belong to a once-powerful country now in the financial toilet because of the mistakes of its leaders. Just ask the United Kingdom.
Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone is on BBC iPlayer
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