82 Culture The Economist May 14th 2022
“L
et’smakea thriller,”AlexeiNavalny
tells Daniel Roher, and the Canadi
an filmmaker tries to oblige. “Navalny”
has many of the genre’s key elements—a
hero, villains, skulduggery—but runs
into an obstacle. “Tango with Putin”, a
documentary by Vera Krichevskaya about
Dozhd (also known as tvRain), a gutsy
Russian news channel, faces the same
problem. It lies not in the directors’ craft,
still less in the merits of their subjects,
but something deeper: the throttling of
narrative in a dictatorship.
His eyes are a reproach. Piercingly
blue, they peer from the screen as Mr
Navalny exhorts his compatriots not to
give up. Mr Roher filmed the Russian
opposition leader as he recovered from a
poisoning in Siberia in 2020 (old footage
shows Yulia, his indomitable wife, strug
gling to get into his hospital room, lest
his assailants finish the job). Recuperat
ing in Germany, the patient links up with
Christo Grozev, whom he describes as a
“very kind Bulgarian nerd”; the investi
gator uses data from the dark web to
track down the failed assassins.
Mr Navalny is a socialmedia mae
stro—barred from campaigning in other
ways, he has had to be—and some view
ers may already know of the phone calls
he made to the goons who allegedly tried
to kill him. The sequence is still gripping.
One falls for his impersonation of a
Kremlin official and spills the details of
the botched hit, including the smearing
of Novichok in Mr Navalny’s underwear.
“He’s a dead man,” the team pityingly
conclude of the unwitting informant.
If “Navalny” elucidates the workings,
and incompetence, of Vladimir Putin’s
death squad, the source of its subject’s
amazing courage remains something of a
mystery. By contrast, “Tango with Putin”
(also called “F@ck This Job”) shows howbraverycanbenurturedbycircumstance.
When Natalia Sindeeva launched
Dozhd in 2010, she envisaged an upbeat
lifestyle channel, not a crusading news
outlet. By her own account, she previously
had more interest in partying than in
politics: the news imbued her with princi
ples, rather than the other way round,
beginning with a bombing at a Moscow
airport in 2011. A fourway split screen—a
repeated device in Ms Krichevskaya’s
film—contrasts Dozhd’s coverage of the
aftermath with the tranquillising pap
being aired by statecontrolled channels.
Another motif is Dozhd’s journalists
calling in from the back of police vans. As
the repression worsens, reporting be
comes riskier, from the rigged Russian
elections and protests of 201112, to the
crisis in Ukraine and eruption of war in
the Donbas region in 201314. The channel
becomes a beacon of integrity less by
design than by observing elementary
journalistic principles. To be good, in this
telling, is simply to obey your conscience.
(Mr Navalny turns up in this film, too,
giving advice on lighting for an interview.)These documentaries chart different
genealogies of heroism, seemingly in
nate in Mr Navalny’s case, accidental in
Ms Sindeeva’s. Yet their outlines overlap.
Both dramas are powered by exceptional,
againsttheodds defiance of a crushing
system. Ultimately, in both, that system
bends and flattens the story arc.
Totalitarianism, noted George Orwell,
forces storytellers to falsify facts and
feelings. In a tyranny, he concluded,
literature is doomed. In Mr Putin’s Rus
sia, censorship is tightening anew. The
squeeze is not just on the stories Rus
sians can watch and read. It extends to
the stories they can live—and thus, the
tyrant hopes, even imagine.
In these films, the authoritarian
ratchet is inexorable. Dozhd endures
harrumphs from the Kremlin, then
cyberattacks, boycotts by cable provid
ers, eviction from its studio, harassment
and police raids. For his part, Mr Navalny
is assaulted and imprisoned before being
poisoned. “I’m not scared of anything,”
he says when, in a classic act of Russian
valour, he flies back from Germany to
Moscow. “And I ask you not to be scared
either.” This is the climax of “Navalny”.
Russia’s rulers have other ideas. Like
most despots, they are philistines as well
as brutes. But they understand the rudi
ments of narrative. They know a drama
needs a denouement—in which the hero
vanquishes the villain, or goes down in a
blaze of glory—and see to it that there
won’t be one. In the film, Mr Roher spec
ulates that Mr Navalny may now be mur
dered; instead he is detained on arrival at
the airport, then dispatched to a penal
colony. Dozhd, meanwhile, is driven off
the air. Their stories flatline in the bu
reaucratic vice of the police state. It is
hard to make a thriller when someone
else is writing the ending. Back Story The editor in the Kremlin
Tyranny is the enemy of storytelling, as two profiles in courage demonstratewife’s grip on reality starts to slip, “the
mind becoming the flesh for its own teeth”.
This detached, thirdperson yarn, reminis
cent of the work of Henry James, is
followed by a somewhat bombastic autobi
ographyinprogress by Bevel. He touts the
patriotism of his enormous success,
maintaining that “selfinterest, if properly
directed, need not be divorced from the
common good”. Then there is a memoir
from a writer called Ida Partenza who
helped Bevel sculpt his legacy in print.
Finally come some unpublished pages,
seemingly by Mildred herself.The title is a nod to Bevel’s wealth. But it
also evokes the fragile feeling that is
frequently missing from relationships,
including between storytellers and audi
ences. As Bevel gamely admits, self
interest nudges people to “bend and align
reality” to accord with needs or desires.
“Trust” dramatises the way such truth
bending often accompanies tales of
wealth. “What I’ve made, I’ve made on my
own,” says Bevel, who inherited a fortune.
The novel also highlights the way history’s
dominant storytellers—mostly white and
male—have tended to sideline the narratives of others, such as women. As Parten
za writes of her affinity with Mildred: “We
both were young women trying to grow in
narrow crevices, hoping to break and
expand them in the process.”
Mr Diaz shifts elegantly between styles,
but saves the most engaging voices for the
novel’s second half. Partenza’s memories
of being cowed by Bevel’s money and au
thority, and her nostalgia for her “over
bearing and dysfunctional” father, inject
depth, momentum andclarity. The only
shame is Mr Diaz’s pat ending,which gives
too much of the game away. n