I don't quite remember how I stumbled upon Marcel Theroux's excellent documentary on the state of modern Russia, but I'm glad I did. This is a very sobering look at the underbelly of this proud nation, and although the country's population growth has improved since this documentary aired in 2006, Putin has become Dictator for Life, HIV/AIDS is still a silent epidemic, and nationalism (which doesn't bode well for non-Caucasian Russians) is rearing its ugly head.
We'll soon be posting two other documentaries on Russia that also aired on More4, so look for them in future posts, that is, if you liked this one.
On a personal note:
If I was a Russian who came onto this site and saw this post, I'd more than likely be offended by it. I'm not trying to come off all P.C. here, but I do realize that this doc is made by a Brit who is outside looking in. Also, I come from a country that is so fucked up in so many ways that I feel "who am I to judge...", thus the ambivilence about this post. And besides, I don't want to get kicked from RU Tracker, or end up with Polonium poisoning over this.
My daddy didn't raise no fool.
From Anna Picard at Bloomberg:
``Death of a Nation'' is Theroux's love letter to the nation he fell for as a teenager. It is also a depressing portrait of provincial Russia today. Since the end of communism in 1991, the average life expectancy of a man has fallen to 56 years, equivalent to that of Bangladesh or Bosnia. Worse still, the birth rate is plummeting.
Trouble at Mills
Ivanova was once the textiles center of the entire Soviet Union. Now, half of its mills are closed, and many of its citizens are homeless. About 50 percent of the city's newborns are sickly, and the abortion rate outnumbers that of live births. In Irkutsk, in the heart of Siberia, of the 17,000 local HIV sufferers, only 25 are on anti-retroviral drugs.
In Krasnodar, home to 30,000 Meshket Turks, the Cossack paramilitaries have revived religious nationalism. Kidnapped by one of their commanders, Theroux and his team are taken to a grocery store, where ``Mein Kampf'' has pride of place on the bookshelf, and are forced to drink moonshine. Thankfully, their abductors are too drunk to carry out their threat to decapitate the film crew, and settle for whipping the director.
``Death of a Nation'' raises some worrying questions. With nationalism increasing, and rising disenchantment with democracy among Russia's young people, what will the country be like in 20 years, when its population is halved? Who will run the nuclear reactors, the hospitals, the armed forces? And can Vladimir Putin be trusted to address these issues before it is too late?
Technical Information:
Title: The State of Russia: Death of a Nation
Year: 2006
Country: UK
Director: Nick Hornby
Writer/Presenter: Marcel Theroux
Source: Television
Video Codec: XviD
Container: .avi
Size: 499 MB
Length: 0:46:59
Programs used: Unknown
Resolution: 640x352
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Video: MPEG4 @ ~1200 kb/s
Frame Rate: 25 fps
Audio: English- AAC Stereo @ 128 kb/s
Subtitles: None
Death of a Nation Megaupload Link