"Putin´s pride: Cossacks and the Church" is a documentary produced by the German TV broadcaster DW. On YouTube, it´s available with English voice-over. Despite its title, the documentary features both supporters and opponents of Putin. Many of the supporters are extremely upper class, go to exclusive schools and have high positions in the Russian business community. DW has interviewed "the Orthodox oligarch" Konstantin Malofeev, the man behind Tsargrad TV and St Basil the Great School. Tsargrad TV is explicitly monarchist-nationalist, and Malofeev un-ironically believes that Putin is an excellent substitute for a Czar! Anti-homosexual propaganda in another staple of Tsargrad TV. Meanwhile, the privileged students at the St Basil School study good manners, etiquette, dancing and Old Church Slavonic. The film team then visits the Shakhty Cossack School, a military school for teenage boys who want to enter the Russian military. They claim to be real Cossacks, i.e. descended from that particular cultural community. However, these are obviously not the freedom-loving Ukrainian frontier bandits of olden times, but 100% loyal Greater Russian nationalists!
The most sensational part of "Putin´s pride" features "40 times 40" (Sorok Sorokov), a group of literal storm troopers working for the Orthodox Church. When some dissidents in Moscow protested against the building of an Orthodox Church in Tofianka Park, these Orthodox bogatyrs quite literally beat them up, while the police looked the other way. "40 times 40" provide security at Orthodox masses, and the documentary shows them present at a celebration in a cathedral also attended by Russian prime minister Medvedev. The vigilantes are also shown training martial arts, and its suggested that their members are a motley crew of former hooligans and police officers.
The dissidents shown include the protesters at the park, Nemtsov supporters and Navalny supporters, including Navalny himself, who is quickly arrested by the police right in front of the TV crew. The Nemtsov supporters protest every night at the exact spot where the opposition leader was killed by Chechen criminals, supposedly at Putin´s orders.
"Putin´s pride" ends with an interview with a Putin supporter, a certain Timon or Timor, an anti-gay snitch who spends most of his free time hunting down LGBT teachers on the web, trying to get them fired by the schools where they work. DW claims that Timon has been barred from entering the US and the EU because of his activities!
All in all, a quite interesting production.
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