Building a State of Fear in “Extremist”
On November 16, 2023, Sasha Skochilenko, a thirty-three-year-old artist, poet, and musician, appeared in court to give what is known in the Russian justice system as the “last word,” the defendant’s final remarks before the judge delivered his verdict. Skochilenko, from inside a metal cage where defendants are kept during court hearings, said his case was so “strange and ridiculous” that it looked like an April Fool’s joke, as if “confetti was going to start falling from above.”
A version of the speech appears near the end of “Extremist,” a short film by Russian director Alexander Molochnikov, who now lives in New York. The film reimagines the so-called crime that made Skochilenko famous, an avatar of both the cruelty of Putin’s system and the courage of the few who would risk their fate and their freedom to oppose it. “Even though I am behind bars, I am freer than you,” Skochilenko told the judge. “I can make my own decisions and say what I think.” She adds: “Perhaps this is why the state fears me and others like me so much and keeps me in a cage like a dangerous animal. »
Nearly two years earlier, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Skochilenko had replaced the price tags of a St. Petersburg supermarket with various anti-war messages: “The Russian army bombed an art school in Mariupol where about 400 people were seeking refuge,” and “Putin has been lying to you for 20 years on the television screen. The result of these lies is our willingness to accept war and senseless deaths.”
This act of guerrilla performance art was noticed by a store customer, a seventy-six-year-old retiree, who reported the new labels to the police. (The woman, Galina Baranova, told a Russian news site, “I’m proud of what I did. Isn’t it a real shame to see a crime and turn away?”) An investigation worthy of an extremist ensued: Police reviewed the store’s surveillance footage and tracked down Skochilenko, accusing him of the crime of “knowingly spreading false information” about the actions of the Russian armed forces. After giving her final words in court, the judge sentenced her to seven years in prison.
Molochnikov told me that the film does not claim to be a documentary, or even to be based on Skochilenko’s story, but rather, he said, “inspired” by it. A key artistic reinterpretation is that, in the film, Skochilenko – who lives with his partner, Sonya – resides in the same apartment building as Baranova. All three maintain pleasant neighborly relations, saying hello to each other and discussing, in one scene, an afternoon of mushroom picking in the woods. At first, Baranova does not know who she has denounced; When she learned that it was Skochilenko, she felt a pang of remorse and told the police: “They are honest girls.” But his attitude towards them ends up hardening. The price tag attack, she told the court, was a “well-planned and cynical” attack. “She is guilty.”
The proximity of Skochilenko and his accuser heightens the film’s sense of tragedy, the almost accidental way in which lives collide and shatter — a phenomenon that can happen with terrifying ease in wartime Russia. “The careless actions of one person, then of a second, together lead to disaster,” Molochnikov told me.
This feeling of closeness, a physical closeness coupled with a deep moral disconnect, is a broader metaphor for Russians with anti-war views. Molochnikov told me how, in the days after the invasion, he was filming a television series in a small town in the Vologda region, hundreds of kilometers from Moscow. He got along well with the locals. “We drank tea together, discussing all kinds of things, unrelated to war or politics. It was quite nice and warm.” But he could see that they supported the war. The friendly hotel receptionist listened all day to Vladimir Soloviev, a particularly noxious pro-war media personality and propagandist. “We had so much in common,” Molochnikov recalls. “But there was still a vast gulf between us.”
The destiny of the director and his protagonist has taken unexpected turns in recent years. When Molochnikov wrote the screenplay, Skochilenko was behind bars in Russia. But in August 2024, a week before he was to travel to Riga to shoot the film, she was released in a large-scale prisoner exchange between Russia and several Western countries. (Russia has released more than a dozen political prisoners, including American journalist Evan Gershkovich.)
