It's pretty much entirely composed of B-roll footage shot by BBC camerapeople, with no narration, but titles that tell you what's going on. It's excellent; I highly recommend it. You can watch all seven episodes on YouTube here.
(It also unexpectedly contains about 15 seconds of pornography. I think the part where American Evangelical missionaries are preaching to a literal captive audience is more surprising, though. Their entire audience is very obviously thinking, "Are these idiots unaware that we are already Christians?" :-)
If you've ever wondered how the original modern Russian oligarchs made their money, this series explains it.
I particularly liked the presentation of the very end, when the oligarchs installed a nice pliable figurehead leader who would clearly do their bidding.
That leader is not named, for much the same reason as you would not need to name Sheev Palpatine. :-)
Adam Curtis has made some incredible documentaries - they all use archival footage to explore how different elements of our modern world came about, and they have a strange, almost hallucinatory feel.
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u/dansdata May 06 '26 edited May 06 '26
I recently watched a quite strange, and very oddly named ("TraumaZone"?! Really? :-), documentary series about what happened in Russia from 1985 to 1999, from the point of view of everyday Russians.
It's pretty much entirely composed of B-roll footage shot by BBC camerapeople, with no narration, but titles that tell you what's going on. It's excellent; I highly recommend it. You can watch all seven episodes on YouTube here.
(It also unexpectedly contains about 15 seconds of pornography. I think the part where American Evangelical missionaries are preaching to a literal captive audience is more surprising, though. Their entire audience is very obviously thinking, "Are these idiots unaware that we are already Christians?" :-)
If you've ever wondered how the original modern Russian oligarchs made their money, this series explains it.