Media Comment 2/10 – “The Betrayed”

I stumbled across this documentary while mining the depths of Reddit for raw material, war-porn and death fetish videos. It’s a direct transfer from VHS and the scan lines cut across the screen now and then, bringing a surge of analog nostalgia with them every time. The film is called The Betrayed, and it was released in 1995 in the midst of the first Chechen war – that disastrous intervention that catapulted Putin to power on the promise of retribution. It’s a work of accidental genius, war journalism stumbling onto a profoundly unsettling set of narratives.

Consider the story of Kosov, a functionary in Yeltsin’s army, tasked with breaking the news to a group of mothers that their sons have been killed or captured. Watch his face as he flicks through his reports and realizes what’s happening. It’s a hellish Kafkaesque moment, a bureaucrats worst nightmare, the total collapse of abstraction.

Kosov becomes an unlikely sort of hero. His attempts to do right by the women lead him into Chechnya, and what he finds is haunting. This is a ruthless picture, there’s no punches pulled. When the mass graves are opened the corpses are rotting, hands decayed into horrendous blackened claws, the villagers covering their noses and mouths. We see the civilians fresh from the killing, bloodied by the grenades tossed into their shelters. In hell, a living hell, and we’re there, watching. You feel sick when you see it – that place where empathy gives out as a mechanism of self-protection.

The footage is incredible, as is the juxtaposition between frantic combat and the human aftermath. I’ve a scene seared into my mind, a squad of Russian troops holding a position against an attack as the light fades and the darkness settles in. The barrels of their AKMs steaming from the volume of fire, overheating, glowing red, while boys push fresh bullets into empty clips as fast as they can, flinching at the tracers passing overhead. The soundtrack only adds to the weird immediacy of it all, a punk number in a made up language intended to sound like English.

If you can make it to the end you’re rewarded by a final scene that sits on your chest like a weight – an unforgettable little film and a visceral insight into a history that has profoundly shaped the current Russian mindset.