SUMMARY:

Denis Dubrovkin is a high school history teacher from the war-torn Ukrainian region of Donbass. As an eyewitness of political polarization in Donbass and the war hostilities that followed, Dubrovkin attempts to frame his personal experience with the version of psychohistory that he teaches his students. Specifically, he uses the book Escape from Freedom, by Erich Fromm (1941), as a “field manual” of sorts, making sense of the seemingly paradoxical and self-destructive choice of many Donbassians.