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He was once one of the world’s most celebrated filmmakers, winning an Academy Award and becoming a fixture at the major international film festivals. Today, Nikita Mikhalkov is better known as one of Vladimir Putin’s most influential allies. Svetlana Satchkova describes how one of Russia’s greatest directors ended up here.

Russian filmmaker and director Nikita Mikhalkov. Photo: Maxim Shipenkov / ANP / EPA

In 1995, Nikita Mikhalkov ascended the Oscar stage alongside his eight-year-old daughter, Nadya, to accept the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for Burnt by the Sun, in which they both played leading roles. Set over the course of a single summer day in 1936, just outside Moscow, the film is a languid, atmospheric historical drama. At the center is Sergey Kotov, a celebrated Red Army commander, spending an idyllic Sunday at his dacha with his wife, their young daughter, and a house full of relatives. The tranquility is interrupted by the arrival of Mitya, his wife’s former fiancé. There are long meals, rambling conversations, and lush, golden landscapes. The mood is almost Chekhovian, until it gradually becomes clear that Mitya has not come for a social visit. He has come to arrest Kotov as a traitor.

There is a devastating scene in which Kotov realizes that even his personal friendship with Stalin won’t save him and that, most likely, he will be executed. I still consider Burnt by the Sun one of the greatest movies ever made.

At the time, the film was widely seen as a humanistic indictment of Stalinist terror, released as Russia was embracing democratic reforms and reckoning with its Soviet past. Today, it’s viewed differently, largely because of Mikhalkov’s transformation into one of Putin’s most loyal and, many would argue, most rabid propagandists. Whether he truly changed, or simply revealed who he’d always been, remains an open question.

Svetlana Satchkova

Journalist en schrijver

Svetlana Satchkova schreef drie Russische romans. Ze groeide op in Moskou en woont tegenwoordig in New York. In januari 2026 verscheen haar eerste Engelstalige roman: The Undead

Like father, like son

Nikita Mikhalkov was born into one of Russia’s most distinguished and influential families. His paternal ancestors belonged to the nobility, while his mother was the daughter of painter Pyotr Konchalovsky and the granddaughter of the great Russian artist Vasily Surikov. His father, Sergey Mikhalkov, was one of the Soviet Union’s best-known public figures: a children’s poet whose books sold in the millions, the author of the Soviet national anthem, and a writer who enjoyed Stalin’s personal favor. Decorated with numerous state honors, he served for decades as chairman of the RSFSR Writers’ Union. Nikita shot to fame as an actor in 1964, starring in Walking the Streets of Moscow. The film made him an overnight celebrity, his face instantly recognizable across the Soviet Union. While continuing his acting career, he turned to directing, making his debut with the 1974 Red Western At Home Among Strangers, set during the Russian Civil War.

Over the years, Mikhalkov proved to be a remarkably prolific director and earned international acclaim. By the late 1980s, he was widely regarded as one of the Soviet Union’s leading filmmakers. His 1977 film An Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano — my personal favorite — adapted from Chekhov’s Platonov and several of his short stories, won the top prize at the San Sebastián International Film Festival. Dark Eyes (1987), based on several Chekhov short stories, earned Marcello Mastroianni the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival. Urga, set on the Mongolian steppe, won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1991 and was later nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Around this time, Mikhalkov Jr. began following his father’s example in his relationship with political power. Sergey Mikhalkov had an extraordinary ability to reinvent himself as political circumstances changed. A loyal servant of the state under Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and, eventually, Putin, he managed to remain in official favor across radically different political systems. He wrote the lyrics to the Soviet national anthem in 1944, revised them after Stalin’s death, and, decades later, rewrote them once again for Putin’s Russia. Over the course of his career, he participated in official campaigns against writers including Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, he downplayed his role, insisting in interviews that his involvement had been minor and driven by pressure from above.

Nikita, too, began cultivating close relationships with the country’s leadership. Under the Soviet Union, he enjoyed unusual institutional support; under Boris Yeltsin, he became a prominent cultural figure; under Vladimir Putin, he evolved into one of the state’s most influential cultural ambassadors. He also accumulated powerful positions of his own. In 1998, after a bitter internal struggle, he was elected chairman of the Russian Cinematographers’ Union, a position he has effectively controlled ever since. The following year, he became president of the Moscow International Film Festival, a post he still holds today. In 1998, Mikhalkov released The Barber of Siberia, his most ambitious and expensive film to date. He cast himself as Emperor Alexander III, and the role suited him so well that people began speculating he might run for president. But when Putin came to power, Mikhalkov put aside any such ambitions, if he ever had them, and became one of the new president’s most loyal supporters.

Extraordinary wealth

He had backed the right horse. As he lavished praise on Putin, Mikhalkov’s influence and wealth continued to grow. Over the years, his production company, Studio TRITE, received billions of rubles in state funding for films, while his television projects, cultural institutions, and other ventures also benefited from generous government support. He became an extraordinarily wealthy man. He owns a stake in ChelProm-Diamond (UralDiamond), one of Russia’s largest diamond-processing companies, has long been linked to a timber enterprise in the Volga region, and since 2015 has owned the Nikita Mikhalkov Academy of Cinematic and Theatre Arts, a private educational institution. The only time he publicly disclosed his assets, his declaration revealed not only an enormous income but also ownership of 30 million square meters of land and a private helicopter.

'Sergey Mikhalkov always served those in power. There was also this desire to hold some official position, to head some institution,' said cultural journalist Natasha Kiseleva with whom I spoke over a video call. 'Nikita inherited all of that. In essence, he isn’t an artist. We can’t imagine Tarkovsky heading an organization, or Almodóvar, or Tarantino. But those two have the mentality of bureaucrats. At the same time, Nikita surpassed his father. He had a truly major international career. He belonged to the pantheon of festival directors, on the level of Kurosawa and Lars von Trier. He loved all of that. And then he gave it all up.'

Mikhalkov’s 80th birthday, in October 2025, was celebrated almost like a state holiday. For a week, Russia’s main television channels aired documentaries and retrospectives devoted to him. In one of them, Putin appeared on camera, saying that the two were friends and that there was 'chemistry' between them. On Mikhalkov’s birthday, Putin awarded him the Order of St. Andrew the Apostle the First-Called, Russia’s highest state honor, citing his 'outstanding contribution to the development of Russian culture and cinema and many years of distinguished public service.' The same day, Patriarch Kirill presented him with the First Class Order of Glory and Honor.

Nikita Mikhalkov (right) gets awarded the Order of St. Andrew the Apostle the First-Called, the Russian Federation's highest order, during a ceremony on 24 December 2025 at the Kremlin. Photo: Alexander Kazakov / ANP / EPA

'God sent us the Special Military Operation'

Over the past few years, however, Mikhalkov has become known as Nikita the Demon Hunter. In 2011, he launched Besogon ('Demon Hunter'), a personal talk show that began on YouTube before moving to Russia’s state television channels. There, the director promoted an ever-growing array of conspiracy theories and, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, became one of the war’s most vocal defenders. 'God sent us the Special Military Operation,' he declared. Mikhalkov has repeatedly insisted that he makes Besogon with his own money and does not receive 'a single kopeck' from the state. But in 2025, Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation published an investigation which found that every episode is in fact paid for by the state-owned oil company Rosneft, which transfers five million rubles per episode through contracts disguised as advertising payments, even though the program contains no advertising. Mikhalkov himself has said that, at Putin’s suggestion, Besogon became part of the mandatory school curriculum and was also shown to soldiers. According to the investigation, his company receives 350,000 rubles every time a short clip from the program is licensed for use in schools, even though the full episodes are freely available online.

The two central themes of Besogon are patriotism and Christian family values. Mikhalkov frequently argues that Russia is the only country capable of preserving them, while portraying Europe as morally bankrupt. Yet the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s investigation suggested that his own preferences told a different story. According to its findings, three apartments Mikhalkov owned in the Spanish city of Torrevieja were transferred to his daughter Anna in 2019. Around the same time, he purchased another property in Spain: a 250-square-meter, two-story apartment in Benidorm. In 2023, the apartment was frozen after Mikhalkov was placed under European sanctions for his public support of Russia’s war against Ukraine. The investigation also identified a 950-square-meter villa on a nearly one-acre plot in Sotogrande, registered in the names of his wife, Tatyana, and their children.

As for the traditional family values Mikhalkov so often extols, the investigation concluded that, in addition to his wife, he has maintained a long-term relationship with Maria Lemesheva, a former Channel One television host and editor-in-chief of Kinoreporter magazine. They have a daughter, Marfa, born in 2011. It also established that Lemesheva owns two apartments near the Mikhalkov family’s properties in Torrevieja.

Childhood trauma

'He doesn’t believe in what he’s saying,' Natasha Kiseleva told me. 'When he was placed under personal sanctions, he was deeply offended, and out of that resentment he started badmouthing Europe. But the most important factor is money. He’s paid enormous sums simply to sit in his study at home and speak to a camera. Of course he says whatever is required of him. I’m convinced that if the regime changed, he would change his rhetoric too, just as his father did.'

Director Igor Sadreev made a documentary about Nikita Mikhalkov titled Son. In a video call, he told me he believes Mikhalkov’s trajectory can best be explained in psychological terms. 'This is what I tried to show in my film, and that’s why I started looking so closely at his family, and especially at his father. There seems to be some mechanism of childhood trauma and compensation at work. In general, he’s someone who never lets go of a grievance. He goes after his critics for years and remembers every negative review ever written about his films. I think it all goes back to his childhood.'

Mikhalkov himself made a documentary about his father in 2003 to mark his ninetieth birthday. Titled Father, the film portrays Sergey Mikhalkov as a man consumed by career and status, largely indifferent to his wife and emotionally distant from his children. In one striking exchange, Nikita asks his father whether he cheated on his mother. Sergey matter-of-factly replies that he did. Nikita then says explicitly that his entire life has been an attempt to prove his worth to his father and earn his praise and love. He never heard either—not in the film, and not in life.

'It’s astonishing that this larger-than-life figure is just a wounded child who never received enough love from his father'

'There’s something almost ancient Greek about it,' Sadreev said. 'It’s unquestionably a tragedy. It’s astonishing that this larger-than-life figure is, at heart, just a wounded child who never received enough love from his father, and who built his extraordinary life and career in an effort to become worthy of him.'

Nikita’s older brother, Andrei Konchalovsky, also kept him at a distance when they were young. The brothers moved in very different circles in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. For decades, Konchalovsky seemed to embody the opposite path. He worked with Andrei Tarkovsky, co-writing the screenplays for his early films, immersed himself in European and American cinema, and left for Hollywood in 1980. There, he directed films starring major international actors, had a long relationship with Shirley MacLaine, and won numerous European film awards, while Nikita tied his career and identity ever more closely to Russia. Konchalovsky returned to Russia in the 1990s. Yet decades later, with both brothers now in their eighties, the distance between them has all but disappeared. Both have become outspoken supporters of Putin and defenders of the war in Ukraine.