In December, the Ukrainian culture ministry issued a warning about a Russian TV series that was being widely (and illegally) viewed across the besieged nation. There was no explicit mention of the offending show, which was described as “hostile propaganda,” but none was needed: Everyone knew it was “Slovo Patsana: Krov na Asphalte,” a new series about the youth gangs, or gruppirovki, that came to dominate the central Russian city Kazan in the final years of the Soviet Union.
The show’s title is usually translated to “The Boy’s Word,” though patsan has an edgier connotation. When we first meet the protagonist, Andrey Vasilyev, he is a sensitive teenager who plays the piano; then he is recruited into the Universam gang by a young man named Marat. Patsan was what such gangsters called one another, as if they were a unique breed of citizen. The opposite of the patsan was a chushpan: a loser, a rube, a working stiff. A patsan might die in a brawl or go to prison, but that was still better than sitting through workers’ committee meetings at the Tupolev helicopter factory. “We’re the street,” Marat says, after a brawl in a discothèque. (I’m translating loosely.) “In this city of weaklings, we are the only human beings.”
After its release last fall, the show bested “Squid Game” as Russia’s most streamed; in its first month, it saw more queries on the Russian search engine Yandex than “SVO,” the acronym for the “special military operation” in Ukraine. Its first half is concerned with a hat Andrey’s mother loses in a game of three-card monte; the second is about the contested ownership of a VCR, which spins into a bloody gang rivalry. “It’s the story of young men living in a society where there is no longer a unifying principle,” David MacFadyen, a professor of musicology and comparative literature and expert in Russian popular culture at the University of California Los Angeles, told me. “All that’s left is physical violence.”
At one point, Andrey’s affection for an older official — played by Anastasiya Krasovskaya, a Belarusian model who doesn’t exactly square with my recollections of Soviet martinets — brings him to a small party of would-be rockers whose Dylanesque sensibility he doesn’t share. Andrey stuns the hipsters by playing a few soulful chords on a piano. Then he abruptly slams the fallboard down, growling, “I see you around the neighborhood, I bury you.” In just three episodes, he has gone from Little Mozart to Ivan Drago. So would Russia go, in three decades, from the young democracy tempting Harvard Business School quants to a rogue superpower embracing North Korea.
Andrey is a blank. With his pouting lips and deep-set eyes, he resembles a tattoo-free Justin Bieber, but he is so defiantly affectless that even the care he lavishes on his mother and sister fails to make him sympathetic. After Marat’s girlfriend is raped and then dies by suicide, a rift emerges between the boys. “There are higher laws than the code of the patsan,” Marat says. Andrey looks at him indifferently — he hates weakness, because he was once weak himself. “There is no such law,” he says.
Russian television is still far behind where American television was when Tony Soprano first sat in Dr. Melfi’s waiting room, but “The Boy’s Word” is an attempt at something similar. The problem is its lack of irony. On “The Sopranos,” Tony the patient distanced himself from Tony the criminal, while the show kept a certain observational distance from its subject, elevating the series above ordinary television. As many great Soviet artists knew, irony can be remarkably subversive. But subversion is forbidden in Russia today, so “The Boy’s Word” only offers one face-punching after another against a backdrop of Soviet kitsch.
Produced by the Institute for Internet Development and partly funded, according to some news reports, by Iran, the series was one of a few intended to raise awareness of “positive changes in the lives of people in Russia.” Its narrow apartments, battered Soviet cars, frigid classrooms and exhausted members of the Marxist-Leninist vanguard all scream to the modern Russian viewer, “You’ve come a long way, comrade!” Judging by the public response, they may be succeeding. “I am very happy that the youth of today had never experienced anything like that,” one user wrote in an IMDB review.
‘They say that in a year or two, we will be like America.’
It’s true that the material circumstances of many Russians are much improved from those late-Soviet days. But the violent, nihilistic mind-set the show captures doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere at all. Last year, a pro-Ukrainian account on Instagram shared video of a Russian soldier sitting on a bench in front of an apartment building in Kazan just like Andrey’s. In an apparent attempt to show off, the soldier produces a real grenade, pulls the pin and throws it. A woman excoriates him, but the soldier is unbothered. As it says on a tote bag you can now purchase online: “A patsan never apologizes.”
The leader of the Universam gang — Marat’s brother, Vova — is also freshly returned from battle, having served in the brutal Soviet-Afghan War. He seems unbothered by what he saw there. None of his peers seem curious, either. This is the show’s aesthetic world: blank to the point of impenetrability. The director, Zhora Kryzhovnikov, rarely lets the camera wander beyond the rectilinear bounds of apartment blocks. The period details are hauntingly precise, but I still have no idea what Kazan actually looks like. The plot is somehow both frenetic and inert.
The show is set in a critical moment. Everyone knows that the Soviet Union is crumbling, but nobody knows what will come next. In one of its few moments of effective irony, Vova muses about the future. “I listened to Gorbachev,” he says. “They say that in a year or two, we will be like America. Or maybe better.” My family left the country in 1989, and I remember the disappointment and humiliation of those years with exceptional clarity. We were all supposed to have VCRs. Instead, gangsterism filled a vacuum left by collapsed institutions. The “Kazan phenomenon” of the ’80s morphed into the Russian mafia of the ’90s, which looted post-Soviet democracy until an exasperated Kremlin handed power to Vladimir Putin, who effectively converted organized crime into a form of government. Today, his worldview, with its fixation on strength prevailing over weakness, is embedded in the national consciousness.
It’s easy enough to dunk on bad Russian TV, but “The Boy’s Word” has something truly rotten at its core: It is a warning about what happens when our ability for moral reasoning becomes so impoverished that the most straightforward response to any situation is to punch somebody in the face. In a withering online review, the critic Platon Besedin wrote, with classic Russian restraint, that the series “could only be demanded by a sick and miseducated society that walks in circles like a tired, sick pony.” American culture is not exempt from similar criticism: We may not have to fight over VCRs, but I doubt that Besedin would regard Street Fighter 6 and “Deadpool & Wolverine” as evidence of a culture on the come up — and if he doesn’t know about “MILF Manor,” let’s not tell him.
In the final scene of “The Boy’s Word,” Andrey is in a prison colony. He is playing the piano, while the boys arrayed before him sing. The scene is tense, controlled but close to unhinged, and may be the show’s best. Andrey is a new man, ready for the new world that he has helped make. He concludes with a glissando, his long fingers sliding across the fingerboard. Then the show ends, and Russia begins.
Alexander Nazaryan writes about culture and politics.
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