By Guy Faulconbridge
MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian television serial exploring the tragedy wrought by brutal teenage street gangs fighting for survival, money and love in the last years of the crumbling Soviet Union has become a sensation in Russia.
The series - "A hoodlum's promise - blood on the asphalt" - shows the savagery of the gangs which carved up the Russian city of Kazan in 1989 as the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev gyrated the Soviet Union towards its 1991 demise.
In the Kazan badlands, many of the teenagers tried to make sense of their Soviet world turned upside down by flocking to the gangs where they found a kind of extended family offering security, money, adventure and death.
The film holds back little: three young men - Andrei, Marat and Vladimir - grapple with extreme violence and see their dreams ripped apart by murder, rape, suicide, madness and ultimately by themselves.
"For me this is a story of retribution and redemption, about how evil always returns evil - that you cannot but redeem evil," Andrey Zolotarev, who wrote the screenplay along with Zhora Kryzhovnikov, told Reuters.
It has become the most popular series in Russia, bringing in millions of viewers to online platforms, though some officials have demanded it be banned for glorifying criminal gangs and corrupting the youth of modern Russia.
The head of Tatarstan, Rustam Minnikhanov, said the series should be banned as it romanticised the gangs and risked stoking a repeat of the vicious gang history.
The series is also popular in Ukraine.
BACK IN THE U.S.S.R.
The end of the Cold War triggered a surge in optimism about the strength of democracy in the West and across swathes of eastern Europe.
But for tens of millions of Russians, the hopes of the period were dashed as the collapse of the Soviet Union brought freedom alongside poverty and an orgy of violence and corruption.
"There is still a divide in society about this time: was it blessed period or a nightmare?" said Zolotarev, who was born in 1982 but remembers the graveyard near his childhood home which filled up in the crime wave of the early 1990s.
The series follows Andrei Vasilyev, a gentle 14-year-old pianist who speaks fluent English and clearly has a bright future.
He uses a rare piece of Kazan regional Russian slang from the 1980s - "Chushpan" - a negative word used to describe an outsider on the streets - to explain why he wants to belong.
"It was very difficult for those with ambition and charisma not to go into the gangs - that is the paradox," Zolotarev said.
Andrei is given the nickname "Overcoat" because of his Soviet coat and falls for Irina. In a cinema they sing the words from Viktor Tsoi's legendary 1986 song "Change".
"Change is what our hearts demand. Change is what our eyes demand. In our laughter and our tears, in the pulse of our veins, we await change," they sing.
But violence destroys all of the main characters.
Marat's girlfriend, Aigul, is raped by a member of a rival gang. Ostracised by Marat's gang, she kills herself. Marat, stricken with guilt, betrays his own gang to the police and joins the Komsomol Communist youth in an bid to get justice for Aigul.
Vladimir, or "Vova Adidas (ETR:ADSGN)", who is recently returned from the war in Afghanistan, tries to escape the gang world. He is murdered on a train platform. His girlfriend watches him die.
Andrei's mother goes mad. The state tries to take away Andrei's younger sister. Andrei ends up playing the piano in a Russian prison.