The Bleak, Nihilistic Show Russians Can’t Stop Watching

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.”