A few weeks ago, I first heard about Padomju džinsi (Soviet Jeans, 2024). It is a recent and very lively political tragicomedy about late Soviet Latvia. Director Stanislavs Tokalovs said that back in the early 2010s he had been offered the chance to make a series for Russia’s Channel One[1]. But the two sides could not agree on the main point: how exactly to portray the Soviet 1960s and 1970s. As a result, the series came out much later, and in Latvia. It became a story not about the nostalgic ‘style of an era’, but about the mechanisms of coercion built into the late USSR.
That discovery made me wonder: was a similar series ever made for Russian television in the end? In the 2010s, Channel One aired the series Оттепель (The Thaw, 2013) and Fartsa (2015). They deal with the Soviet past in different ways. But in relation to Soviet Jeans, Fartsa is especially interesting. Most likely, it was Fartsa that went on air in place of the project the director of Soviet Jeans had refused to make for the channel.
Fartsa turns to the bright, dynamic, outwardly optimistic years of Khrushchev’s Thaw. Soviet Jeans turns to the late Brezhnev era, often associated with terms like stagnation or soft terror. Placed side by side, the two series say something far larger than fashion, youth, or Western goods. These are two very different works. But both reveal the same underlying logic: Soviet law should not be understood as clear limits on state power. It was one of its instruments. Sometimes it was observed, sometimes rewritten, sometimes simply bypassed.
Beneath the Optimism of the Thaw
From its opening minutes, Fartsa creates a dense historical setting. Yuri Gagarin appears on the streets. Real figures are woven into the story. They range from currency traders and shadow dealers to film director Genrikh Oganesyan, singer Muslim Magomayev, theatre and film actor Andrei Mironov, and Nikita Khrushchev. All of this is placed in an imagined and vividly lit atmosphere of early 1960s Moscow, played here by Minsk. Construction is everywhere, and Soviet man has conquered space. Young people are searching for their place in life. They are also learning how to live within the shadow economy. Critic Anna Narinskaya called the series an Exhibition of the Sixties’ Achievements and wrote that whatever else falls apart in it, one idea holds it together: the KGB’s sticky fingers — “sticky, in part, literally with blood” — are ready to reach everything and choke off anything fresh and free, from young art to young lives.
This contrast is where the series gets its strength. On the surface, it is a time of energy and cultural revival. Style, music, youth, a sense of movement. But Fartsa insists on showing that behind this façade of freedom there is a state ready to change the rules at any moment.
One of the most revealing scenes involves a conflict between a police investigator and a state security officer. With some artistic freedom, the film depicts the real story of the notorious case against currency speculator Yan Rokotov and his associates. A KGB captain takes the case away from a police officer. Why, he asks, does one currency dealer get eight years for an illegal circulation of fifty dollars, while another receives the same eight-year sentence for one million?
In response, the investigator cites Article 88, Part 3 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. It sets the maximum punishment at eight years in prison.
“But he should get fifteen,” the KGB officer says. “That would be just.”
“I defend the law. I do not rewrite it,” answers the investigator.
“That is exactly the point. Which is why I am taking the case away from you.”
The dispute here is not between law and lawlessness. The clash takes place within the state apparatus itself. One arm appeals to codified norms. The other acts on political necessity and moral rhetoric. Law is not a limit on coercion here. It becomes material for adjusting coercion.
Under the law in force at the time of their crimes, Yan Rokotov and his associates should have been sentenced to eight years in prison. But Nikita Khrushchev intervened personally and saw to it that special decrees changed the penalties. They were applied to Rokotov and the others retroactively. First, the sentence was increased to fifteen years in prison. Then, only a few weeks later, even that sentence was changed. In July 1961, Yan Rokotov and Vladislav Faibishenko were executed by firing squad.
According to the former Izvestia correspondent Yuri Feofanov, the fact that criminal law had been applied retroactively troubled mainly lawyers but not all of them. He writes: “In the public consciousness a kind of formula had taken root: not fully according to the written law, but just.”[2]
Izvestia reporting on July 20, 1961 that Rokotov and Faibishenko were sentenced to death by firing squad.
Fartsa turns this legal-political episode into everyday drama. What matters is not only Rokotov, who appears only briefly, but the whole environment: black marketeers, underground music recorded ‘on bones’ (pressed onto X-ray film), casinos, semi-legal middlemen connecting Soviet consumers to the global market. Participation in the grey market did not necessarily mean political opposition. That is precisely why the familiar categories of legal/illegal, loyal/rebellious begin to blur. The grey zone did not exist outside the Soviet system. It existed inside it, alongside it, and often with its quiet participation.
Bone Music, or ‘Roentgenizdat.’ Explore more at the X-RAY AUDIO project website: https://www.x-rayaudio.com/x-rayaudioproject
Silencing Without Spectacle
If in Fartsa state violence still favours loud show trials, demonstrative punishments, and legal escalation, Soviet Jeans shows a different register of coercion. The action takes place in 1979 in Soviet Riga. A young man named Renars works as a costume assistant at a theatre and supplements his income by selling jeans and records on the black market. When the KGB learns of his activities, they turn him into an informer. He must monitor colleagues, report who listens to Western radio, who drinks Coca-Cola, who jokes about Leonid Brezhnev, who thinks too freely. A foreign female director arrives, and she becomes the focal point of the plot’s political line about control over art.
The film is based on real events. More precisely, on three real stories whose elements were fused into one story in the series. One of them involves a Latvian man who wanted to escape by boat to Sweden. But who in their right mind would want to live outside the USSR?! The director, Tokalovs, conducted extensive research. When he shared it with a producer at the Russian channel, the response was blunt: “We need to rewrite everything. We’ve got a new ‘party line’ (politika partii) now: life in the Soviet Union was good. And what do you have here? Everyone is running away. Horror stories!” Tokalovs recalled this years later in an interview with Latvian radio.
This series centers on the mechanisms of punishment. Instead of a show trial, there is blackmail. Instead of a public process, there is professional destruction. Instead of an open rewriting of the law, there is punitive psychiatry. The protagonist ends up in a closed psychiatric clinic. There he organizes an underground jeans workshop in partnership with the head of the clinic. This is not a deviation from the system. It is one of its working forms. Punitive psychiatry in the USSR functioned in this way. It turned political and cultural disagreement into an alleged medical problem. At the III Congress of Soviet Writers on 22 May 1959, Nikita Khrushchev said that those who called for opposition to communism were clearly not mentally normal. The wording in the May 24, 1959 issue of Sovetskaia kul’tura (Soviet Culture) differs slightly from the unedited archival stenogram published later, but the core proposition remains the same. Soviet Jeans captures this logic and shows with remarkable precision how, by the late Brezhnev period, it had become routine and bureaucratized. Coercion is quieter and less spectacular. But no less real.
Front page of Sovetskaia kul’tura, no. 64 (933), 24 May 1959.
The psychiatric hospital in Soviet Jeans appears almost as the perfect symbol of late Soviet power. It allows the authorities to declare oppositional thinking a symptom, and dissent a form of deviance. On paper, everything may look constitutional, procedural, even humane. But the underlying logic is the same as in Fartsa: law does not restrain the state. It gives the state a language, a form, and a toolkit for selective violence.
The Shadow Inside the System
Both Fartsa and Soviet Jeans refuse to reduce Soviet reality to a simple opposition between the state and the underground. Instead, both series show a permeable boundary between the illegal market and the legal state. The state did not simply fight the grey zone. It could profit from it, tolerate it, regulate it informally, or deploy it against specific people when convenient.
This is visible throughout the plots involving jeans, records, currency, unofficial deals, and personal connections. Formally, all of this was on the wrong side of the line. In practice, these activities were woven deep into Soviet everyday life. They are tied to cultural institutions, state bodies, local middlemen, and corrupt officials. So the contrast here is not between a clean state and a dirty market. It is a negotiated, politically adaptable order in which individual actors within the system constantly decide, day by day, where exactly the line of the permissible runs.
This leads to a broader conclusion. The Soviet punitive and disciplinary repertoire is better understood not as a fixed body of rules, but as a changing technology of governance. It can work through the code, through a decree, through an investigation, through editorial control, through a hospital, through the security services, through a moral campaign in the press. In some cases, the state relies on a show trial. In others, on administrative pressure or the medicalization of dissent.
That is probably why both series are more interesting than just stories about stylish Soviet youth. Yes, they contain music, fashion, friendship, romance, and vivid visual work imagining an era. Yes, some (perhaps even most) viewers saw Fartsa above all as a story about a group of friends, almost outside the Soviet context, something between a crime drama, a coming-of-age series, and a retro version of the plot about young guys drifting into illegality.
But at the moment when it seems that we are simply watching an engaging story about friendship, money, and risk, both series suddenly reveal something more important: the Soviet order held together not through the clarity of rules but through their selective application. The question was never only what was forbidden. It was who, when, and in whose interest decided what counted as a crime, an illness, a moral failure, or a threat to the state.
In that sense, Fartsa and Soviet Jeans show that the Soviet grey zone was not an exception to the system. It was one of its normal states. The two series observe how the forms of power change while its underlying principle stays constant. In the early 1960s, the state still prefers loud punishment and public revision of what is permissible. In the late 1970s, it operates more quietly: through surveillance, blackmail, professional strangulation, psychiatry, and institutional corruption.
Suggested reading:
Yuri Feofanov and Donald D. Barry, Politics and Justice in Russia: Major Trials of the Post-Stalin Era (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996).
Eva Hausbacher, Elena Huber, and Julia Hargaßner, eds., Fashion, Consumption and Everyday Culture in the Soviet Union between 1945 and 1985 (Munich, Berlin, and Washington, DC: Peter Lang, 2014).
Notes
[1] Channel One (formerly ORT, ‘Public Russian Television’) is the largest federal television channel in Russia and has the biggest audience in the country. The channel is also broadcast in a number of countries outside Russia.
[2] Yuri Feofanov and Donald D. Barry, Politics and Justice in Russia: Major Trials of the Post-Stalin Era (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996), 28.
About the author
Dr. Gevorg Avetikyan is a Research Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin, where he contributes to the ERC-funded project In Pursuit of Legality and Justice: Minority Struggles in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union (JUSTIMINO). His current research examines national identity, dissent, and justice claims in Soviet Armenia.
He holds a PhD in History as well as MA degrees in Iranian Studies from Yerevan State University and Nationalism Studies from Central European University.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Gevorg Avetikyan (April 21, 2026). Soviet Jeans and Fartsa: Law, Coercion, and the Soviet Grey Zone in Two TV Series. In Pursuit of ‘Legality’ and ‘Justice’. Retrieved September 7, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/163rq