The Russian series “Gaunerehrenwort” is about the rise and fall of a Kazan youth gang in the 1980s – and hits a nerve in society. Now Netflix is also interested in it.
“I’m one of the boys now”: 14-year-old Andrej is full of pride when he can finally say this sentence in the series “Slowo Pazana” (in German: crook’s word of honor). He was actually only supposed to give English tutoring to Marat, who had previously blackmailed him for money on the tram. Instead, he became friends with him and joined the youth gang “Universam”.
There isn’t much else to do in the Russian provincial town of Kazan at the end of the 1980s: Andrej suspects that his training at the music school won’t help him to become a pianist, gangs of youth in tracksuits are hanging around on the streets of the already crumbling Soviet Union, You can either be their victim (a “Tchushpan”) and allow yourself to be bullied, or you can be a “Pazan”, a whole guy and belong to them. Andrej has made a decision – and a large part of the Russian-speaking world audience has been following his decision since November in the eight-part feature film series.
The law of the fist will soon replace the word of honor
The imagery is yellowed, uniforms and the gutter jargon that emerged back then and that shapes Russian political discourse today are omnipresent. Soviet hits by Kino, Mirasch and Willi Tokarev play in key scenes. All of this awakens a bittersweet nostalgia in many viewers – or serves the longing of younger people for a time that they did not experience themselves, but in which they are very familiar thanks to retro trends and constant history education.
Taking the night train to Moscow and insulting students there, treating your first love to an ice cream, doing little things in between: the “boys” coming of age is all about their gang and a backyard youth that not only Putin biographers flirt with again and again. But things quickly become dark.
When Andrej and Marat realize that in their new environment only the rule of thumb applies and that a “crook’s word of honor” is actually worthless, it is too late: their mutual friend Mischa is murdered by a rival gang, and Andrej’s mother is driven to the psychiatric hospital by grief , Marat cannot protect his girlfriend Aigul from rape and subsequent ostracism. Friends become enemies.
The series hits a nerve with many
In today’s Russia, where the crime rate has risen since the mobilization of former prison inmates, this depressing mood also hits a nerve: everyone knows life in constant escalation, between state over-regulation and lawlessness in everyday life.
Not only the title song “Pyjala”, sung in Tatar, is a hit: on TikTok, young people in “Pazan” costumes act out key phrases and showmanship, and meme jokes compare the series with familiar moments in Russian life.
The political dimension of the hit series in Russian-speaking countries is correspondingly sensitive: many Russian-Germans and people from Ukraine have also seen it. The production was made possible by the de facto state-run “Institute for the Development of the Internet”, which otherwise finances propaganda content, the Gazprom-financed television station NTV and the media holding of “United Russia” party member Alina Kabaeva, who has an intimate relationship with President Vladimir Putin is said.
Critical undertones – only against whom?
Theoretically, “Slovo Pazana” is a historical series: It is about the so-called Kazan phenomenon of marauding youth gangs in the last years of the Soviet Union. However, it was not shot in Kazan, but in Yaroslavl because local politicians opposed it. And since December, at the latest, in Irkutsk, young people beat a 15-year-old to death and relatives and the media made references to the “boys'” honor, the authorities are no longer sure to whom the critical undertones of the series now apply: Is “crook’s word of honor” an educational one Warning to young people, their parents and the security apparatus, who are helpless in the face of increasingly escalating gang violence in the series? Or is it a criticism of the system from within?
In any case, the Family Committee of the State Duma already felt compelled to order an examination of the series by the media supervisory authority and the public prosecutor’s office – but they couldn’t find anything dangerous, especially since it is declared “from 18” in Russia.
The creators of the series have so far survived the scandal unscathed. Apparently Netflix has started negotiations with the production company about the rights to “Gaunerehrenwort”. Accordingly, an adaptation could run in the spring on the streaming service, which has no longer been available in Russia since 2022 – and achieve a similar cult status among Western viewers as the HBO series “Chernobyl”, which appeared in 2019. But no one in Russia can give the crook’s word of honor that nothing comes between them.