During the Gorbachev years, Platon Makovski and his four buddies are university students who jump on the private capitalism movement. Fast-forward 20 years, Platon finds himself the richest man in Russia, having sacrificed his friends to get to the top. But with this cynical rise, comes a brutal fall.
Acting
Mashkov's Platon: charming, terrifying, utterly magnetic
Direction
Lungin captures wild-west Moscow with operatic swagger
Cinematography
Gilded decay everywhere — Soviet brutalism meets nouveau riche excess
Director
Pavel Lungin
Vladimir Mashkov
Platon Makovskiy
Mariya Mironova
Mariya
Andrey Krasko
Shmakov
Aleksandr Baluev
Koretskiy
Vladimir Steklov
Belenkiy
Marat Basharov
Koshkin
Levan Uchaneishvili
Larri
Valentin Varetskii
member of the Security Counsil
Mikhail Vasserbaum
Mark
Vladimir Golovin
Akhmet
Vladimir Gusev
Lomov
Vladimir Kashpur
ship captain
Natalya Kolyakanova
Nina
Sergey Yushkevich
Viktor
Aleksandr Samoylenko
Musa
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Based loosely on real oligarchs like Berezovsky and Khodorkovsky — the film arrived as Putin was consolidating power, making its cynicism feel almost prophetic.
Vladimir Mashkov allegedly based Platon's physicality on watching actual 90s Russian bankers — the way they held cigarettes, the dead-eyed confidence of men who'd seen too much.
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