Moscow Rules
Detective radio drama in post-Soviet Moscow
- 6episodes
- 2 h 55 minof drama
- 1997–2016setting years
Moscow after the Soviet Union, from 1991 to today. Maksim Volkov, a former criminal-investigation officer turned consulting detective, and his flatmate Dr. Grigori Melnik, a military surgeon who tells each story, work cases in a city where the rules changed overnight and nobody agrees on the new ones.
The stories are loosely inspired by real cases. Every name, place and figure is changed and the solution is invented, so these are fictions, never reports of what happened.
The writing, voices, music, sound effects and artwork are AI-generated, and a human listens to and revises every episode. How it is made.
Episodes in Moscow Rules
Paris After Dark
On a winter night in Moscow, old Sedov climbs five floors to the detective Maksim Volkov's door and will come no further than the mat. After the party for his eightieth birthday, something else was in the frame of his father's Tolmachev, and the police only laughed. Half the building was in his flat that night. What became of the painting?
The Polished Letter
A Moscow translator stands on the doormat of the detective Maksim Volkov and will not sit down. This week the American papers printed a bank warning, and she knew it by her own commas: she had polished it. Someone will be blamed, she says. Who hired a Moscow translator to polish the letter that robbed Washington?
The Friday Flight
Three weeks ago, on a Friday, the metals dealer Arkady Zimin went to a Moscow airport for his flight to New York and never boarded. A girl at the check-in desk saw two men in long coats show Federal Security Service passes and walk him out. His secretary has come to the detective Maksim Volkov: who walked Arkady Zimin out?
Freedom in a Locker
A stranger on the telephone is selling a jailed oil baron's freedom for seven hundred thousand dollars, and the baron's wife, Olga, has already paid half in cash. The guards have gone, the gas is cut off, and she has kept one hand clenched shut for two days. Before she pays the rest, is the voice real?
The Case of the Twin Ledgers
Who drained seven billion dollars out of Russia through twin shells and a letterbox, while the one clerk whose signature is on every confirmation begs a detective to look past her?
The Quiet Banker
Six Moscow banks fail within a week and twelve billion rubles disappear. So why was a quiet bank employee beaten on the street for writing down a number plate?
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