S1.E3 ∙ BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH

The statue of a town's patron saint is broken just before the annual Saint's Day festival, so the priest hires a mime from a troupe of traveling players to impersonate the statue during the church's hours of operation.

After having returned from Berlin to St. Petersburg the Russian soldier Oleg realizes that after the breakdown of communism everything he once knew has changed. Only his friend Vladimir welcomes him with the traditional bottle of Vodka and when they get drunk they decide to become capitalists...

The half-educated law student Pyotr Chukhontsev, who is trying his hand at private investigation, is approached by engineer Kuklin, an inventor who fears for his life. Soon, Kuklin dies exactly as he foresaw.

Old war veterans meet a changed world.

Maya is over thirty, full of life and holds a very practical worldview, until she suddenly risks "cascading backwards." Accompanied by her nearly adult daughter, she leaves her quiet cottage in a leafy suburb at the risk of being isolated from her community. She plunges into the pulsing life of the big city and goes job-hunting, which has her encounter many different people. She moves into a big apartment complex, where she meets people in extremely diverse living situations. On account of her residence and her daughter's new friends, Maya is acquainted with new forms of life, which she unhesitatingly confronts. Unfortunately, finding personal satisfaction in a new relationship she starts proves to be quite difficult. The affection of her lover, Tony the composer, turns out to be short-lived. Only time will tell if Gerd, Maya's boss and secret admirer, will turn out to be the great love of her life.

USSR society in the late Brezhnev years had its own yuppies: the 30 something Young Communist League officers rising in the Party bureaucracy.One is about to lose his rank after a theft from his office.