ABSTRACT
Special Forces, too . . . I know it’s all very exciting, but what does it have to do with Pushkin?1
Not only are Brezhnev and his era increasingly important in the raison d’eˆtre of Russian TV drama; that same period was responsible for institut-
ing the genre itself. As a form of storytelling well established in the West
decades before, though, how did television series even come to Russia? This
remains a tricky issue, since argument continues over how lengthy, serialized
‘‘television films’’ of the past relate to the television series we know today.
What is the difference between a long film in four parts and a series in
fourteen? Aleksandr Prokhorov has succinctly argued that Soviet television
of the 1960s
