“ that's me commenting yt essays on how 90s and early 00s volatility and violence in russia might have added on top of ilya's family trauma “
I’m not Russian but I would love to hear about this !!
hi! thanks for the question! this is such a TL;DR, i'm sorry) so, ilya was born in 1991 (same as me), and that time was a hell of a ride for russia and other post-soviet countries.
the dissolution of the ussr in 1999 led to economic collapse, general poverty, rise of organized crime (often interconnected with the police and state officials — wink-wink at grigoriy and andrei-alexei), and widespread normalization of violence. law enforsement was generally weak, understaffed and often corrupted. some people were in survival mode, some desperate, some opportunistic.
so, yeah: organized crime, gangs fighting for money and power, assassinations, blowing up competitors’ cars with zero regard for casualties, taking competitors’ families hostage, juvenile gangs (gopniki), and a drug crisis. if we want to go deeper and darker, the soviet–afghan war just ended in 1989 (hence, handicaps begging for money in the streets, brothers and fathers with untreated ptsd), chechen wars (we had two, in 1994 and 1999) started and brought new wave of traumatized survivors and a series of attacks in moscow and smaller cities (appartment bombings in 1999, moscow theater hostage crisis in 2002, Beslan school siege in 2004). that’s just off the top of my head.
back to my sweet ilysha. in 90-00s your childhood experience depended immensely on your family’s financial situation, and tbh this is a blind spot for me. the show depicts opulence, while the book states that his father (a ministry official!) left his family with nothing. i honestly don’t get it. the only reason you would work for any ministry at that time was to gain access to money — and i don’t mean a hard-earned paycheck at the end of the month. so who paid for those kremlin-style interiors: ilya or his father? have andrei-alexei drained his father too? best-case scenario: by the time ilya was born, his father was loaded, with esablished career in moscow, somehow eliminated threats and competition (or everyone was just really chill with grigoriy specifically). therefore, he was able to shield ilya from most of the chaos by placing him in an elite school and having him driven around. still, i doubt ilya could escape reality completely.
the feeling of unsafety, unpredictability and helplessness seeped into life through the news, gossip, overheard conversations, the way the streets looked and people treated each other.
i mean, even if you had a personal driver back then, you still would have heard stories about this respectable man’s car being blown up, or that respectable man being shot in the elevator of her apartment building.
and if you were just a regular kid, sucks to be you. most of the time you were on your own, and chances were, you might be easily targeted on your way home from a hockey practice by a gopnik gang (usually consisted of boys from about 8 to 20ish years old). being a stranger in the area, having a hint of nice clothes or, an even worse crime, blond curls as a boy, would make you an obvious target. the usual tactisc were as follows: block your way, ask something innocent (usually got a cigarette? - wink-wink to shane in saskatchewan), assess your reaction, if satisfied — leave you alone, if not — proceed to robbing and beating the shit out of you. so boys had to know how to talk and act in these situations to avoid the threat, because beeing submissive (or overly agressive) would be an invitation to humiliation and violence. at the same time, teachers, coaches, and parents usually enforced the opposite dynamic and demanded submission. sidenote: on my first watch, i read ilya’s what the fuck do you want face at their first meeting in saskatchewan as pure instinct — because if someone approached you like that in some russian backstreet, it could mean a whole range of trouble. and later i chuckled at his “you will murder me,” thinking "is it really that scary in the dark alleys of montreal, baby???" (with all respect to montreal).
so, yeah, ilya's mom was depressed and died around 2003, his dad was a shithead all the way, but i believe ilya had no choise but to develop his situationl awereness, hypervigilance and a facade way earlier so he could navigate other social situations and general historical chaos. it's kinda a miracle to me that he didn't really internalized a lot of toxic power dinamics and views on relationship, sex and musculinity that were common at that time. i attribute that to his kind heart and irina's beatiful soul.
sidenote 2: in the 90s and early 00s, ilya’s family would’ve been considered wholesome. he had a father, his father wasn’t an alcoholic, and there are no mentions of physical abuse, as far as i remember. what else could you want if the bar is in hell? i have a feeling most 90s kids didn’t know that “you are a disgrace, be better” does not mean “i love you, son.”
