About the title
Moscow, 1996. Young and enterprising banker Andrei Rubanov has a wife, Irma, and a small child. He also has, together with his friend Misha, more than a million dollars between them. Seeing themselves as the future elite of the new state — oligarchs — they get involved in a major deal, only to discover that they have been drawn into a massive scheme to embezzle billions from the state treasury. After his arrest, Andrei ends up in an overcrowded shared cell in Matrosskaya Tishina — a purgatory where he must become a different man in order to survive and return to the world he once knew.