The Boy's Word: Kazan's Asphalt Wars

Where Kazan's street wars began, say some who remember. In the 1940s and 1950s, residents of the Sukonnaya Sloboda, nicknamed Sukonka, fought the residents of Tukayevskaya Street. Sukonka took prisoners and demanded a ransom of 100 to 200 pies from the other side. This is a local memory, not an agreed history. The series is built around the Kazan phenomenon, and these early fights between streets are its distant roots.

Location precision: The sources do not give a spot for the fights; the pin marks the historic Sukonnaya Sloboda area.

Privolzhsky District is where Kazan's police first noticed the trouble: in 1974 they began receiving reports of identically dressed groups of cheeky teenagers. A Tatarstan court official names the Tyap-Lyap gang from this district as the source of the whole phenomenon. The series moves forward to February 1989, when youth gangs fight in the streets of Kazan, and fourteen-year-old Andrey is caught between them. Its real-life roots are here.

Location precision: The district covers a large part of southern Kazan and the sources name no street; the pin marks the district centre.

The high point of Tyap-Lyap came in August 1978: a motorcycle run through Novo-Tatarskaya Sloboda, in which several people were beaten to death. A decade later the term "Kazan phenomenon" reached the national press; by one account, it was coined in a 1988 Ogonyok article about Tyap-Lyap. The series is based on Robert Garaev's book about this phenomenon, and it picks up the story ten years after the motorcycle run, in the winter of 1989.

Location precision: The sources name the sloboda, not the streets; the pin marks the district in the old city centre.

Sotsgorod, with its bird market, is named as an example of a factory district where many gangs operated. Their wars were called asphalt wars: teenagers spoke of dividing the asphalt or fighting for it, a world that gives the series its subtitle, Blood on the Asphalt. In the story, fourteen-year-old Andrey is harassed by street gangs and befriends his former bully Marat, a member of the gang Universam, in return for protection.

Location precision: The series invents its gang territories; the pin marks Sotsgorod as a real district of the kind the gangs held.

The phenomenon did not stop at Kazan. Similar gangs formed in Naberezhnye Chelny in the 1970s, and the series later came here for faces. When casting began in February 2022, 240 people were selected in Kazan and another 40 in Naberezhnye Chelny. The city lies in the same republic, Tatarstan, and the pin marks it as the second city of the story's real background.

Location precision: The sources name the city only; the pin marks the city centre.

The series is set in Kazan but was shot in Yaroslavl. According to Garaev, local authorities opposed filming in Kazan, so the production moved. Garaev, the author of the book, was a consultant on the series. It aired on NTV from 9 November to 21 December 2023, and Yaroslavl stands in for the Kazan of 1989 on screen.

Location precision: The sources name only the city of Yaroslavl, not the streets used; the pin marks the city centre.