Abstract
In September 2002 the acclaimed film director Pavel Lungin, known for such movies as Taxi-Blues, Luna-Park, and A Wedding, released his new venture, Oligarkh (An Oligarch). Based on Yulii Dubov's novel Bol'shaia paika (A Big Quota), it features the infamous Russian tycoon and king-maker Boris Berezovsky, played by the popular leading man Vladimir Mashkov, as the central character and prototype. A year later Iskusstvo kino published a three-way conversation under the telling title Konets dinozavrov (The End of the Dinosaurs) among Lungin, Aleksandr Timofeevskii (critic, political analyst, and speechwriter), and Lev Karakhan (deputy editor-in-chief of the journal) about this screen project. The point of consensus among the participants in this conversation was that the era of the New Russians is over-the attention-grabbing dinosaurs are extinct now, replaced by middling beings resembling field mice, who in the political sphere are represented by Putin's chekists from Piter (piterskie chekisty). The conclusion Lungin drew from this perceived fact is quite symptomatic: It is time to create a myth about New Russians:
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