Red Mafia

The story of Yuri Sokolov, manager of the famous Eliseyev Emporium in Moscow, who was sentenced to death for corruption in 1983. A total of 147 people in the retail industry, including government bureaucrats, were arrested. In the country, rumors spread that the new General Secretary, Yuri Andropov, was struggling against the nomenklatura, but few knew what was really going on.

The story of the struggle between Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB, and the corrupt Nikolai Shchelokov, head of Soviet police and the Ministry of the Interior, that ended in Shchelokov's downfall and suicide in 1984.

This episode of "Red Mafia" focuses on the Marshal of the Soviet Union, Georgy Zhukov. In June 1946, an investigation was initiated against him. It revealed that he had taken furniture, works of art and other German war trophies for his personal use, leading Stalin to exile Zhukov.

In 1952, no ordinary Soviet citizen would have imagined that a secret nationwide mafia could exist without the knowledge of the authorities. Its entanglements were such that, when it was uncovered, shock waves were sent through the highest circles of the Soviet Communist Party.

In 1977, workers in the fishing trade started getting arrested. 120 investigators working under Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB, uncovered massive corruption involving hundreds of tons of goods labeled as herring and mackerel exported from the Soviet Union. Was it just a corruption case, or was it an intervention in the Kremlin power struggle?

While leading the world proletarian revolution, fighting a devastating civil war and starvation rampant among the peasant population in the early 1920s, top Bolsheviks were selling off the Imperial Russian gold reserve on the world market.