Peter Rutland is a Professor of Government at Wesleyan University.
The play Mother Russia, written by Lauren Yee, recently showed at the Signature Theatre in New York City. Through the vehicle of what Lee has described as a “post-Soviet buddy comedy,” it captures Russia’s chaotic transition from communism to capitalism in the 1990s and the impact it had on Russian families and individual Russians’ sense of self.
It is remarkable that Yee was able to pack so many insights into a 90 minute show, and one that keeps the audience engaged and entertained through its swift pacing and dark humor.
The play is set in St Petersburg in 1992. Dmitri (Steven Boyer) runs a threadbare kiosk selling everything from chickens to condoms. Dmitri is a working-class kid who failed in his dream to join the KGB (similar to Vladimir Putin’s own background, except he did join the KGB). Dmitri has a side business spying on Katya (Rebecca Naomi Jones), a former pop singer. He recruits his former schoolmate Evgeny (Adam Chanler-Berat) as an assistant. Evgeny’s father was a member of the Soviet nomenklatura elite, who has moved over into organized crime, extorting protection money from small businesses. Evgeny is struggling to adapt to work in the new family business. Evgeny falls for Katya, and the three team up in a farcical plot to steal the privatization vouchers being accumulated by his father.
The play, directed by Teddy Bergman, is narrated by a hilarious drag Mother Russia (David Turner) with a mock Russian accent. Mother Russia summarizes Russia’s 1000-year history in one pithy monologue, in the spirit of Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire (1989) or the Tetris-themed Complete History of the Soviet Union. (Billy Joel probably got the idea from Neil Diamond’s 1970 song Done Too Soon.) A sample of the lyrics: “Perestroika, Frere Jacques, A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Yakov Smirnoff, Garry Kasparov, Three’s Company, too. The first Chechen war. The second Chechen war. Why so many Chechen wars? What is going on over there?”
Mother Russia is also Katya’s mother. We learn that she had denounced her husband to the KGB in order to save her daughter (and herself), and it was she who hired Dmitri to spy on Katya. The play has a couple of deeply amusing scenes—such as Dmitry and Evgeny eating their first McDonald’s filet-o-fish and a techno rendition of Swan Lake. Mother Russia invokes many of the all-too familiar stereotypes about Russian life, but the wit and humor prevents them from falling flat.
The play completes a trilogy by Yee on the relationship between communism and consumerism in China (“The Great Leap,” 2018) and Cambodia (“Cambodian Rock Band,” 2020). Mother Russia was originally planned for performance at the La Hoya Playhouse in California, but was cancelled after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It was produced at the Seattle Rep in 2025 before moving to New York (with a new cast) in February 2026.
Yee chooses to frame the political and economic transition through the prism of generational change and the relations between parents and children. This is a well-established literary device, and it immediately gives the audience something that they can relate to. They may not recognize the term “false Dmitry” (a reference to a series of claimants to the throne in the early seventeenth-century “Time of Troubles”), or be familiar with the vernacular and clothing choices of a Russian street thug (gopnik). But they all have parents and worry about whether they are succeeding in moving beyond their influence, or meeting their expectations.
Generational change is more than just a literary form: it also captures an important dimension of the Russian transition. A small minority of elites turned themselves from communist to capitalist. But the majority of Russian society was marooned by the collapse of communism and found it very hard to adjust to the new reality— something that came naturally to their children.
The play puts gender at the center of the story. Evgeny is emasculated by the transition: his Marxist economics skills are not needed, and he does not have the guts to run a protection racket. So he is letting his father down. He seeks an escape through re-connecting with his street-wise buddy Dmitri, and as Evgeny gains in confidence, it is he who is calling Dmitry a “pussy.” The narration provided by Mother Russia is key to helping us understand what is happening. She explains that Russia has been let down by a succession of “shitty men,” from husbands to leaders.
Indeed, the Russian state is typically seen as the domain of men, and the Second World War—the most important and sacred symbol of identity in Putin’s Russia—is known as the “Great Fatherland War.” Maria Natalyuk explains that, under Putin, “the state itself has positioned itself as a father figure, providing paternalistic guidance.” But it is the figure of Mother Russia that is the enduring symbol of Russian identity. Yee’s play vividly illustrates the work of Valerie Sperling, Elizabeth Wood and other scholars, who have shown that the 1990s crisis of masculinity is central to understanding the rise of Vladimir Putin.
There have been a number of artistic and documentary efforts to capture Russia’s “wild 1990s” on stage and screen, with varying degrees of success. Peter Morgan, who scripted The Crown, told the story of Boris Berezovsky’s rise and fall in Patriots, which played in London and New York in 2024. That same year saw Sarah Gancher’s Russian Troll Farm, about the internet disinformation campaign during the 2016 US election, and Erika Sheffer’s Vladimir, about a crusading journalist, modeled on Anna Politkovskaya.
Relevant documentaries include Phil Rosenthal’s Exporting Raymond (2010), which tells the story of taking the sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond to Russia; and Gabe Polsky’s Red Penguins (2020), about an abortive joint venture between the Pittsburgh Penguins and the C.S.K.A. hockey team.
Aleksei Balabanov’s movie Brother (Brat, 1997) remains the most powerful crystallization of that era. It is extremely challenging for outsiders to get inside the Russian worldview and distill it into a narrative that is accessible to a Western audience. Mother Russia rises to the challenge. Exploring the desperation and resentment born of Russia in the 1990s is an important stepping stone to understanding Putin’s ill-conceived decision to invade Ukraine.
