"The series does not romanticize gangs. But vice versa." The head of the Ministry of Youth of Tatarstan spoke in defense of the “Word of a Boy”

At a press conference, Tatarstan Minister of Youth Affairs Rinat Sadykov spoke out against the ban on the most discussed Russian series of the year, “The Boy’s Word.” “I absolutely disagree with the opinion of those experts who say that the series romanticizes groups. You look at these shots, and they are a black page of our reality,” the official said.

According to him, he remembers Kazan of those times and it’s worth talking about them so that people understand the horror of the path and life of criminals. "Grouping is the grief of parents, it is trouble in the family, death, funerals, violence. If you watch the series carefully, they show when the credits roll and the frames stop: one of the leaders was killed,” Rinat added.

He admitted that he carefully watched the series and did not see any positive characters there. "But every hero or anti-hero has something good in his heart. When they returned the hat out of the kindness of their hearts, when they were looking for the little sister of one of the leaders, when they saved their own children and took them to the hospital. This means that everyone has something good. This needs to be seen and revealed,” says Sadykov. In addition, he noted that the Kazan phenomenon is not criminals or street kids, but scientific and cultural figures who lived and worked in the city.

The series, filmed by director Zhora Kryzhovnikov based on a documentary book by writer and journalist Robert Garayev, was at the center of a scandal due to accusations of romanticizing a criminal lifestyle. There were even demands to ban it after teenagers started organizing “games” and "clogging" based on his motives, but Roskomnadzor did not find any violations of Russian legislation.