Last week, in addition to being busy on the production/publishing side of my life, I saw two of my favorite streaming series come to a conclusion—A Gentleman in Moscow and Franklin. Both played a bit loose with the history, but they were authentic, well-written, and meticulously produced.

A Gentleman in Moscow, which I’ve mentioned before, is based on the Amor Towles novel of the same name. The novel tells the story of a tsarist era aristocrat, Alexander Rostov, who fled with his grandmother when Bolsheviks burned his family estate. Rostov, however, loves his country and returns, only to be arrested as a counterrevolutionary. He anticipates being executed, but when he comes before a Soviet committee, someone produces a poem he wrote some years before condemning the ruling classes. Based on that, the committee decides not to execute or exile him, but to sentence him to life imprisonment in the luxurious Metropol hotel, a real and very famous hotel in Moscow. However, he’s not allowed to live in the sumptuous suite he rents but is relegated to a drafty, ill-heated attic room. If he ever ventures outside the Metropol, he will be shot on sight.

Here’s the first history disconnect for me. A committee of Bolsheviks at that particular time of the Revolution wouldn’t have been swayed by a poem. They would have done to Rostov what they eventually did to the Romanovs, but that would have made for a short novel.

What is authentic about the series is the depiction of the constant changes when power transferred from a dead Lenin to Stalin, the Stalin cult of personality, the effects of the purges, the failure of collectivism, all seen through the eyes of Rostov and the Metropol’s staff.

The depiction of party toadies was authentic as well, how they kept files on guests and employees to pass along to the various iterations of Soviet state security. When Stalin dies in 1953, everyone is fearful, not knowing if his successors will purge the people who followed him slavishly.

(As an aside, if you want to see a fictional but highly realistic movie about Stalin’s death, check out The Death of Stalin, which is billed as a comedy, but there is so much truth to how Stalin’s circle reacted to Stalin’s death.)

Nina, a young child Rostov meets at the hotel, becomes his companion in exploring the hotel’s secret rooms, including ones that abut Rostov’s cell and which he turns into a more comfortable living space. He hides his access to these additional rooms with a large clothing armoire with a false back. He also eventually discovers a passage to the roof of the hotel, where he can see the outside and he technically hasn’t left the hotel.

Nina grows into a dedicated communist, and to Rostov’s dismay she and her new husband leave Moscow to join the collectivism movement. Years later Nina returns with her child. Her husband’s been sent to a gulag, and she’s going to follow him there. She asks Rostov to watch her child, Sofia, until she can return.

That was quite common. Indeed, when a young Lenin, then Vladimir Ulyanov, was sent to a gulag, his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, accompanied him.

Nina never returns for her child, and Sofia essentially becomes Rostov’s daughter.

There’s a love story, of course, but it doesn’t overwhelm the plot, which follows the timeline of Soviet history for 30 years quite closely.

If you’re an aspiring or even an experienced writer, this series is a good lesson in how a setting essentially becomes a character. In the novel, Towles essentially writes of the Metropol almost as if it’s alive. Indeed, after I read his novel, I was determined to work this historic hotel into something of mine. So in book 2 of my ebook box set SECRETS, for my country, Olga Lubova meets one of her brothers for lunch in the Metropol.

And that’s enough about that. Too many spoilers already.

Franklin, starring Michael Douglas as Benjamin Franklin (a fabulous performance, by the way), seemed to hurry up the ending in the final few episodes. Okay, the colonies won the war was like a couple of lines of dialogue, but a good deal of time was spent on the back and forth of the peace negotiations that took place in France between the British representatives and Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. And the spy-like intrigue around the negotiations abounded with betrayals right and left, blackmail, attempts to discredit Franklin with fake letters that made him appear to be more for the British than the American Colonies. That was fascinating.

I’m sure the history was loose with this series, too, but I don’t know enough about U.S. history in this period to dispute any of it. It was an unusual portrayal of Jefferson, but again all I know of him is what we learned in Virginia history in 4^th and 7^th grade, and that was undoubtedly biased. I thought the portrayal of John Adams as prissily moralistic was excellent.

Both of these series again were wonderfully written. In Franklin in particular, the costuming was spot on with 18th Century French excess, down to the fact that men wore as much makeup as women.

A Gentleman in Moscow was on Hulu, but I watched it on Paramount+. All episodes have now dropped. Franklin was on Apple TV, and all episodes of that series have also dropped. I recommend them both. I know I said that when I’d only seen a couple of episodes, but both series got better and better as the episodes accumulated.

If you’re a history nerd like me, you’ll geek out on them.

This past weekend, I finally watched the Oscar-winning documentary 20 days in Mariupol. Mariupol is a port city on the Black Sea that was the major focus of the 2022 Russian invasion of a sovereign country, Ukraine.

Indiscriminate shelling and bombing overwhelmed the limited Ukrainian military and police presence, and all the western media pulled out except for an Associated Press crew, who painstakingly recorded what they saw.

And what they saw is heartbreaking, depressing, and angering. I had to pause it several times because it was so overwhelming. The earliest victims of Russian shelling and bombing were children, whom doctors frantically tried to save, but as their medical supplies ran out, saving became almost impossible.

I thought throughout the hour and a half that every single Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives should be forced to watch this documentary. However, being the ghouls they are, they’d probably think it was a comedy. The Russians decided all the suffering shown were actors, acting. That was as infuriating as Russian propaganda that they were merely protecting Russia by attacking Ukraine.

Again, it’s very graphic, but war is graphic and bloody and civilians die. Maybe it’s time we realized that.

Remember, I occasionally get political.