‘Prison diary’ Convicted Russian agent Maria Butina’s memoir of her U.S. justice system experience comes to the small screen
The Russian government has long used entertainment as a tool of propaganda, but its investment in pro-Kremlin content has surged since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine. One of its latest productions is a TV series based on the memoir of Maria Butina, the Russian national who was arrested in 2018 while studying in Washington, D.C., and later convicted of conspiring to act as a Russian agent. Butina insists that she and director Igor Kopylov aimed for factual accuracy, but from the first episode, the series strains credulity, portraying the U.S. as a hysterically anti-Russian place where only LGBTQ+ people can succeed. Meduza reviews the new production.
It’s 2018, and Maria Zhukova — an ordinary Russian college student — is studying abroad in the U.S. capital. Her fiancé, Walter, has political ties, and through him she even finds herself at a meeting with Donald Trump, then running for re-election. At a cocktail party, Maria accidentally overhears a classified conversation — one that radically alters her worldview. Soon after, she’s arrested as a Russian spy. U.S. authorities accuse her of helping Russia interfere in the presidential election. She’s sent to prison, where she’s subjected to torture.
This is the plot of Prison Diary, a new show based on the memoir of Russian State Duma deputy Maria Butina. In the 2010s, Butina founded the gun-rights group Right to Bear Arms, which advocated for legalizing firearms in Russia. She later moved to the United States, officially for graduate school, where she attempted to lobby on behalf of the Russian government by cultivating ties with American political figures. In 2018, the U.S. authorities arrested her and charged her with acting as an unregistered foreign agent. Butina pled guilty and was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison.
A few months after her release, Butina was deported to Russia, where she won a seat in parliament as a member of the ruling United Russia party. Today, she’s a vocal supporter of the war against Ukraine. Among her recent projects is a documentary about female entrepreneurs helping the Russian military.
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The new series about Butina’s arrest, directed by Igor Kopylov, is pure propaganda. FBI agents are portrayed as outright psychopaths. Prisoners are all shown as unjustly convicted or mentally ill. Queer characters force their loved ones to transition, then chain them up in a basement; meanwhile, the TV insists that everything in the country is perfectly fine. The only way to climb the career ladder is to be gay.
Following this logic, the Zhukova-Butina case is assigned to agent Kelvin Hughes, a gay forensic examiner whose colleagues promote him to Washington just to get rid of him. His partner, Nancy Bell, is a recent police academy graduate and former weather forecaster. Still, they’re inexplicably entrusted with the “spy case of the year,” as the show puts it. Both characters are entirely fictional.
Nonetheless, Butina claims the series is a faithful retelling. Speaking ahead of its release, she said, “From the beginning, [director] Igor Kopylov and I agreed: we would tell the truth — even if it’s raw, unfiltered, and painful. Honest storytelling, without smoothing the edges, is what people expect from us today, and that’s exactly what this series aims to deliver.”
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“Who is Maria Butina?” she continued. “This questions still puzzles people around the world. It’s time to show the truth and how it all really happened.”
Although the story is set in Washington, D.C., all the American characters speak Russian and are played by Russian actors. To make it sound like an American show, some are dubbed by voice actors, and the dialogue reads like a clunky translation. The tone is straight out of a Leslie Nielsen comedy — actors deliver absurd lines with deadpan seriousness. Take, for example, this exchange between Zhukova and a cellmate:
“Everybody shut up.”
“You talkin’ to me, bitch?”
“My cellmate’s not feeling well. It’s her birthday today. Would you sing her something, please?”
“No problem!” (Starts singing.)
Almost every American character is a raging "Russophobe." One of Zhukova’s professors openly hates Russians. “I get where he’s coming from,” says Agent Bell during the arrest. Once taken into custody, Maria is stripped naked, shackled, thrown into solitary confinement, and tormented with recordings of people screaming. In the show's telling, her arrest had nothing to do with her actions — it was simply meant to sabotage a Trump–Putin meeting.
If you understand Russian, it’s difficult to watch the series without laughing. It’s a forceful critique of a corrupt justice system — just not Russia’s.
Original review by Alexander Tremasov. Adapted for Meduza in English by Sam Breazeale.