In the series, journalist Maksim Strizh, played by Aristarh Venes, and his friends are detained on suspicion of murdering the editor-in-chief of the media holding “Russia Tomorrow”. During the interrogation, Strizh tells officers from the FSB and GRU about the AI assistant AVA, created for criminals.
After the program is hacked, the heroes gain access to archives of the world’s biggest terrorist attacks and try to prevent a new catastrophe. At the same time as the premiere, Lenta.ru and Gazeta.Ru published fictional reports from 2035, including ones attributed to Strizh.
Gazeta.Ru also created a page for the fictional journalist: according to his biography, Strizh studied at Moscow State University, has covered the “special military operation” since the age of 19, and in 2029 moved to “Russia Tomorrow”, where he worked on fact-checking after the adoption of the “digital fakes law”.
In one of the pieces, Elon Musk moves to Russia after the Democrats win the U.S. elections and an American military missile strike on a SpaceX launch site. Together with AvtoVAZ and Moskvich, he opens an electric car factory in Moscow, and in a fictional interview calls Russia a “state-civilization”.
Other texts describe the collapse of the United States after a second civil war, migrant riots, a war between Britain and Spain, and a nuclear disaster in Germany. In this version of the future, France leaves the EU, Marine Le Pen becomes its president, China controls Taiwan and buys Apple, and Russia, together with China, builds the “Druzhba” space station and a new capital of Siberia.
The series is directed by Boris Kindorov, and the scripts were written by Roman Melnikov and the former editor-in-chief of Lenta.ru, now Okko documentary projects producer Vladimir Todorov; together with Polina Shevchenko, they also served as producers. In October 2025, Todorov said that the authors wanted to create a “clear image of the future” for Russia.
The multimedia project “Reportage-2035” won the IRI competition in July 2024. More than 15.7 billion rubles were allocated to support 130 winning projects in 2024–2026, and in 2026 the institute was to receive 25.96 billion rubles from the budget. In June 2024, the European Union imposed sanctions on IRI, calling it an important element of the Kremlin’s propaganda of war in Ukraine.
