Franchise Potential

Nadya, is pitched as a stand-alone, limited series.

 

However, the characters within Nadya provide us with great potential for continuing the story after Nadya’s death. The three further seasons described below are examples of an approach that could extend the first season into a franchise. 

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Anna. 1934-40 The period of Stalin's Terror or the Great Purge during which almost all of Stalin's allies in Series 1 end up dead or in the Gulag. Including Uncle Abel, Nikolai Bukharin, Sergo And Zinaida Ordzhonikidze. Focused on the story of Anna Larina, the third wife of Bukharin who was 26 years his junior when she married Bukharin in 1934. They had a son, Yuri, in 1936 but in 1937, when her son was less than one year old, she was separated from him for the almost 20 years she spent in the Gulag after the NKVD arrested her. After her husband was executed in 1938, one of the greatest shocks she experienced in the Gulag was to be confronted by one of her childhood playmates, Andrei Sverdlov, son of one of Bukharin's old comrades. She at first thought he was a fellow prisoner, but discovered that he was in fact her interrogator. 

 

Polina. 1948. Polina was Molotov’s Jewish wife and Nadya’s best friend in the Kremlin. It was Polina who followed Nadya out of a dining room to try and comfort her after Stalin had publicly humiliated his wife. The next morning Nadya was found dead by suicide, having shot herself. This event is believed to have fuelled a secret hatred of Polina by Stalin, who in 1939 attempted to frame her for spying and then in 1948 finally managed to get her sent to a Siberian Gulag where she was referred to only as "Object Number 12". She was released in 1954 after the death of Stalin and returned to married life with her husband Molotov, who had remained loyal to Stalin, the man who had imprisoned her.

 

Svetlana. The story of Nadya's daughter Svetlana who in 1967 defected from the USSR after she fell in love with and was then not allowed to marry Kunwar Brijesh Singh an Indian Communist. She was given asylum and ended up living in a council flat in Bristol in the UK for several years. She married an American and was naturalised to the USA in 1978 but after her husband died she went back to the USSR in 1984 but fled again in 1986 back to the USA. She died in 2011 in Wisconsin where she had been living quietly for 40 years under the name Lana Peters.