Episode Details

This radio drama uses AI-generated writing, voices, music, sound effects and artwork. All spoken performances in this edition use ElevenLabs V4.

Six Moscow banks fail within a week and twelve billion rubles disappear. So why was a quiet bank employee beaten on the street for writing down a number plate?

Read the story and the full transcript: https://matezz.com/episodes/the-quiet-banker-moscow-rules/

🎭 Directed Edition — every role cast for this story and every line performed with full voice direction.

Moscow, 2012. A retired official, Semyon, brings his bruised and limping son-in-law Rutger to the flat of the detective Maksim Volkov, near Chistye Prudy. Rutger works at a bank, pays his taxes and has no known enemies. Three men and a black SUV with tinted windows beat him, and he wrote down the plate before they caught him at it. The militia call it road rage, and Semyon, who spent thirty years inside the state machine, knows when a file is stalling. Volkov takes the notebook and leaves it on his piano. He then joins the queue outside a bank branch on Myasnitskaya, where depositors like the pensioner Nina lost their savings when six banks were declared insolvent. Men from the regulator carried boxes out of a back office and gave no receipts. The notice offers ten kopecks on the ruble, if the paperwork survives. Volkov goes to the economic-crimes squad off Petrovka, where an inspector ran the plate before Volkov reached the stairs, then told him to go home and let it lie. Nobody will say who ordered the beating, or whether it has anything to do with the vanished money. Who is so keen to keep a number plate quiet?

From the series Moscow Rules: a real post-Soviet crime reimagined as a modern detective radio mystery, performed by a full multi-voice AI cast with an original score and sound design.

Loosely inspired by a real Russian case of the 2010s. All names, characters, dialogue and events are fictional; the words, actions, motives and private lives of every character — including a retired official, a bank employee, depositors, bankers, the investigators and the police — are invented for drama, and so is the solution of the mystery. Where a real city, state, public body or newspaper is mentioned, its part in this story is invented; the six banks, the regulator and the economic-crimes squad named in it are invented too. This is a work of fiction, not a factual account of any real person or institution. No real person is portrayed, and no real individual, company or organisation is accused of any act shown here.

Setting: Moscow, 2012 — with Chistye Prudy, Myasnitskaya Street and Petrovka.

Chapters:
0:00 A Visitor With Bruised Ribs
1:43 The Queue on Myasnitskaya
3:42 Notebook on the Piano
5:21 Petrovka and a Tired Inspector
7:06 Where the Depositors Gather
9:04 Two Facts by Lamplight
11:03 A Meeting in Full Cry
12:53 Behind the Locked Cabinet
13:27 Registers Across the Piano Lid
15:22 An Appointment That Went Wrong
17:12 Grey Hours at the Steel Desk
19:08 The Last Day of Payouts
21:13 Phrases Laid Out Like Music
23:12 Morning Beneath the Head Office
24:59 After Midnight, Waiting
27:19 Paper on the Steel Desk
29:02 Rain Over Chistye Prudy

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