The flying Volga

 

I never really understood why Dima's father gave her such a vehicle. I must have missed an episode. Dmitry "Dima" Maykov is a student at Moscow State University. His father gave him a '66 Volga for his birthday. A 1966 Volga is not what I would call a great car. It's narrow, frankly old. In Russia, where the model is common, it's even worse. 

The thing is that this car was a prototype of Soviet technology. The car could fly, equipped with rocket boosters and everything. On the outside, it was an old car; on the inside, it was James Bond's car.

When he got the car, Dima was happy. It was his first car. In the glove compartment there was an old photo and an audio recording, he didn't pay attention to it.

Dima was in love with his classmate, Nastya Svetlova, too pretty a girl for a poor guy. Dima knew that the only way to seduce this girl was to have a nice car, and the money that goes with it... His conviction was reinforced by the fact that Max, Nastya's boyfriend, drove a Mercedes. What he didn't know was that Max belonged to the mafia.

Dima worked as a simple flower delivery boy. He had no chance to afford, one day, Mercedes, jewelry and clothes to attract girls like Nastya Svetlova. 

In short, Dima got into trouble with the men of Kuptsov, Max's father, a mafioso like there are too many in Russia. One day when he was being chased by these evil men, he accidentally triggered the car's take-off system. He lost control of his Volga and landed in an abandoned hangar. 

He then paid attention to the photo and the recording in the glove box. He found two of the scientists on the photo, a couple, Pavel and Olga. They explained to him that the Volga was a Soviet-era prototype, equipped with multiple rocket engines and a device that transformed ordinary gasoline into high-efficiency fuel for flight. They gave Dima the manual for the car. This was the place to start!

Dima was young. All he got out of it was to use it to deliver his flowers while avoiding the Moscow traffic jams. Then Dima started to want to be a hero, to fight crime. That's when the legend of "Black Lightning" was born. People started to see a black car driving around in the sky. Dima got into trouble with Kuptsov, the mobster. There was trouble, deaths. Dmitry Maykov almost sank to the bottom of the Moscow River. Nastya helped him, we don't know why. He got out of it. 

But his father died and the scientists Pavel and Olga mysteriously disappeared. In fact, he had the FSB, the Russian internal security, on his back for a while. They were watching him to see how he could get such material. They wanted to know, of course, if he had accomplices. So they apprehended Dima's father and then the scientists. They also raided Kuptsov's house. But this is Russia. Kuptsov had connections, he was able to get away with a phone call. In any case, he knew nothing about the origin of the car.

One day the FSB agents caught Dima. They took him to the basement of the Lubyanka. After a long interrogation in which he lost an eye, they were convinced that he was just a little fish. His father had bought the car from a network of fences. In the USSR, at one point, after the fall of the wall, there was anarchy. Everything was being sold, weapons, nuclear missiles. A militiaman was able to get his hands on the Volga without knowing what it was. From hand to hand, the car ended up on the used car market in Levsha where father Maykov bought it for his son Dmitry. The FSB guys, or perhaps Kuptsov's men, strangled the father and son and threw them into a pit in a wood near Barybino, south of Moscow.

Nastya ended up in a salon, then on the Bersenevskaya quay, a prostitute. Max, her boyfriend, was the son of Kuptsov, the mobster. He didn't like that she helped Dima, he was jealous. He hated that his girlfriend wanted to help that show-off Dima out of the icy waters of Moscow. So he kicked her to the curb. A Russian mobster, especially a young one, can be sentimental.