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The Master and Margarita
Мастер и Маргарита
2005 · TV series · 1 season
Created by Vladimir Bortko
DramaMysteryScience FictionFantasy
The Master and Margarita is a Russian television production of Telekanal Rossiya, based on the novel The Master and Margarita, written by Soviet writer Mikhail Bulgakov between 1928 and 1940. Vladimir Bortko directed this adaptation and was also its screenwriter.
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What's wrong with propaganda? Is that a reason why you haven't seen for example Apocalypse Now?
You might want to watch Andrei Rublev, at its inception a controversial movie heavily disliked by the Soviet state:
https://sovietmoviesonline.com/drama/andrey-rublev
Edit: And then the post-soviet Fairy, which ruminates on the legacy of Tarkovsky's masterpiece.
https://sovietmoviesonline.com/fantastic/fairy
The rest of Melikyan's movies are also quite interesting and fun.
They also distribute post-Soviet russian movies and television series. You should watch the two takes on The Master and Margarita, both high profile projects based off one of the most beloved books in Russia, from two very different times in russian society:
https://sovietmoviesonline.com/drama/master-i-margarita-mini-serial
https://sovietmoviesonline.com/melodrama/the-master-and-margarita-2
The Soviet was especially good a adventures for kids and science-fiction, of which you'll find a lot there, for example Alice in Wonderland and Hard to be a God. You should watch the takes on the latter to get a feel for differences between soviet and post-soviet societies. If the younger version feels hard to watch you might need to watch The Green Elephant and other movies from the russian nineties to prepare yourself and better understand the feelings and mindset of the time.
And if you want you can watch old propaganda movies about the Donbass or whatever, you'll learn a lot about places you likely know very little about.
The book that taught me to spiritually make sense of a world that is a constant let down was "The Master and Margarita" by Bulgakov. The author wrote it in secret while living with totalitarianism and meaninglessness in Stalinist Russia.
If you're not in the mood for a book, there's a great mini-series adaptation that was produced in Russia in the 2000s that takes about a week to watch. It does an almost perfect job of reproducing the book. I don't think it's available online.