Der russische Krimi presents the first comprehensive account of crime fiction in Russia. It offers detailed discussions of books and movies and also of the broader critical literary debates, as cultural policy during the Soviet decades would not easily grant the crime genre any right to exist. Instead, generating sympathy for the security apparatus eventually became the official purpose of this genre, which was politically relegated to a niche existence. Accordingly, the study places particular emphasis on ideology, especially in the portrayal of the heroes and their opponents and a fictional reality that the reader should nonetheless recognize as his own. In this process, he learns a lot about the darker sides of society that are otherwise mostly kept secret. Not least because of the long-time scarcity of exciting texts, after the end of socialism crime fiction became the bestseller genre par excellence. These post-Soviet developments up to the 2010s are shown using the example of the women’s crime novel (Marinina and her successors) and the postmodern crime novel (Akunin).