As is the case by definition in time travel stories, Russian Doll’s sojourns to the past aren’t perfectly linear. Nadia darts back and forth from 2022 to 1982 in the first few episodes of season 2. The end of episode 4 introduces the 1944 timeline, which Nadia is also able to navigate to and from before all of her time traveling interference collapses reality into a ball of mush.
By the end of the whole experience, both the viewers and Nadia have a rough narrative of the Volvokov family history in place. It may take more than one viewing to fully understand that narrative, however. So let’s spare you the second watch-through (unless you really want to do it!) by presenting the abbreviated history of Nadia’s family in chronological order.
Budapest 1944
The story of the Peschauer/Vulvokov family begins long before 1944. Hell, every family’s story does if you want to trace it back to Adam and Eve or the first single-cell organism. For the purposes of Russian Doll season 2’s saga, however, Budapest 1944 is where things start.
When Nadia travels back in time to 1944, she ends up in her grandmother, Vera Peschauer’s, body. A Hungarian Jew, Vera is operating under the name “Erzabet” to deflect attention from the Nazis occupying Hungary. Though World War II will end soon, taking the Nazi German regime down with it, existing while Jewish in 1944 Budapest is still an existential threat for Vera…particularly since her family was already taken away to concentration camps, never to be seen again.
Thanks to her knowledge from the future, Nadia/Vera knows that all of the Hungarian Jews’ possessions are being held in a warehouse and will eventually be placed on a train out of Hungary by the Schutzstaffel before 1945. Nadia/Vera infiltrates the warehouse as an interested buyer and eventually finds her family’s treasures in the basement.
Nadia/Vera then sneaks into a sewer, chisels out a hole in the side of it and deposits the valuables there. Thanks to Nadia’s experience in 2022 seeing stones left on a Christian minister named Kiss László’s grave, she knows he can be trusted as an Oskar Schindler-esque figure. Before departing for the future, Nadia gives László a map to the treasure and asks him to mail it to her after the war.
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