If You Want To Know What Happened To The Russian, You Don't Understand The Sopranos
Via MovieStillsDB
Published Sep 1, 2026, 8:00 PM EDT
Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock.
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When The Sopranos aired its series finale in 2007, the ending was met with a mixed response. The final cut-to-black was wildly polarizing, with some fans finding it to be suitably subversive and others finding it to be a big whiff, but more broadly, The Sopranos’ finale was criticized for not providing enough closure. There was no Scarface-style massacre. There was no action-packed climax. We never got to see Tony get gunned down on the steps of the Teatro Massimo.
But if you watched all six seasons of The Sopranos and still expected the finale to provide some big, explosive payoff, then you didn’t understand the show you were watching. If you thought The Sopranos’ final season would tie up all the loose ends, then you missed the point.
Going into its final episodes, The Sopranos had left a few unanswered questions up in the air. Carmine ordered a hit on Johnny Sack to protect Ralph, but didn’t seem to bat an eye when Ralph mysteriously went missing and everyone moved on. Tony made up some cock-and-bull story about Richie going into witness protection to cover for Janice killing him in the heat of an argument, but would that story really stick? When Dr. Melfi was sexually assaulted in the parking garage at her office, she unexpectedly identified her attacker as the “Employee of the Month” at a fast food restaurant, but she never told Tony where to find this guy.
Of course, the biggest unanswered question in Sopranos history is, what happened to Valery? In what is generally considered to be The Sopranos’ greatest episode — season 3, episode 11, “Pine Barrens” — Christopher and Paulie take a Russian man named Valery out into the woods to bury him, only to find that he’s not dead. Throughout the night, a freezing Chris and Paulie engage in an existential cat-and-mouse chase with Valery, sort of like a mafia version of Waiting for Godot, but they never find him. After they barely survive the night, they find that Paulie’s car is gone, and Valery is nowhere to be seen.
There were countless theories about what happened to Valery. Maybe Valery survived the night, took Paulie’s car and the money, and left the country, never to be seen again. Maybe he bled out from his gunshot wound (he’s a highly trained commando, but he’s still a human being) and somebody else took Paulie’s car. But, in true Waiting for Godot fashion, The Sopranos never explained what happened to Valery, just like Samuel Beckett never introduced us to Godot.
A lot of Sopranos fans were hoping these questions would be answered when the series wrapped up its run. But this isn’t Lost; this isn’t a “mystery box” show. Those questions weren’t left unanswered to build anticipation for the final season; they were left unanswered because life doesn’t always answer our questions.
The Sopranos Always Refused To Give Us The Comfort Of Closure
At the end of “Pine Barrens,” Tony ominously warned Paulie that if Valery ever resurfaces, he’ll have to take care of it. In any other show, that would be clear foreshadowing of a future storyline, where Valery would come back to exact vengeance, and it would lead to a climactic showdown between Valery and Paulie. But The Sopranos wasn’t just any old TV show; it was a game-changer. Creator David Chase threw out all the rules of dramatic storytelling, and went for something much more realistic and nuanced.
As audiences, we want to see cathartic, dramatic payoffs, like Valery coming back for revenge, or Dr. Melfi identifying her attacker to Tony so he could deal with him. But Chase recognized that those payoffs are cheap and easy, and aimed for an ambiguity that better reflected the messiness and moral disorder of real life. The Sopranos always refused to give us the comfort of closure, so anyone hoping the series would reveal Valery’s fate was dreaming.
The Sopranos Subverted Our Expectations At Every Turn
When The Sopranos was airing its sixth and final season, the cast spoke to The New York Times for an article titled “One Final Whack at That HBO Mob.” The interviewer asked Michael Imperioli about “Pine Barrens,” and whether the series would reveal Valery’s fate, and the actor said it was a perfect example of The Sopranos’ subversiveness. He said, “This show was never what people expected.”
The Sopranos subverted its audience’s expectations at every turn. No one would’ve expected Chris to have Adriana whacked. No one would’ve expected Valentina to catch on fire. Tony found out Big Pussy was a rat in the most unexpected way imaginable: by having a food poisoning-induced nightmare in which Pussy speaks to his subconscious mind through the mouth of a dead fish lying in ice at a fish market.
The Sopranos Almost Revealed What Happened To Valery
Via MovieStillsDBIn the same New York Times piece, Tony Sirico explained that an early draft of one of the season 6 scripts included a scene that would’ve revealed Valery’s fate. In the scene, Christopher and Paulie would have a chance encounter with Valery outside a bar, and they would promptly shoot him dead (keeping their promise to Tony that, if Valery did resurface, they’d have to deal with him). However, before filming, Chase removed the scene. According to Sirico, “I think David didn’t like it. He wanted the audience just to suffer.”
It’s probably for the best that this scene was removed. It sounds like it was just there to tie up the loose end, and not in a particularly compelling way. If The Sopranos was going to reveal what happened to Valery, it would have to be for a much better dramatic reason than that. Sirico was joking about making the audience suffer, but that was always Chase’s style.
In an interview with the Writers Guild (via Variety), Chase explained what happened to Valery: “Okay, this is what happened. Some Boy Scouts found the Russian, who had the telephone number to his boss, Slava, in his pocket. They called Slava, who took him to the hospital, where he had brain surgery, and then Slava sent him back to the Soviet Union.” So, there you go. But Chase only said that to shut people up. People have been asking him about that pesky Russian for years, and that was never the point of The Sopranos.
Source: New York Times, Variety
The Sopranos
10/10
Release Date 1999 - 2007-00-00
Network HBO
Showrunner David Chase
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James Gandolfini
Tony Soprano
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