Anita and Justin begin their journeys in Sochi, the Black Sea resort home to the 2014 Winter Olympics. Full of futuristic architecture, this is new Russia's glittering showcase to the world, but just round the corner from the glitzy stadiums is Joseph Stalin's old dacha, a reminder that in Russia the old and the new are often very close. Anita is out to discover 'new' Russia. She travels north and west from Sochi in a Kombat, a Russian built luxury armoured plated bling machine. She enters a thriving world of westernised entrepreneurs, the mega-rich and rebellious youth, people who are at the forefront of shaping a new and vibrant Russia. Meanwhile Justin heads east into 'old' Russia where he encounters a very different world in his chosen vehicle: a slightly battered Soviet-built UAZ 'jeep' first designed in the 1940s for the Red Army. He meets traditional Russians and encounters a land that seems hardly to have changed since before the Cold War years.

Justin Rowlatt and Anita Rani continue their epic road trips across Russia, discovering two very different sides of a vast and bewildering country looking to assert itself once again on the world stage. Anita turns north to meet entrepreneurs harvesting caviar from sturgeon stocked in the warm waters of a nuclear power plant, before reaching her final destination of Murmansk, high in the arctic and Russia's new economic frontier. Justin continues on his journey east, from Perm and one of the last Gulag prison camps, deep into the Ural Mountains and Asia. He spends time with some very traditional bear hunters, gets close to some powerful military buyers at Russia's biggest arms fair, and drives on to Yekaterinburg, where he comes a little too close to men protecting the graves of local gangsters from the 1990s.