Khraniteli: The Soviet take on Lord of the Rings

Russian-speaking fans of JRR Tolkien have been flocking to YouTube to watch a newly rediscovered Soviet TV version of The Lord of the Rings. The low-budget production, which aired briefly in 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed, was uploaded this month by Russian television channel 5TV (successor to Leningrad TV, which produced it).

The first episode has notched up half a million YouTube views.

Khraniteli (The Keepers) is based on the first novel in the Tolkien trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, but while readers may recognise the plot and the characters, this weirdly psychedelic Soviet reimagining is a very different experience from Peter Jackson's epic film version a decade later.

To find out just how different, we spoke to Irina Nazarova, a Russian artist who saw Khraniteli when it first came out and was familiar with the arts scene which inspired it in Leningrad (Russia's second city, now known again as St Petersburg).