Archangel is a television adaptation of the 1998 novel of the same name by Robert Harris. It is so named because much of the story is based in the city of Archangel, a city in northwestern Russia, located on the Northern Dvina River near its mouth on the White Sea. Made by the BBC in 2005, it was filmed in the city of Riga, Latvia. The timing of the adaptation aligned Harris's fictional narrative with renewed global interest in post-Soviet power dynamics.