Starting in 1984, aspiring American rock singer Joanna Stingray (1960-) began smuggling recording equipment into Leningrad's rock community, orchestrating the first-ever Western release of Soviet rock music—the double album Red Wave (1986).

Footage of a live Kino concert at Moscow's Luzhniki Stadium on 24 June 1990, about six weeks before frontman Viktor Tsoi's death in a car accident in rural Latvia at the age of 28. We see the band at the apex of its popularity, and the country in transition: a heavy and conspicuous Soviet police detail is assigned to the event, while audience members wave both the Soviet flag and the Russian tricolor banner. 

As an art-jazz-rock collective, Auktsyon was a genre-blending musical and performance phenomenon within the Leningrad underground, distinguishing itself from other bands in both longevity and stylistic variation. Throughout the post-Soviet period, Auktsyon gradually increased the antiestablishment content of its music, while maintaining a veneer of ideological ambiguity. 

The 16th track on Grazhdanskaia Oborona's 1988 eponymous punk-rock album, whose refrain became a popular catchphrase of the late perestroika and post-Soviet period. The song cemented Egor Letov and his band as a major influence during Perestroika, marking the punk genre's departure from the established norm of largely avoiding politically-charged lyrical content.

The finale of Sergei Solovyov’s (1944-2021) film 1987 film ASSA features rock star Viktor Tsoi (1962-1990) performing his hit "Changes! [Peremen]" to a stadium crowd. The film’s record-breaking commercial success marked the moment when Soviet rock music transitioned from counterculture to mainstream. 

Kazakh film director Rashid Nugmanov's (1954-) final project for Sergei Solovyov’s (1944-2021) workshop at VGIK—the Moscow-based film school known in English as the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography—included some of the first film footage of everyday life in the Leningrad rock music scene.