Political discussion group "Perestroika"

Vyacheslav Marychev, "Actor" of the Russian Duma

During a Duma session, Marychev cocks a gun while wearing sunglasses and a Megadeth t-shirt tucked into high-waisted slacks

The Raspberry Blazer

The origins and significance of the raspberry blazer as an iconic element of the “New-Russian” wardrobe in the early 1990s.

Sergei Kuryokhin and Pop-Mekhanika on TV's "Musical Ring"

Making its debut in 1984, Musical Ring was a Perestroika-era Soviet television program, dedicated to showcasing new musical talent and fostering a live audience Q&A. This 1987 segment features composer and avant-garde jazz pianist Sergei Kuryokhin and his band Pop Mekhanika. Throughout the episode Kuryokhin artfully wields the postmodern rhetorical weapon of styob, imbuing formal musical discourse with farce, an artistic and communicative device that became one a defining mode of expression during perestroika and the early post-Soviet period.

Interview with Viktor Tsoi and Natalia Razlogova. Conducted by Sergei Sholokhov at the Golden Duke Film Festival in Odessa, 1988

This eight-minute interview, which took place on a cruise ship chartered for Odessa’s Golden Duke Film Festival in September 1988, depicts rock musician Viktor Tsoi and film critic Natalia Razlogova speaking to a journalist about the insurmountable generational tensions that inhabit the Soviet film industry. Tsoi was attending the festival to promote the film The Needle, where he played the lead role. The interview is significant highlighting the aesthetic and ideological crisis of the Soviet film industry in the last Soviet decade.

Nautilus Pompilius performing "Last Letter" (Poslednee Pis'mo: Gudbai Amerika)

A televised performance of Nautilus Pomplius's cult song lamenting the frustrated hopes of Perestroika-era Westernization, which was further popularized by its prominent position in Aleksei Balabanov's popular gangster drama Brother 2 (2000), inscribing it into the post-Soviet cultural and cinematic discourse as a sort of antidote to Viktor Tsoi's "Changes!" at the end of S. Solov'ev's ASSA.