In May 1990, the long-running Soviet newspaper “Komsomolskaya pravda” set a world record with nearly 22 million daily copies. This staggering total marked the peak of Soviet print media's reach before the 1990 Press Law shifted financial responsibility to outlets themselves, making such high print runs unsustainable.

This editorial call, published on 29 September 1990 in the daily “Komsomolskaya pravda” (1925-), asked readers to keep and submit "kitchen diaries" on shortages and price changes in their area as a way to track the progress (and deficiencies) of perestroika-era economic reforms.

In 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022) signed into law a press reform that reinforced existing commitments to speech and press freedoms, as articulated in the version of the Soviet Constitution adopted in 1977 under Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982).