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Putting the “Spotlight” on an experimental three-hour line for Soviet luxury clothes
“Prozhektor perestroiki” (Perestroika's Spotlight), a glasnost-era televised investigative journalism project, seeks to uncover the causes of a three-hour line for luxury clothes at the recently opened Luxe Fashion Center, which come down to intractable issues of supply and demand in the USSR.
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ASSA, motion picture
Scene of Viktor Tsoi performing his rock-anthem "Changes!" (“Peremen!”) during the last seven minutes of Sergei Solov’ev’s 1987 film Assa. Kino's cinematic performance became a defining mass-cultural event that legitimized Soviet rock music as a product of the official mainstream collaborating with the Soviet underground rock movement, crowning Tsoi as USSR's ultimate rock star, and promoting rock music as a legitimate artform for the late-Soviet audience.
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"Sovetskii Ekran" with Konstantin Kinchev on the cover
Popular film magazines like Soviet Screen (Sovetskii Ekran), were instrumental in establishing rock musicians as cultural icons. Volume 7 (1987) publication places Konstantin Kinchev, frontman of the Leningrad band Alisa, on the cover of its “youth issue” (molodezhnyi vypusk) in an effort to promote the Valerii Ogorodnikov’s film The Burglar (Vzlomshchik, 1987) in which Kinchev plays the lead role.
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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.
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The founding of the Memorial Society in the late 1980s
Three moments in the early history of Memorial, a human rights group established in Gorbachev-era Russia (and abolished by Putin’s government in 2022) to document and memorialize Soviet political repressions and abuses.
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