“Chto? Gde? Kogda?” (What? Where? When?), a long-running highbrow quiz show targeted at the late Soviet technical intelligentsia, debates the economic principles underpinning Soviet private enterprise in the midst of perestroika’s economic reforms in 1988.

Alexander Liubimov’s (1962-) talk show, “One on One,” staged debates between public figures who disagreed strongly with each other. When nationalist provocateur Vladimir Zhirinovsky (1946-2022) and liberal reformer Boris Nemtsov (1959-2015) met on air in as the First Chechen War (1994-1996) was just beginning, sparks—and a piece of the set—flew.

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. 

Popular film magazines like Soviet Screen (Sovetskii ekran) were instrumental in establishing rock musicians as cultural icons. Volume 7, from 1987, places Konstantin Kinchev (1958-), frontman of the Leningrad band Alisa, on the cover of its “youth issue” (molodezhnyi vypusk) in an effort to promote Valerii Ogorodnikov’s film The Burglar (Vzlomshchik, 1987), in which Kinchev plays the lead role.

This official “initiative group survey” from the Leningrad Rock Club was completed by Sergei Kuryokhin (1954-1996) of the band Pop Mekhanika sometime in the 1980s.

This German television documentary captured one of Russia's first Western-style punk clubs, TaMtAm, founded in 1991 by Akvarium's Vsevolod Gakkel (1953-) after his visit to New York's CBGB.