An entry in “Argumenty i fakty”'s occasional column "Ugolok O. Bendera [Ostap Bender’s Corner]," a reference to Il’f and Petrov’s trickster hero of the 1920s, gave advice to beginning "chelnoki," or small-trade merchants who would travel—some across international borders—to find cheap items and sell them at markups back home. The checkered bag became a symbol of these petty merchants and of the hand-to-mouth experience of living in the 1990s.

A Russian translation of an article by American scholar Simon Karlinsky (1925-2009) on the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929), published in the LGBTQ magazine Tema.

M. Gessen interview with Yelena Bonner (1923-2011), wife of Nobel Peace Prize-winning dissident and nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov (1921-1989), published in the LGBTQ magazine Tema.

Pravda’s (1911-) coverage of the Human Chain on 24 August 1989, documenting the previous day’s political action by hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians, who linked together in a 600-kilometer-long “living chain” (zhivaia tsep’) that stretched from Tallinn, Estonia to Vilnius, Lithuania. 

Coverage of Soviet tanks rolling into the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius in January 1991 from Pravda, the Russian Communist Party’s press organ since 1911.