“Namedni” (Recently), Leonid Parfenov’s project dedicated to recent history, was one of the most successful shows of the 1990s. Eschewing big narrative arcs, the program highlighted the past as a collection of memory sites—in this case, exploring the origins of the “New Russian” in 1991.

The aftermath of the "Shannon diplomatic incident," in which Yeltsin, having slept through a meeting with Irish leaders while his plane sat on the tarmac at the Shannon Airport, confronts Russian reporters back at Vnukovo-2 in Moscow.

The early-to-mid 1990s saw an explosion of chewing gum packaging featuring all sorts of imagery, much of it seemingly irrelevant to the underlying product. Inserts might include film stills from The Godfatheror Jurassic Park, pornographic pictures, or, in this case, characters from New Zealand cartoonist Kim Casali’s syndicated “Love Is…” series, which originally dated to the 1960s and ’70s.