Footage of a live Kino concert at Moscow's Luzhniki Stadium on 24 June 1990, about six weeks before frontman Viktor Tsoi's death in a car accident in rural Latvia at the age of 28. We see the band at the apex of its popularity, and the country in transition: a heavy and conspicuous Soviet police detail is assigned to the event, while audience members wave both the Soviet flag and the Russian tricolor banner. 

The cover image from Volume 13 (1988) of Soviet Screen (Sovetskii ekran, 1925-1998) depicts Viktor Tsoi (1962-1990) of Kino and Pyotr Mamonov (1951-2001) of the Moscow-based rock band Zvuki Mu, demonstrating how late-Soviet cinema magazines established rock musicians as cultural icons, while the film industry increasingly relied on underground rock culture for commercial content.

This 1988 televised performance of Nautilus Pompilius's “Last Letter” captures the band’s cultural disillusionment with Western ideals, prefiguring post-Soviet anti-Americanism. 

In 1992, the Beatles superfan and rock-and-roll activist Kolia Vasin (1945-2018) petitioned the St. Petersburg authorities to establish a public “John Lennon Temple of Rock-n-Roll.” 

The most famous woman in the Soviet Union transformed into a successful post-Soviet star.

Music video and lyrics from the 1999 musical hit “Ubily negra [They Killed a Black Man]” by the band “Zapreshchennye barabanshchiki.”