Starting in 1984, aspiring American rock singer Joanna Stingray (1960-) began smuggling recording equipment into Leningrad's rock community, orchestrating the first-ever Western release of Soviet rock music—the double album Red Wave (1986).

The actor and TV host Sergei Bodrov, Jr. is interviewed shortly after the release of Aleksei Balabanov’s (1959-2013) cult gangster film, Brother.

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 Moscow-based, English-language magazine the eXile combined gonzo journalism and stiob to provide unique reporting on post-Soviet Russia. At the same time, the outlet fetishized the very 1990s-era lawlessness or bespredel—not to mention Western sexual and economic exploitation of Russia—that it nominally denounced and condemned.