Nothing epitomized the everyday experience of the urban Russian 1990s like crime. As this first comprehensive statistical study of the 1990s demonstrates, crime was just as bad as everyone had anecdotally experienced. The numbers also reveal some unexpected trends.

Aleksei Balabanov's cult crime drama, which made its title character, the loveable killer Danila Bagrov into a youth idol and a national emblem of post-Soviet masculinity

The continuation of Danila Bagrov's story from Balabanov's 1997 smash hit "Brother" was partially set in the United States, where national hero Bagrov avenged his friend's death while responding to Russo-American cultural differences.

Photograph of Mikhail Kuchin's funerary portrait with mercedes keys, gravestone, 1994. Shirokorechenskoy Cemetery.

Igor Dudinsky takes over the magazine Megapolis-ekspress and turns it into an extreme and surreal parody of the lowest and most excessively sensationalist forms of Western tabloids.

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.