A 1994 article, published in the weekly magazine Megapolis Express, on the early 1990s LGBTQ activism of M. Gessen (then known as Masha) in Russia.

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).

A clip from one of many perestroika-era televised conversations between American and Soviet "regular people," in which they find common ground with the help of longtime Soviet propagandist and future star of liberal post-Soviet TV, Vladimir Pozner (1934-).

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.”