The finale of Sergei Solovyov’s (1944-2021) film 1987 film ASSA features rock star Viktor Tsoi (1962-1990) performing his hit "Changes! [Peremen]" to a stadium crowd. The film’s record-breaking commercial success marked the moment when Soviet rock music transitioned from counterculture to mainstream. 

Kazakh film director Rashid Nugmanov's (1954-) final project for Sergei Solovyov’s (1944-2021) workshop at VGIK—the Moscow-based film school known in English as the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography—included some of the first film footage of everyday life in the Leningrad rock music scene. 

Popular film magazines like Soviet Screen (Sovetskii ekran) were instrumental in establishing rock musicians as cultural icons. Volume 7, from 1987, places Konstantin Kinchev (1958-), frontman of the Leningrad band Alisa, on the cover of its “youth issue” (molodezhnyi vypusk) in an effort to promote Valerii Ogorodnikov’s film The Burglar (Vzlomshchik, 1987), in which Kinchev plays the lead role.

Made in collaboration with rock star Viktor Tsoi's (1962-1990) widow, Marianna Tsoi (1959-2005), this film, directed by Alexei Uchitel (1951-), includes scenes from Tsoi's funeral and chronicles the mass mourning of the late musician—a proxy, perhaps, for mourning the perestroika era as a whole.

Journalist Sergei Sholokhov (1958-) interviews rock star Viktor Tsoi (1962-1990) and film critic Natalia Razlogova (1956-) at the Golden Duke Film Festival in Odesa in September 1988. 

Excerpt from an early episode (the second) of a new version of the popular talk show Vzgliad, co-hosted by Aleksandr Liubimov and Sergey Bodrov Jr., which aired weekly on the TV channel ORT in 1996-1999.