An excerpt from Stanislav Govorukhin's (1936-2018) influential documentary on late perestroika malaise and the ways out of it.

“A Way Out of the Dead End,” an op-ed co-authored by prominent Russian “oligarchs” and published in the Wall Street Journal-like daily “Kommersant” in April 1996, which announced their intention to use their considerable media resources to sink the Communist Gennady Zyuganov in the upcoming 1996 presidential election.

An infamous 1994 article on the First Chechen War by controversial gay journalist Slava Mogutin, published in Novyi vzgliad (New View).

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-).

Just five months before his death, Nobel Peace Prize-winning physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov (1921-1989) spoke out at the USSR’s First Congress of People’s Deputies, defying Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022) to advocate for a multi-party system in a speech broadcast live to millions—yet silenced within the Congress hall itself.

Konstantin Ernst’s (1961-) series of social advertisements extolling Russia’s shared values and national identity at a time of seeming social crisis in the mid-1990s.