Explore: Year » 1990

A Man Who Keeps Up with the Times

A piece on David Bowie, focusing on the star’s bisexuality, in the glossy color gay magazine Мальчишник

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Piskunov’s “Kitchen Diary” in “Komsomolskaya pravda”

For almost a month in 1990, a student named S. Piskunov documented regional shortages in a "kitchen diary," responding to “Komsomol’skaia pravda”'s call for readers to track the impacts of Gorbachev's economic reforms on daily life.

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Kino’s last concert (Luzhniki Stadium, Moscow)

Footage of a live Kino concert at Moscow's Luzhniki Stadium on June 24, 1990, roughly a month and half prior to frontman Viktor Tsoi's death in a car accident in rural Latvia. The footage shows the band at the very height of its popularity, as well as offering an unencumbered look at a country in transition: a heavy and conspicuous Soviet police detail is assigned to the event, while audience members wave both the Soviet flag and the Russian tricolor banner.

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Roksi Music Journal (Samizdat) (Vol. 15, 1990.)

The final print issue of the Leningrad-based samizdat rock journal Roksi, which was founded in 1977 by members of the rock band Aquarium and the future president of the Leningrad Rock Club. Considered to be the first rock publication in the Soviet Union, which was subject to raids by the KGB, Roksi eventually became the official newsletter of the LRC, and thus legitimized by the state apparatus.

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“500 Days: Program Summary,” a special issue of "Komsomolskaya pravda"

A special issue of the long-running Soviet daily "Komsomolskaya pravda" dedicated to economist Stanislav Shatalin's (1934-1997) "500 days" plan for economic reform under Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022).

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Nikita Skripkin and Locis Studio's "Perestroika" video game (1990-1998)

Perestroika, the puzzle game based on the eponymous series of late-Soviet political reforms, heralded a new, weird age in Russian gaming in its inexplicable attempt to represent the ongoing political turmoil via the reductive means of traversing colorful islands to prosperity. 

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