A Coup d'État Holds a Press Conference

A press conference held by the State Committee on the State of Emergency (GKChP in Russian), the group of hardline government officials who attempted a coup d’état overthrowing Mikhail Gorbachev. This press conference, held on 20 August 1991, shows the coup coming apart at the seams.

View Artifact

Tsvetaeva and Parnok

Article on the affair between poets Marina Tsvetaeva and Sophia Parnok in LGBTQ magazine Риск

View Artifact

Vzgliad on the GKChP

Clips of Vzgliad's reports during the attempted GKChP coup in 1991. These include being holed up in the White House (the RSFSR parliament) alongside its defenders and celebrities, such as Mstislav Rostropovich.

View Artifact

Putting the "Spotlight" on an experimental three-hour line for Soviet luxury clothes

Prozhektor Perestroiki [Perestroika's Spotlight], a glasnost-era televised investigative journalism project, investigates a three-hour line for luxury clothes at the recently opened Luxe Fashion Center, where the reporters discover the problem of supply and demand in the USSR.

View Artifact

Soviet technical intelligentsia learns Reaganomics on the Chto? Gde? Kogda? gameshow

Chto? Gde? Kogda? [What? Where? When?], a long-running high-brow quiz show for the late Soviet technical intelligentsia, debates the economic principles of Soviet private enterprise in the heat of Perestroika’s economic reforms in 1988

View Artifact

"Our boys" fight against "fascist" Baltic independence

"Nashi [Our Boys]"- Alexander Nevzorov's propagandistic documentary of the Latvian and Lithuanian Soviet OMON, fighting off the local independence movement in early 1991

View Artifact