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.

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Tsvetaeva and Parnok

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

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“Vzgliad” on the GKChP

Clips of “Vzgliad”'s reports during the attempted anti-Gorbachev coup of August 1991. These include the hosts’ holing up in the seat of Russia’s new parliament, the White House alongside its defenders and celebrities, including the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich (1927-2007).

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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, seeks to uncover the causes of a three-hour line for luxury clothes at the recently opened Luxe Fashion Center, which come down to intractable issues of supply and demand in the USSR.

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The Soviet technical intelligentsia learns Reaganomics on the “Chto? Gde? Kogda?” quiz show

“Chto? Gde? Kogda?” (What? Where? When?), a long-running highbrow quiz show targeted at the late Soviet technical intelligentsia, debates the economic principles underpinning Soviet private enterprise in the midst of perestroika’s economic reforms in 1988.

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"Our boys" fight against “fascist” Baltic independence

"Nashi [Our Boys]," journalist Alexander Nevzorov's propagandistic documentary about the Latvian and Lithuanian divisions of the Soviet OMON (special forces), who fought local independence movements in early 1991.

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