Early Vzgliad parodies itself

A 1988 celebration of a year of Vzgliad, where several sketch comedy artists parody and recapitulate Vzgliad's casual, sincere, freewheeling style of television programming

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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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TV Commercials for the MMM Pyramid Scheme

A series of 15-second TV spots advertising post-Soviet Russia's most successful pyramid scheme, MMM. The scheme's popularity derived from the simple action-reward structure of the TV spots, which presented a simultaneously winking and sincere vision of capitalist utopia.

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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, 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.

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

<i>Chto? Gde? Kogda?</i> [<i>What? Where? When?</i>], 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

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Writers demand a Yeltsin coup ("Letter of the 42")

"Pisateli trebuiut ot pravitel’stva reshitel’nykh deistvii [Writers demand decisive actions from the government].” A letter signed by prominent intelligentsia during the 1993 Parliamentary crisis, in which the liberals urge Yeltsin to use lethal force to destroy the Communist-led parliamentary opposition.

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