The book series “Contemporary Russian Prose” or the “Black Series,” published by Vagrius—one of post-Soviet Russia’s most successful commercial publishers—made bestsellers out of literary prose.

Vavilon, or Babylon, began as a loose group of young poets brought together by Dmitry Kuzmin in 1988. In the post-Soviet years, the group's almanac, and then website, became a driving force behind some of the most innovative poetry of the 1990s.

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.