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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Evgenia Debryanskaya: "I Don't Give a Damn about Public Opinion"

Interview with LGBTQ activist—and sometime spouse of far-right philosopher Alexander Dugin (1962-)—Evgenia Debryanskaya (1953-) in the newspaper "Argumenty i fakty."

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

A letter signed by 42 prominent members of the Russian intelligentsia during the 1993 Constitutional Crisis, in which the liberals urged Yeltsin to use lethal force to destroy the Communist-led parliamentary opposition.

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