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.
View ArtifactEvgenia 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."
View ArtifactPutting 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 ArtifactSoviet 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
View ArtifactWriters 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.
View ArtifactOligarchs collude for Yeltsin in 1996
"Vyiti iz tupika [To Get Out of the Impasse]," an op-ed coauthered by Berezovsky, Gusinsky and other prominent 'oligarchs,' in which they announce their intention to use all media resources at their disposal to sink Ziuganov's chances of beating Yeltsin in the 1996 election.
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