Lyube "Stop Fooling Around, America!" (Ne Valiai Duraka, Amerika!) music video
Music video for the fourth track on Lyube’s second studio album Who Said We Lived Poorly? (Kto skazal, chto my plokho zhili?), which was released in 1992. Written from the perspective of the Russo-Soviet “common man,” while using folk vernacular, the song explores questions of Alaska’s historical and territorial integrity – lamenting its sale to the United States and demanding its return while celebrating Russia’s national character.
View Artifact
SpidInfo #1, January 1991
The cover of the first issue of the early 1990s magazine SpidInfo, with an anxious nude couple turned away from one another in bed.
Georgii Deliev, "Mask Show [Maski Show]," 1991-2006.
A 1991 title screen for the sketch comedy program Maski-Show (Mask Show, 1991-2006) showing a stylized image of multiple people in clown make-up.
Leningrad Rock Club
A wall of graffiti in the courtyard of the Leningrad Rock Club (1981-1991) on 13 Rubinshteyna Street in Leningrad (St. Petersburg), which featured fan street art dedicated to USSR's most revered rock-music collectives. When the wall was painted over in 2010 by the bulding's new proprietor, this caused a public outcry from both rock fans and the many surviving musicians from that era, who sought to preserve the LRC's legacy and designmate the wall and the building a historical landmark.
View Artifact
TaMtAm Rock Club documentary by German television (1993)
The first and until 1994 the only Western-style rock club in Russia, which was founded in 1991 by cellist Vsevolod (Seva) Gakkel (Akvarium) after he visited the famous music club CBGB in New York. The club specialized in punk rock specifically, providing the budding underground punk scene in Russia a much-needed performance venue and cultural legitimacy. Some have accused Gakkel's establishment for breeding far-right nationalist sentiments among Russia's youth subcultures (or at least providing them with a physical organizational platform) in the early 1990s. The fact that a German television production company took interest in TaMtAm is also a testament to punk as a truly transnational movement after fall of the Berlin Wall.
View Artifact
Valerii Pereleshin
Piece on the gay Russian émigré poet Valerii Pereleshin with excerpts from his verse cycle “Ariel” in gay newspaper Shans
View Artifact