Nothing epitomized the everyday experience of the urban Russian 1990s like crime. As this first comprehensive statistical study of the 1990s demonstrates, crime was just as bad as everyone had anecdotally experienced. The numbers also reveal some unexpected trends.

A 1988 celebration of a year of the late- and post-Soviet youth program “Vzgliad,” where several sketch comedy artists parody and recapitulate its casual, sincere, and freewheeling style of television programming.

“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.

The bearded B.U.Kashkin (1938-2005) stands in front of an array of trash bins painted with bright, colorful scenes featuring trees, butterflies, and flowers. Against the background of this artistic display, pigeons are seen digging through the site’s abundant garbage and mud.

A glasnost-era play by Mikhail Shatrov (1932-2010) that opened, without the cuts censors had previously requested, at the Lenin Komsomol Theater in Moscow in February 1986.