Russian Crime Statistics, 1980-1996

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.

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Klei-Moment

Made by the German Henkel company, Moment-brand glue was a staple of post-Soviet hobbyists. It also became one of the preferred drugs among post-Soviet youth. The brand name alone became synonymous with huffing.

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Long Live PaperLessLit

Soviet paper shortages, new computer technologies, and the lifting of censorship come together in an unexpected way in this proposal to preserve manuscripts of unpublished authors for posterity.

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Early “Vzgliad” parodies itself

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.

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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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