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and the lifting of censorship come together in an unexpected way in this proposal to preserve manuscripts of unpublished authors for posterity.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 Vzgliad, where several sketch comedy artists parody and recapitulate Vzgliad's casual, sincere, 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, 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.

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Soviet 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

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