This chapter focuses on three overlapping sets of issues. The first is the emergence of sensationalist reporting and, more generally, of tabloids [zheltaya pressa] in Russia during perestroika and the 1990s. The second is chernukha (gore)—the fascination with violence, sex, and the darker, hidden sides of Soviet/Russian society that went hand-in-hand with glasnost. The third is the blurring of the boundaries between underground and mainstream culture that occurred during this period. The essay shows that chernukha often degenerated into sheer surrealism, while a taste for the overtly violent, sexual, politically incorrect, and absurd became the source of a specific form of national identity. Drawing on Agamben, Foucault, and Arendt, the author argues that this surreal physicality reflects a “biopolitical essence” of the post-Soviet transition defining the exercise of power as total control over bare life and a prolonged “state of exception.” A biopolitical framing further reveals the continuity between Yeltsin’s “shock therapy,” which immiserated an emergent middle class and starved an already ailing Russian countryside, and Putin’s “neoliberal authoritarianism.”