A "Limonka" cover from 1997 displaying a collage by the surreal retrofuturist artist and pioneer of industrial music, Aleksandr Lebedev-Frontov.

Novyi Vzgliad authors write some of the most scandalous and incendiary political commentaries of the 1990s, producing new forms of political irony. Iaroslav Mogutin and Eduard Limonov turn violence into a paradoxical source of identity. The main artifact here–an article by Mogutin–exemplifies this process.

The first issue of the actionist magazine Radek featured, on its cover, four strategically denuded men standing in front of the charred façade of the Russian White House—a recent casualty of the 1993 Constitutional Crisis. 

Images from a photo shoot from the Polushkin Brothers’ Fash-Fashion collection, which alluded to both queer and fascist aesthetics. Images in the series appeared, respectively, in an ad for Dr. Martens in the lifestyle magazine “Ptiuch,” and as an example of the countercultural aesthetics of the National Bolshevik Party in the pages of its press organ, “Limonka.”

Egor Letov performs his song “Moia oborona” (My defense), during his “concert in the hero city Leningrad,” part of Grazhdanskaia oborona’s 1994 tour Russkii proryv (Russian breakthrough).

The model, writer, singer, and TV personality Natalia Medvedeva (Limonov’s third wife) performs her song “Poedem na voinu!” (Let’s go to war!), a countercultural hymn romanticizing war, violence, and rebellion.