This billboard advertising the cigarette brand L&M is positioned in front of the burned façade of the Russian White House, which was bombed on Yeltsin’s orders during the 1993 Constitutional Crisis. It possibly inspired one of the most famous passages from Victor Pelevin’s iconic satire of the 1990s, “Generation P” (titled, in English, “Homo Zapiens”).

Andrei Sakharov (1921-1989), a physicist and Nobel Peace Prize-winning dissident, returned to Moscow from internal exile in 1986. He quickly became one of the USSR's most popular and respected public figures, surpassing even Gorbachev in some polls. His sudden death in December 1989 drew tens of thousands of mourners, despite a muted official response.

In 1989, Boris Yeltsin (1931-2007) capitalized on the gains of glasnost to secure widespread support for his candidacy to the Congress of People’s Deputies, overcoming a contentious past with General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022) and emerging as a popular figure against conservative elements inside the Soviet Communist Party.