Starting in 1984, aspiring American rock singer Joanna Stingray (1960-) began smuggling recording equipment into Leningrad's rock community, orchestrating the first-ever Western release of Soviet rock music—the double album Red Wave (1986).

Kazakh film director Rashid Nugmanov's (1954-) final project for Sergei Solovyov’s (1944-2021) workshop at VGIK—the Moscow-based film school known in English as the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography—included some of the first film footage of everyday life in the Leningrad rock music scene. 

The concert logo for the Rok protiv terrora (Rock Against Terror) music festival, which took place in Moscow on 6 April 1991.

Popular film magazines like Soviet Screen (Sovetskii ekran) were instrumental in establishing rock musicians as cultural icons. Volume 7, from 1987, places Konstantin Kinchev (1958-), frontman of the Leningrad band Alisa, on the cover of its “youth issue” (molodezhnyi vypusk) in an effort to promote Valerii Ogorodnikov’s film The Burglar (Vzlomshchik, 1987), in which Kinchev plays the lead role.

Popular film magazines like Soviet Screen (Sovetskii ekran) were instrumental in establishing rock musicians as cultural icons. Volume 7, from 1987, places Konstantin Kinchev (1958-), frontman of the Leningrad band Alisa, on the cover of its “youth issue” (molodezhnyi vypusk) in an effort to promote Valerii Ogorodnikov’s film The Burglar (Vzlomshchik, 1987), in which Kinchev plays the lead role.