Artifact of the 90s: a visit to McDonald's captured on Polaroid. Image from the personal archive of Olga Ostapova, courtesy of Dmitry Okrest. Check out the latest in our Unlikely Media series, which profiles independent (and independently-minded) publications from across the post-Soviet space. As part of this series, we interview editors who are trying to make space for alternative journalism, political commentary and reporting.
Here, Dmitry Okrest, Stanislav Kuvaldin and Evgeny Buzev speak about their new book, It fell apart: Everyday life in the Soviet Union and Russia, 1985-1999, which traces forgotten moments of the 1990s — how people switched to the market economy, the Russian and Ukrainian miners strikes, the growth of radical movements and the legacy of Soviet dissidents. Specifically, we deal with memories of Russia’s experience of the 1990s, the retroactive politicisation of this time and what the future holds for the “wild decade”.
The book is based on your VKontakte group “It fell apart”, which was set up in June 2014. Could you tell us what led you to start this group? What role did it play when it come to financing the actual book?
