Pop, glamour and gangsters: Boris Yeltsin's new rave Russia

As the Soviet Union dissipated its counter culture movement was replaced by a decade of free-market hedonism. The Calvert Journal talk us through the 1990s

The 1980s were divided into two five-year periods in Russia, one black, one white. First there were the throes of Soviet power played out to the accompaniment of an extraordinary carnival of underground art: from the Necrorealist film genre, to Ilya Kabakov's art works and Pyotr Mamonov's hypnotic rock.

This was followed by the era of perestroika and glasnost - economic policies of "openness" and "restructuring" - where everything was for sale. The 1980s ended up like a lunar landscape: its heroes, like musician Viktor Tsoy, rock singer Mike Naumenko, and avant-garde musician Sergey Kuryokhin, were dead, or - if saleable on the international market - living abroad.

Everything was mixed together in a friendly stew of glamour, cocaine and criminality