Access Moscow: The Art Life of a City Revealed 1990–2000

until the 1990s we had a society where everyone was strongly connected. It was a bit like having a single collective body. Then, on the 19th and 20th of August 1991, the collective body fell apart, rotted, and died. People – or rather the Soviet person: collective units of existence – experienced a really serious identity crisis which was in fact an existential crisis: how to live, where is up, where is down, what’s good, what’s bad. The official Soviet institutions were all destroyed, but so were unofficial structures. The people that were left were kind of like “animals.” They wanted to move forward, but they didn’t really have the means to do so. […]

The 1990s were about experiencing possibilities when there was no established system and you have to be the system yourself.