A Holy place is never empty, says a Russian proverb. In accordance with this proverb, the government pretends to become something almost sacred, displacing all the junk around. So the nineties so memorable, they were like a window to the future, looking at that many Russians believed that participate in creating the future of their homeland. Mikhail Gorbachev, who wanted with the help of glasnost and perestroika to modernize the Soviet system and make it more dynamic, destroyed it, depriving it of legitimacy. His policies are weak-willed movement, however, has unleashed the spirit of the inventiveness and enterprise, forced the whole society to feel completely renewed. It never before or afterwards did not feel so honest and open.
Photographer Daniel Biskup (Biskup Daniel) for 11 years recorded these changes. In the early nineties, Russia was on the way to Europe and thought this way will take two to three minutes. Coup clique of old Communists in August 1991 also failed, because the elite has long felt the taste of the market economy. This contributed to the peaceful dismantling of the monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the machine of repression, the secret police, the KGB, before the KGB building on Lubyanka square. Empty plinth, on which someone wrote in red paint “Dzerzhinsky — fascist” represented freedom, but at the same time and the vacuum of power and values in which resources were distributed in new ways. Market shock therapy of the economy turned many square and metro station Lubyanka in the flea market, where traveling merchants and grandmothers could buy anything, be it weapons, documents of privatization, vodka, tights or piece cigarettes. The state only partially perform their functions. Salaries and pensions were not paid, the elderly for a song, sold off the remnants of his property. But the police were friendly and modest.
New impoverishment of the population made the Communists popular again
Everything Western became a hit. The Palace of culture held a beauty contest, in the Moscow Museum of Lenin conducted fashion shows. Before the first McDonalds restaurant every day standing in long queues. In a traditional trading house GUM on red square was opened to European stores, where goods can be bought only for Western currency. Future oligarchs were making their first state for trade and currency exchange. When was elaborated the rules of the game, communication has become a key capital. Creative entrepreneurs have founded restaurants and shops, they imported Western used cars or put guards parked cars on the streets. But well-organized group of healthy men smelled their chance. The mafia in those years, too, has become a growing industry and so strong that, according to surveys among students, most kids wanted to be gangsters.
But the new impoverishment of the people made the Communists popular. They tried to prevent the intention of the democratic President Boris Yeltsin to hold a referendum on a new Constitution that would give him more power and the ability to dissolve Parliament, the Supreme Soviet, elected during the Soviet era. In October 1993 to the Parliament building, where MPs barricaded and armed men, Yeltsin brought tanks that shelled Parliament. People died, the number of which has never been installed. And behind all this Sunny autumn day watching the Muscovites with children and ice cream in hand.
