"The Wild Nineties": description, history and interesting facts. "The Wild Nineties": description, history and interesting facts Life in the Wild 90s

Was it great in the 90s?! Author, are you stubborn?
1. An inspiring feeling of freedom.
What kind of freedom was missing before, to shit on the streets?
That “freedom” is shown very well in the film “Kill the Dragon”, the video is attached. In Nizhny Novgorod there was shooting at night, brothers shooting at each other. On the right the Kalash is scribbling, on the left they are firing from the Makarov. Freedom is crap!
2. Easy money.
They wore shoes on the streets, we boys, less than 4-5 people did not go to Moscow, because at the stations and near the metro there were local groups of thugs, now called “gopniks”. Only they acted more brazenly and lawlessly, for impunity and, read above, freedom! Outright, low-quality leftist, low-quality expired products were sold in markets and stalls. Is easy money great?!
3. Imported goods.
Foreign junk poured into the market. Everyone rushed to buy televisions, VCRs, etc. A lot of fakes, a lot of Chinese crap. Was it great to ruin the country because of imported shit?
4. Everyone was in their place.
Everyone tried to earn as much as they could, because the delays in wages were terrible. I, an officer of the Russian Army, did not receive any salary for several months and dug copper cable at night because there was nothing to eat. Was I in the right place? During the day, the commanders instilled in us that we needed to protect the Motherland, and at night they themselves worked on loaders at the local factory, loading vodka. Because the family had to eat. The cops had no rights at all, but in the end they quickly realized and wrested their “business” from the bandits, at the same time greatly thinning their ranks. Were they in the right place too? Teachers went to collective farms, because even their meager salaries were not given, were they in the right place?
5. We had the funniest president in the world.
If this is a joke, then it is extremely unfortunate. When we watched drunken Borka jumping around the stage or “leading” the orchestra, we didn’t laugh, we were incredibly ashamed. He destroyed the army, destroyed the country, Pindosian “consultants” were allowed into strategic sites, enterprises were sold for pennies, the people lived in extreme poverty. Funny? We didn't find it funny at all.
6. People have hope.
What??! All my memories of the 90s are in shades of gray. There was terrible unemployment, no money was paid, hence there were so many “businessmen” who were trying to somehow make a living. There was terrible hopelessness, no light was visible. The reforms ruined everything at the root. One day we became impoverished, there were 6 thousand per family on the book and in one day it was no longer possible to buy anything with this money. I still remember the crazy Georgian who ran around the Kursky railway station with a suitcase of 500 rubles, throwing them around and yelling “why the fuck do I need them now?!” Hope?? In the USSR, everyone knew that after graduating from college he would go to work in his specialty, he knew that he would get an apartment, etc. There was STABILITY. In the 90s, no one knew what would happen tomorrow or even tonight.
7. Everyone was a millionaire.
What's fun? Money depreciated. Yes, we joked that we had become millionaires, but it was laughter through tears.
8. Opportunity to travel abroad.
Yeah. Everyone was able to personally verify that foreign stores actually sell more than 40 types of sausage. The mass of people, deciding that everyone was waiting for them over the hill, left the country. Only a few emerged as people. How many of these returned after 2000? All this anarchy that was happening in the country was not worth such pleasure.
9. Nostalgia for childhood and youth.
These are just memories of childhood. For example, we collected bottles, handed them over, went to VDNKh and, if the local “free boys” who “were in the right place” weren’t wearing shoes, we bought a couple of posters with the Bruces and the Schwartzes, or bought “Donald” or “Turbo” chewing gum. . The latter are less common because they cost 3 times more than “Donald”. And, if they didn’t give us shoes on the way back, they brought it all home.
10. “Fashionable” clothes.
Low quality junk from Turkey and China. Everything that was bright and colorful was fashionable. We, like the natives, who reacted to mirrors and beads, bought low-quality shit from Adadis, etc.
I don’t know a single person who experienced the “dashing 90s” who would like them to be repeated. No one! Young brats who didn’t get involved in this themselves, but read about that “romance”, don’t count.
The author is either a massive troll or a stubborn person. If this is such a joke, then I never understood it.
Now at least take a moment...

The time when they “hammered the arrow” and “chopped the cabbage.” A time when the fate of two wagons of frozen fish in the port of Vladik (Vladivostok) was usually decided through a game of thimbles.
The time when Americans paid private security services out of their own pockets so that local fools and roads would not get to the still frightening “nuclear button.”

The time when the Marlborough block and the Levis party were paid for with what they managed to steal from the nearest garrison. Time for financial adventures, deception, setups, showdowns.
A time of severe demographic decline, stratification of society and the death of everything good that was created during Soviet times. A time that you really don’t want, but you need to remember, in order to avoid its repetition.

What to say? The topic is not simple. And writing an introduction to it is also not easy. The turmoil of the 90s, there’s no other way to call it. In terms of human and financial losses, it is comparable to a real civil war. Ten years of confusion, search, losses, ups and downs...

Street children

Along with the Chechen war, skinheads and criminal showdowns, street children were the main topic of television. In the 90s and early 2000s (until 2003) they constantly hung around in Moscow and other large cities, at train stations and major streets. An obligatory attribute is the Moment glue, which they sniffed. They were reminiscent of gypsies - they begged in a crowd, and if you didn’t give them some change, they could rudely curse you after running away to a safe distance. The age is usually from 7 to 14 years. They lived in basements, heating mains and abandoned houses. It is also worth adding that not only street children led a lifestyle similar to this. In any city “in the area” at that time it was considered a show-off to drink, sniff glue and smoke from the age of ten.

Bratva

Bandits and mowing down like bandits. It was fashionable. The first ones can rarely be seen openly - they are in cars, in bars, in clubs, in huts. The latter were everywhere - ordinary, young, street guys from all walks of life, who bought or got hold of a short black leather jacket, often pretty worn and dirty, engaged in goop-stopping, scamming for money and extorting, sometimes six from the real ones. A special case is gangster students who fleece their more sane, but less organized and more cowardly neighbors in the dorm.

Blatnyak

“A musician plays a hit song,

I remember the bunks, the camp,

The musician plays a hit

And my soul hurts"

Lyapis Trubetskoy, Snowstorm, 1996-1998

Blattnyak, also known as chanson, is the brainchild of gangster anti-culture. The time of incredible popularity of Misha Krug and other performers of prison songs. Street and restaurant musicians quickly learn “murka”, because the music is ordered by the one who pays, and back then it was the lads who had the money. A little later, the former Soviet songwriter Mikhail Tanich, who has nothing to do with the bandits, but who spent 8 years in the zone for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, gathers ordinary musicians who somehow perform music and makes of them the Lesopoval group, playing on thin strings shower of rich Pinocchios. Since millions and millions passed through prison in the nineties, it made economic sense.

Homeless people

This period of history gives birth to homeless people, who were completely absent from the Soviet Union before it. Homeless people - yesterday's neighbors, acquaintances and classmates, go from house to house and beg for alms, sleep in the entrances, drink and go to the toilet in the same place. A homeless person was something so wild for a homo-Sovietist that even the then redneck Yura Khoy wrote a song about it:

“I will raise the bull, I will inhale the bitter smoke,

I'll open the hatch and climb home.

Don't feel sorry for me, I live a great life.

Sometimes I just want to eat.”

Gaza Strip, Homeless, 1992

Video salons

In fact, the phenomenon arose and became a cult in the eighties, otherwise where would we have seen Tom and Jerry, Bruce Lee, the first Terminator, Freddy Krueger and other living dead. And at the same time, eroticism.

In the early nineties, video salons reached a quantitative peak, but quickly began to fade away - the new Russians had their own VCRs, and everyone else had no time for it.

For today's youth, it should be noted that most video salons were distinguished by their basement-utility location (turning into real ovens in the summer), video quality, which causes chronic visual damage, and translations that are unsurpassed to this day in their artistry and correspondence to the original text (for example, two main translated curse words - “big white piece of crap” and “pots” replaced almost all rude foreign expressions). As a result, a whole series of films and characters got mixed up and crossed in the minds of visitors. Almost all films of the “action movie about space” type were called Star Wars.

Hazing

“Day and night we rivet holes

Holes, wells and hungry mouths

What we have left from the armies are commanders,

And also admirals from the fleets"

Black Obelisk, “Who are we now?”, 1994

They simply didn’t care about the then Soviet army and left it to rot. Most of it turned into the Russian army and continued to furiously disintegrate, which naturally, in addition to the loss of combat effectiveness, led to such an interesting phenomenon as “Hazing.”

Killer

Killer (from the English “killer” - killer) is the name of killers for money who appeared in the 90s. With the advent of “wild” capitalism in our country, such wild ways of resolving conflicts as contract killings appeared. Anyone with whom it was impossible to come to an agreement could simply be ordered. You could order anyone - a journalist, a deputy, a thief in law, even the sky, even Allah. Fortunately there were plenty of killers. It got to the point that they would place advertisements in newspapers without warning like “Looking for a job with risk.”

Martial arts clubs

Since the people were experiencing a fair amount of pressure from marginal packs of gopotas, and the gopota itself was in great need of more significant ways of taking away other people’s property, enterprising comrades began to produce character leveling places in frantic quantities - Martial Arts Clubs. First of all, it was, of course, karate, which for some unknown reason was driven underground back in the 80s.

But then such new-fangled trends as kung fu, Thai boxing, taekwondo and other kickboxing began to timidly raise their heads. People happily grabbed it, because it looked solid and sounded impressive. It was difficult to find a basement that was not occupied by some “teacher”, “sensei”, who had studied a couple of samizdat books of toilet quality and watched a dozen cassettes with Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee, and was now chasing joyful hamsters until they worked up a sweat.

To be fair, it is worth noting that there were also real gurus and senseis who had actually worked for a certain number of years under the supervision of the corresponding overseas masters. Those who in time began to use their heads (not only for breaking objects), subsequently began to represent something of themselves both in terms of collapsing other people's jaws and in terms of obtaining monetary and material profit... Most of the hamsters did not receive anything, and some individuals even left along the “slippery slope” and got acquainted with the work of Misha Krug in the original sources. But that's a completely different story.

Lump

Derived from "thrift store" in the eighties.

The popular abbreviation for “commercial store” in the very early nineties was indicated on the sign in large letters. These were rare and very outlandish small shops for those times, where people went as if to the Hermitage, to look at things and products from another world.

Working in a commercial store was considered prestigious. Then, with the disappearance and repurposing of soviet stores and the general increase in the number of retail outlets, such a “name” began to be abandoned, what else could a store be other than a commercial one. Retail outlets now have their own names. Closer to the mid-nineties, a separate type sprang up - “night lights” or night stores, “24 hour” stores.

And finally, stalls, which received this name due to their relationship with commercial stores. They originated in the early nineties, in the form of cheap layouts and tents selling vodka, cigarettes, condoms, chewing gum, Mars, Snickers and imported cocoa.

New Arbat. At the end of the twentieth century, the capital and its center were engulfed in a monstrous plague of many thousands of chaotic and illegal retail outlets

Photo: Valery Khristoforov/TASS

Then the lumps became stationary. At first they had an abundance of glass, then they began to look more and more like armored pillboxes with loopholes. They just often had their glass broken, set them on fire, and even shot them. However, this type of entertainment is still alive.

Foreign consumer goods were sold in lumps, ranging from chewing gum to expensive water and cigarettes. In the lump you could buy playing porn cards, which the shkolota abused for the sake of fap. The lumps abounded in everything that the advertisement talked about. Snickers, Mars, bounty, huyaunty - there was all this in abundance. And what’s important is that the product did not have any excise stamps or stickers indicating compliance with Rosstandart; The now obligatory presence of inscriptions in Russian was also only an option.

Cops

For wide sections of the population, a policeman a la Uncle Styopa became a cop in the nineties, contact with whom for an ordinary citizen is dangerous for life, health and money in his pocket. As people familiar with the system first-hand said: “The bandits will simply rob and beat you up, and the cops will also jail you.”

Drug addicts

There were drug addicts, substance abusers and alcoholics in the late 80s. But the peak of drug addiction came in the 90s, when the fight was actually stopped and when junkies of all ages appeared - from teenagers to men. During the period of a special rise in heroin addiction in the mid-90s, an overdose corpse was taken away from the dorms of our alma maters every week.

Nowadays, heroin is a marginal (and noticeably more expensive) drug, but then, in the beginning and middle of the decade, the golden youth, bohemians, and students “dabbled” in heroin...

Meanwhile, drugs have reached even the most distant corner of the country. How many types, varieties, names there were. How was it possible to figure it out and start taking it, where to inject and what to smoke? This is where TV came to the rescue. With his propaganda. Yes Yes. In the late 80s and early 90s, TV promoted everything. Morning broadcasts on Central Television featured Agatha Christie’s fashionable song about drugs, “Come on in the evening... We’ll smoke ta-ta-ta.”

TV series have appeared that supposedly tell about the problems of young people, but in fact explain what is going where and why. I especially remember the broadcast of “Up to 16 and older” and a similar program for teenagers, where they showed: they say this is a button accordion and a spoon over the fire, inject it here, but this is very bad, this is ugh, guys, never do that. And this is weed, they smoke it like this, but it’s ayyyyyy, scoundrel drug addicts, screw them. A drug dealer usually looks like this - but you never approach him. Need I mention that after these programs the flywheel of drug trafficking and drug addiction spun so much that it was possible to slow it down, at best, by the mid-2000s.

Moreover, society practically did not condemn this. Propaganda has made this problem a harmless feature, a national trait. Yes, they say, we are like that, we like to drink, break, steal. Throughout the 90s we were told that we were losers, this is our best feature and because of this we are unique.

The invisible hand of the market

Finally, the “long-awaited” market has appeared in Russia. However, it was introduced through one place, which led to disastrous consequences:

. The disappearance of entire sectors of the economy.

Presumably, the RSFSR alone, not counting the other republics, lost 50% of GDP in two years. By comparison, the Great Depression cost the United States 27% of GDP over three years. A decrease in real incomes of the population and high unemployment in the bargain, oddly enough. The exact figures (taking into account the share of the black market and postscripts before and after the collapse) have been ground into dust by time; no one has studied this scientifically.

. Fierce, furious unemployment.

In fact, there are much more unemployed than there are nominal ones: enterprises are standing still and many work part-time, part-time, part-time, with less than a full year of pay.

. The original “know-how” is the payment of wages at enterprises in goods produced.

For example, furniture, canned food, linen, whatever! But in fact, they sold goods to their own employees at commercial prices under the pretext of “no money.” Here he delivers, bringing the situation to the point of absurdity. An even more kosher scheme worked like this: the plant bought refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, TV sets and sold them with VAT to its employees for a conditional salary. And the profit received from the sale of the plant’s products not only remained entirely in the director’s pockets, but also increased! That's the same!

“What is Russian business? “Steal a box of vodka, sell the vodka, drink the money.”

Non-traditional methods of treatment: Chumak and Kashpirovsky

Healers who took away the last things from the disabled, lovers of horoscopes and astrologers, UFOs, snow and universe people and other science fiction bloomed in full bloom. Also at this time, all sorts of pseudoscientists were chopping cabbage.

They say that once, when Kashpirovsky had just gained popularity, he was invited to give a “closed lecture” for MGIMO employees. There were no healings. Kashpirovsky simply talked about his method and somehow casually mentioned that he also treats obesity. Hearing this, the ambassador's wives and ladies from the teaching staff trickled off the stage after the lecture. Kashpirovsky looked carefully at the suffering women crowded around him and said: “I give instructions - you need to eat less.”

It must be said that Chumak was a very influential person, since his program was part of the “120 minutes” program (originally “90 minutes”) on television, which was shown at 7 am. Thanks to this fact, the human brain was actively exposed to the daily phimotic precipitation of the television miracle worker right from the morning.

Alan Chumak Sessions 1990

Using the TV, he not only treated diseases, but also “charged” water and “creams”: millions of “hamsters” placed glasses of water near the screens. It was also possible to charge water via radio. It’s a pity there were no cell phones in the country back then, since Chumak also knew how to charge batteries.

Also, Chumak sold his photographs and posters, which had to be applied to sore spots for healing. Naturally, the more photos were attached, the more healing the effect. Healthy lifestyle publications sold “charged” portraits to increase circulation sales.

New Russians

In contrast to the socialist approximately equal distribution of income, the B part of the population began to receive much (several million times) more income than the rest of the majority. The reasons for this in the so-called “period of initial capital accumulation” were quite artificial, often not entirely decent and clearly illegal.

In fact, an elite class was created out of nothing in 10 years (1986-1996). This process went especially fast with the privatization of state property after Yeltsin’s coup in 1993, when former bandits, swindlers and their henchmen sawed up the people’s property for the pennies that they had stolen from them a little earlier.

Zhmurki

As a result, by 1996, 10% of the population had legal (or semi-legal) ownership of 90% of the national income, another 10-15% later formed their service personnel, who had the opportunity to live comfortably with an income of $ 500 per family person (corrupt media, managers middle managers, traders, corrupt officials, etc.), and the remaining 75% were doomed to live on a minimum wage in a state of semi-slaves and in conditions of total corruption with little chance of a serious rise. Given the complete collapse of the economy, there was no hope for the situation to improve.

Scumbags

“Fast gait and crazy look” - this is about them. A common feature of real scumbags is a look full of angry, joyful energy in a good mood.

Dashing 90s

At a time when everything becomes possible, they quickly multiply and gather in flocks, and in a flock, frosty character traits develop faster and manifest themselves more strongly. Before that, they probably somehow kept themselves under control, found peaceful uses of their powers, or ended up in prison. If they are involved in banditry, even if they immediately receive money from a person, they will still beat them without getting anything at all - they will maim or kill them. They are looking for any opportunity to disinterestedly deal with someone. The most desirable result of a showdown is for two or three or more people to attack one, shouting “... get him down!!!” and then the highest delicacy for any racially correct scumbag is to jump on the head of a person lying down (a composter), trying to deliver a strong blow with his heel so that the skull cracks.

A scumbag’s weapon is like a kitty’s new phone; it will often be in plain sight and will definitely be used. Bandit scumbags with weapons always mean a lot of corpses. As a rule, a scumbag does not have his own girlfriend, or there are one or two common girls in the company, frostbitten or weak-willed, narrow-minded girls who are not used to refusing anyone and believe that these particular boys have real power.

Prostitutes

“You see, guys, this is not a joke.

Remember, guys, Olya is a prostitute.

The girl is rich and lives well.

Who will find the guys to control her?

Group "Announcement", "Olya and Speed"

Massive and often very young, girls (and sometimes boys) are twelve years old, sometimes less. That's when there was a holiday on the street of perverts! Half or more of the schoolgirls, after a series of publications in the press about currency prostitutes and the chain reaction of conversations on this topic in the second half of the 80s and early 90s, began to consider the work of a prostitute the best female career, full of romance and excellent prospects, which, by the way, The films “Intergirl” (even despite the fact that the film ends tragically for the main character, precisely as a result of her involvement in prostitution) and especially “Pretty Woman” (in general, in this regard, the most harmful film: millions of girls around the world, having watched it) greatly contributed This is a movie, we decided to become prostitutes).

Prostitutes then were naive and unafraid. We walked with whomever and wherever we went. We often ran into thugs. As a rule, the life of a street prostitute is short-lived, much like the life of a drug addict, and ends horribly: death at the hands of bandits, practicing maniacal killers or thugs, sometimes under the wheels of cars, death from disease, overdoses.

Advertising

TV advertising was clearly divided according to picture quality and subject matter into imported and domestic. Import advertising was bright and imaginative. Back then they watched it as a short film, without bothering with what they advertised. Cigarette advertisements especially stood out: Marlboro, Lucky Strike. The domestic one was noticeably inferior in improvisation. The MMM videos alone are worth it: “I’m not a freeloader, I’m a partner.” Or stupid advertising of some pyramids with 900% profitability, “something there... investments,” funds that actively collect vouchers.

Meme of the early 90s - Lenya Golubkov

Most of it is just mumbling against the background of a static picture. The target audience was actively brainwashed (or whatever replaced it): the golden time has come when you don’t have to work - just put your money at interest. Moreover, in advertising, no one messed with the plot, picture, or sound. An average video of those times: on the screen there are falling coins, falling bills, giant blinking inscriptions in “%” and the address with the phone number of another pyramid. For the deaf, apparently the address was also read out in the voice of a Soviet radio announcer. That's all! The advertising worked and how. People stood in line to give away their banknotes. The very first commercials that went into the box en masse were Mars-Snickers-Bounty.

The still thin Semchev (the fat guy who later advertised beer) appeared on the screen in a Twix advertisement. Alcohol advertising: Rasputin winks, “I am a white eagle”, a bottle of Absolute with glitches. Powder rainbow with joyful schoolboy: Invite, Yuppie, Zuko. Coca-Cola vs Pepsi. Advertising for Imperial Bank “Until the first star...”. Advertising Dandy: “Dandy, Dandy, we all love Dandy, everyone plays Dandy.” From the advertisement it was impossible to understand what kind of dandy this was, what the cartoon elephant had to do with it and why they loved him, but gradually everyone got used to the fact that there was no need to look for meaning here, and then they decided that it was better not to look for meaning at all.

Or here’s the plot of one of the TV-Park magazine’s commercials: “Let’s place an ordinary newspaper in sulfuric acid, and TV-Park magazine in distilled water. You see, nothing happened to TV-Park magazine!” Remember?

Sects

Sad wandering along the street and handing out your printed materials to everyone.

The attack begins with a question like: “Do you know what awaits us?” or “Do you believe in God?” During the conversation they say that after a global cataclysm, when a little more than all of humanity is cut down, those who are in the know will receive another globe. Until this moment arrives, citizens who agree to join must also walk the streets of the city and spam passers-by.

The organization is a typical financial pyramid, where profits are received by the top, and dividends are paid to participants in spiritual food. Since the current is divided into many sub-currents, an interesting way of “trolling” is to retell the dogmas of one current to representatives of another.

Financial pyramids

After privatization, all sorts of financial pyramids sprang up like mushrooms after rain, offering former Soviets to make quick money. The end was naturally predictable, but not for the millions of suckers who gave their money to scammers.

Chernukha

Chernukha-style, which originated at the very end of the eighties and reached its peak in the mid-nineties. It continues to exist now.

Like porn, chernukha gained popularity thanks to the principle “because now it is possible, but before it was impossible.” A distinctive feature of chernukha: the obligatory presence of blood, perversion, violence, murder, devilry, aliens, anti-scientific dogma, prostitutes, drug addicts and prisoners.

ps:

I remember well how in those days in the West we were admired and praised for destroying our army and introducing “democratic values”. And they are so diligent in this

On August 8, 2003, one of the last surviving leaders of the Orekhovskaya group, Andrei Pylev, nicknamed Dwarf, was detained in the Spanish resort of Marbella. Among the most notorious crimes of the organized crime group is the murder of killer Alexander Solonik and businessman Otari Kvantrishvili. Who were the Orekhovskys and what happened to them - in the Kommersant-Online photo gallery.
The Orekhovskaya organized crime group was formed in the south of Moscow in the area of ​​Shipilovskaya Street in the late 1980s. It mainly included young people aged 18-25 with common sports interests.
Over the years, the organized crime group has grown into one of the largest criminal communities in Moscow. The group became famous as one of the most brutal Russian gangs of the 1990s, responsible for such high-profile cases as the murder of Otari Kvantrishvili and the assassination attempt on Boris Berezovsky in 1994, as well as the murder of the famous killer Alexander Solonik in Greece in 1997. In the second half of the 1990s, the organized crime group, most of whose leaders fell victims to internal strife, weakened. In the early 2000s, the remaining Orekhov “authorities” were put on trial and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.

In the photo: members of the organized crime group Viktor Komakhin (second from left; shot in 1995) and Igor Chernakov (third from left; was killed in 1994 the day after the murder of the leader of the organized crime group Sylvester)

Marat Polyansky is a killer, member of the Orekhovskaya and Medvedkovskaya organized crime groups. He was involved in the murder of the Kurgan organized crime group killer Alexander Solonik, as well as Otari Kvantrishvili. He was detained in February 2001 in Spain. In January 2013 he was sentenced to 23 years in prison

The times of youth are always remembered with nostalgia. The dashing nineties were a difficult time in the life of the country, but today many miss them. Perhaps this is explained by the fact that they had just gained independence then. It seemed that everything old had sunk into oblivion, and a wonderful future awaited everyone.

If you ask contemporaries what the “dashing nineties” mean, many will talk about the feeling of infinity of possibilities and strength to strive for them. This is a period of real “social teleportation”, when ordinary guys from residential areas became rich, but it was very risky: a huge number of young people died in gang wars. But the risk was justified: those who managed to survive became very respected people. It is not surprising that part of the population is still nostalgic for those times.

The phrase “dashing nineties”

Oddly enough, this concept appeared quite recently, at the beginning of the so-called “zero”. Putin's rise to power marked the end of Yeltsin's freedom and the onset of real order. Over time, the state strengthened, and there was even gradual growth. Food stamps are a thing of the past, like Soviet-era lines, and empty store shelves have been replaced by the abundance of modern supermarkets. The dashing nineties can be perceived negatively or positively, but the country needed them in order to be revived after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It's unlikely that things could have been different. After all, it was not just the state that collapsed, an entire ideology collapsed. And people cannot create, learn and accept new rules in one day.

Chronicle of significant events

Russia declared independence on June 12, 1990. A confrontation between two presidents began: one - Gorbachev - was elected by the Congress of People's Deputies, the second - Yeltsin - was elected by the people. The culmination was the beginning of the dashing nineties. Crime received complete freedom, because all prohibitions were lifted. The old rules were abolished, but the new ones had not yet been introduced or were not established in the public consciousness. The country was swept by an intellectual and sexual revolution. However, economically, Russia has sunk to the level of primitive societies. Instead of wages, many were given food, and people had to exchange some products for others, building cunning chains involving sometimes even a dozen individuals. Money has depreciated so much that most citizens have become millionaires.

On the way to independence

You can’t talk about the “dashing nineties” without mentioning the historical context. The first significant event was the “tobacco riot” in Sverdlovsk, which occurred on August 6, 1990. Hundreds of people, outraged by the lack of smoke in stores in their city, stopped the movement of trams in the center. On June 12, 1991, the people elect Boris Yeltsin as President of the Russian Federation. Criminal showdowns begin. A week later, a coup attempt occurs in the USSR. Because of this, a state of emergency committee was created in Moscow, which was supposed to govern the country during the transition period. However, it only lasted four days. In December 1991, the “center” (one of them opened a casino in Russia. Soon Mikhail Gorbachev, the first and last president of the USSR, resigned his powers “for reasons of principle.” On December 26, 1991, a declaration was adopted on the cessation of the existence of the USSR in connection with the formation of the CIS.

Independent Russia

Immediately after the New Year, on January 2, 1991, prices were liberalized in the country. The food immediately became bad. Prices soared, but wages remained the same. On October 1, 1992, the population began to be issued privatization vouchers for their housing. So far, foreign passports have been issued only with the permission of the regional leadership. In the summer, the Government House in Yekaterinburg was shelled with a grenade launcher, and in the fall, troops began an assault in Moscow. Six years later, Yeltsin resigned early, and Vladimir Putin came to power for the first time.

Order or freedom?

The dashing nineties - and the lads, glitter and poverty, elite prostitutes and sorcerers on TV, prohibition and businessmen. Only 20 years have passed, and the former Soviet republics have changed almost beyond recognition. This was not a time of social elevators, but rather of teleportations. Ordinary guys, yesterday's schoolchildren, became bandits, then bankers, and sometimes deputies. But these are the ones who survived.

Opinions

In those days, business was built completely differently than it is now. Then no one would even think of going to college to get a degree. The first step was to buy a gun. If the weapon did not pull down the back pocket of his jeans, then no one would talk to the aspiring businessman. The pistol helped in conversations with dull interlocutors. If the guy was lucky and didn't get killed early on, he could quickly buy a jeep. The opportunities to make money seemed endless. Money came and went very easily. Some went bankrupt, and the more fortunate took their accumulated wealth, or rather plunder, abroad, and then became oligarchs and engaged in completely legitimate types of business.

In government agencies the situation was much worse. Employees' salaries were constantly delayed. And this is during a period of insane inflation. They often paid in products, which then had to be exchanged in markets. It was at this time that corruption in government agencies flourished. If the guys went to the “brothers”, then the girls went to the prostitutes. They were also often killed. But some of them managed to earn “a piece of bread with caviar” for themselves and their families.

Representatives of the intellectual elite often became unemployed during this period. They were ashamed to go to the market and trade, as most people did, hoping to at least somehow earn money. Many tried to go abroad by any means. During this period, another stage of “brain drain” occurred.

Experience and habits

The dashing nineties determined the entire life of an entire generation. They formed a whole set of ideas and habits among those who were young then. And often, even now, twenty years later, they still determine their lives. These people rarely trust the system. They often view any government initiative with suspicion. Too often they have been deceived by the government. This generation has great difficulty trusting banks with their hard-earned money. They are more likely to convert them into dollars, or better yet, take them abroad. It is generally very difficult for them to save money, because during inflation they literally melted before their eyes. Those who survived the turbulent nineties are afraid to complain to various authorities. In those days, bandits were in charge of everything, so the common man had no business trying to enforce the letter of the law. Although the youth of the nineties themselves do not like to adhere to any rules or restrictions. But their advantage is that they are not afraid of any difficulties. After all, they were able to survive in the dashing nineties, which means they are hardened and will survive any crisis. But can that situation happen again?

Wild nineties: heirs

It seemed that with Putin coming to power, this period of time in Russian history ended forever. The country gradually emerged from poverty and unemployment, and the mafia was almost forgotten. However, after the global financial crisis, the notorious stability never returned. And many began to wonder whether the dashing 90s would return. But can it appear by itself, as is commonly believed? The forecast for the future of modern Russia depends on the answer to this question. Although, without going into details, two elements are needed for the emergence of crime: the need for a large-scale redistribution of property and the need to preserve democracy as a government policy. However, it is unlikely that the “freedom” of the nineties will be repeated.

They love to scare us. Frightened sheep always huddle close to the shepherd, whom the “national leader” fancies himself to be. The fear of banditry, of poverty and devastation, diligently instilled by the media, is perhaps the main core around which the vertical of power is growing. Everything is bad, everything is terrible - they are diligently escalating the situation with the help of gangster series, analytical programs with “independent” presenting authors working in structures affiliated with the Kremlin. Perhaps the main horror story, the repetition of which we are called upon to fear like fire, is the “Dashing 90s.” “Thank Putin that they are over,” they tell us every day. But let’s try to take a sober look at such a recent past.

Petr Baranov, mail.ru
2011-11-17 09:33

In general, the “dashing 90s” is a very recent phrase, appearing in the 2000s of Putin, at a time when the young leader still seemed to many compatriots to be a fighter against the oligarchs and a guardian for the cause of reviving the former power of our country. When many still saw in him a man who would restore the long-awaited order and revive Soviet power. It was at that time that this opposition between Yeltsin’s freemen and Putin’s order arose. And before that, to reflect gangster reality and devastation, the expression “like in the early 90s” was used, and only very recently in our memory, with the help of the media, it was artificially replaced by “the dashing 90s.”

Let's now look at the gangster lawlessness that was supposedly eliminated during Putin's stable years. Let's turn to the data of the Federal State Statistics Service and compare the last Soviet year 1990, the “dashing” 1995 and the “stable” 2009.

As we can see, there is less domestic murder and rape. In general, they steal and rob no less often than in the “dashing 95”, but the number of robbers and drug dealers has increased significantly. There is no need to talk about any obvious and noticeable reduction in crime. And this is according to official data, which the authorities have been monitoring very closely in recent years, so as not to “rock the boat.”

The column on drug-related crimes is especially impressive. As we can see, at the height of the “dashing 90s” there were 3 times fewer of them than in the quiet era of the vertical of power.

Indeed, visually some changes compared to the early 90s (and not all of them “dashing”) are noticeable. There seem to be fewer high-profile murders and shootings on city streets. This is not surprising, since the markets have long been divided and each legalized bandit “hoes his plot like St. Francis,” in the language of the chief overseer of the country. So, “the lads don’t shoot at each other” anymore, since the lads actually sorted everything out, all the Rams were killed, and there is peace and quiet throughout the country. Like in the village of Kushchevka. The fact that half the country lives precisely under the rule of legal and semi-legal criminal clans, as in the hitherto unremarkable Krasnodar village, is, in general, no secret to anyone.

Are the new capitalists now dividing property? Maybe less often, but they share. And the division is sometimes no less bloody than during the period of privatization. But now large owners live not in the apartments next to us, but in mansions on Rublyovki, and therefore the division takes place much less noticeably. In 1991, a normal Soviet person, suddenly faced with the lads who had emerged from all the cracks, was shocked, scared, and confused. The contrast between the past “totalitarian” life and the morals of “democratic” Russia was forever etched with horror in his memory. The memory of that shock is diligently used by the media to propagate the myth of a dashing decade.

Now let’s remember another scarecrow from the dashing 90s, about the “seven bankers” and the terrible oligarchs who plundered the country and who were allegedly taken over by Putin. He tidied up, but he only tidied up the most odious and stupid of them (stupid because money loves silence, and not flickering on TV screens), and these tidied up can be counted on the fingers of one hand. According to the notorious Forbes magazine, in the “dashing” year of 1999 there were no dollar billionaires in Russia. In 2010 there were 62 of them. Where did the money come from, earned honestly? No one will believe this except the oligarchs themselves and, perhaps, members of their families. So what happens that in the dashing Yeltsin 90s the country was not plundered so actively? It turns out that yes. It’s just that now part of the population receives a small percentage in the form of crumbs falling out when breaking the oil pie, and therefore “poverty is receding” indeed. But only in big cities and only for the young and healthy.

In the “dashing 90s,” they will explain to us from the television screen, the country was on the verge of collapse, and only Putin’s coming to power saved it and stopped the parade of sovereignties. Here it is necessary to remember that we are again talking about the first years after the collapse of the USSR, and not about all the “dashing 90s”. By the time Putin appeared, the parade of sovereignties had already ended, and there was only one unrecognized Ichkeria. But during the years of VVP’s rule, the tumor of radical Wahhabism (a kind of Islamic Trotskyism) spread not only throughout the Caucasus, but also took root in Muslim Tatarstan and Bashkiria and is beginning to receive its first adherents among Russian youth. Let us add to this that an attempt to feed the Caucasus with money only leads to an increase in banditry in the region, and among Russians - to a wave of discontent and indignation at the unfair distribution of public funds. The slogan “stop feeding the Caucasus” is gaining more and more popularity, simultaneously with the continuous growth of nationalism in the Caucasus and with the increasingly frequent interethnic conflicts in the Russian regions, the instigators of which are “guests” who have become disconnected from both their own and Russian culture and have sometimes degraded to the cave level. And this, alas, is just the beginning.

Sooner or later, free petrodollars will run out. Everything tends to end sooner or later, as the wise King Solomon noted. So you shouldn’t believe some of his fellow tribesmen who have proclaimed themselves experts in economics and claim (in all seriousness!) that the current situation will last forever. Sooner or later everything passes. This too shall pass. And it is obvious that with the end of the oil freebie, which the ever-blue Yeltsin could not even dream of, the dashing 90s will seem like heaven on earth. And this doesn’t even take into account what is happening under Putin with the army, education, medicine, courts, prosecutors’ offices and the unprecedented level of corruption.

Were there any “dashing 90s”? Of course there were. The years 91, 92, 93 will forever be remembered for famine, monstrous inflation, an unprecedented decline in morality, the destruction of spiritual ideals, and rampant crime. In a word, all the “charms” of the collapse of a power, multiplied by incompetent rule and reforms carried out by the godfather of all today’s government economists, Yegor Gaidar. But after the first nineties, stagnation began, a continuation of which was the Putin years, in which the country slept through the possibility of unprecedented growth, possible thanks to unprecedented oil prices.

So what is Putin’s merit in comparison with the “dashing 90s”? It is only that the media are now completely controlled and bring to the masses the myth of the “dashing 90s”, and nothing else.