Following the collapse of the Soviet regime, Russia seemed poised to develop a robust public sphere. This unprecedented moment coincided with the global digital revolution, in particular the advent of the Internet — a resource whose immediate mobilization by wealthy political influencers epitomized the fragility of Russia’s newly liberated media commons. This project, funded by a NEH Collaborative Research Grant, investigates the encounter of the mainstream with the fringe, of ideologues and idealists, of dazzling creativity and rank commercialism in post-Soviet Russophone print, television, Web 1.0, and radio media. By preserving, interrogating, and (re-)interpreting key artifacts from the “long 1990s,” which began with Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost’ in 1986 and ended with the election of Vladimir Putin in 2000, our curated collection sheds light on a remarkable, if short-lived, period in recent Russian history.