This chapter and the selection of media artifacts connected to it focus on three overlapping sets of issues. These are the emergence of sensationalist reporting and, more generally, of tabloids [zheltaya pressa] in Russia during perestroika and the 1990s; gory social-breakdown-porn [chernukha]—the fascination with violence, sex, and the darker, hidden sides of Soviet/Russian society that went hand-in-hand with glasnost; and the blurring of the boundaries between underground and mainstream culture that occurred during this period. The essay shows that chernukha often degenerated into sheer surrealism, while a taste for the overtly violent, sexual, politically incorrect, and absurd became the source of a specific form of national identity. Drawing on Agamben, Foucault, and Arendt, the author argues that this surreal physicality reflects a “biopolitical essence” of the post-Soviet transition defining the exercise of power as total control over bare life and a prolonged “state of exception.” A biopolitical framing further reveals the continuity between Yeltsin’s “shock therapy,” which immiserated an emergent middle class and starved an already ailing Russian countryside, and Putin’s “neoliberal authoritarianism.”