Urban legends from the Soviet Union. There's plenty of horror on display, as one would expect from the genre: poisons, killings, gross stuff.
There are some fine Cold War/Soviet culture riffs in the lot:
Foreigners sold black marketeers jeans infected by syphilis. The last ones sold them to unwitting fellow citizens. Usually on the back seam there was a package with flea (lice) scaring poor people at first jeans wash.
Radar vehicles driving about the streets and checking videocassette recorders concerning prohibited cassettes [Radar! -ed.]
Some grand Gothic, too:
Allegedly there existed huge underground plants where some cool and highly secret equipment was produced. There related the legends about tanks moving along the ocean bottom and underwater warehouses of atomic bombs in the Atlantic.
Russian humor:
Metro. Doors are about to close. A civilized person - in a tie, indispensable detail - wants to get in, the doors are closing and his head is already in the subway car and stuck in the doors and the rest of the body is still on the platform. He looks sadly at those who are in and says in the fallen silence - “That’s great! F*** underground!”
And that classic Russian fatalism:
A boy was playing with scissors and put out his own eyes. While terrified mom was running about the flat a girl sank in a bath. When mom saw it she jumped out of the window from the 10th floor. Dad was in no minute at home, saw a dead mom’s body on the asphalt, a blind boy and a dead girl, shot the boy from a gun and shot himself too. Everybody died.
All quotations from the original, weirdly translated into English.
Comments