The Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, launched perestroika (restructuring) in 1986. By the summer of 1988, when I took these pictures on my first trip to Moscow, cooperative cafes were a hit and a welcome alternative to state run restaurants – the only choice for eating out until a year before. Opposition activists in the Democratic Union challenged one-party Communist rule by calling for a multi-party system. Click on a picture for a slide show with captions or visit pages for Chechnya, Dagestan and Siberia.