18 Most Iconic Press Photos From 90s That Wrote Our Present

Fall Of KGB Statue, 1991

In August 1991, hardliners in the Communist Party demanded the removal of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who wanted to sign a treaty that would lead to the disintegration of the Soviet Union. They did this by placing him under house arrest and reinstating censorship. However, they were met by mass civil resistance–particularly in Moscow. Even with the aid of the KGB, the feared secret police, hardliners couldn’t win support and their coup toppled in three days.

Two AP photographers, Olga Shalygin and Alexander Zemlianichenko, snapped this iconic image of Moscow civilians destroying the large, reviled statue of feared KGB founder, Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky. It won the Pulitzer Prize for AP the next year and became of symbol of the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union and one of the lasting and iconic images of the 1990s.