Running for nearly 30 years between 1964 and 1993, Krugozor was a monthly magazine focusing on ‘documentary, history, classical and contemporary art, literature and music (including music from western countries)’. Immensely popular with the Soviet youth, each issue would contain up to six 33rpm, double-sided flexi discs bound into the 7″-sized magazine. A spindle hole punched through the centre and ring-bound pages enabled the consumer to fold the pages underneath each flexi and place the whole magazine on the turntable so that the discs could be played.

A recent trip to Moscow yielded many of these, bought mainly for the covers as my Russian isn’t so great but finding them in good condition after all these years isn’t so easy. The bindings are brittle and easily break, the paper is thin and tears and some of the discs are sometimes neatly cut out. There’s an amazing archive of the covers, ordered by year online here, it looks like there should be pdf scans of the issues too but it’s all in Russian and hard to decipher.