Through an analysis of two important visual projects of the late 1990s—Manskii’s Chronicles and Dzhanik Faiziev and Leonid Parfenov’s forty-three-episode series  Lately (1997–2004)—I intend to show how these filmmakers decompose the visual legacy of monolithic and totalizing late socialism. In these documentaries, the last three decades of the USSR emerge as a “tangible time”, to use Shklovskii’s term. Each project achieves a certain degree of temporal and spatial granularity of the period by breaking late Soviet history into material units of meaningful analytic and everyday experience. Autonomous and usually disconnected, these kino-things of sorts bring with them no coherent story. In fact, through their concreteness, they decontextualize identities and destabilize dominant narratives of socialism while simultaneously producing a grounding effect of mnemonic and historical palpability.