NOTES ON LATE SOVIET ART. 1960–1985

If the Late stage in Soviet art is not a terra incognita, in any case it remains misunderstood in art history. Several questions have to be posed in view of future interpretation. Firstly, how to differentiate contents and messages of last decades if Soviet art history from the much better studied and described art development in Western Europe and North America. Secondly, maybe time has come to correct the simplistic and misleading construction “official versus non-official” in Soviet art. This conception appeared as a statement of the real and factual split in artistic life around 1960 but then it evolved to a kind of sacred cow of criticism. Much more productive would be the differentiation of independent artists inside official institutions, on the one hand, and radical non-conformists, on the other. The most fundamental problem is how to understand the situation of mess and labyrinth both in official policy and artistic creation in different artistic movements. My point is that paradoxes and contradictions in artistic content go back to the historically inevitable situation of “burnt out soil” in result of the permanent inner suppression and ensuing sociopychological devastation clearly visible in painting, literature and thinking in Soviet Union before its breakdown in 1991.