Abstract
Post-Soviet Graffiti: Free Speech in Authoritarian States is a cross-regional study of street art in post-Soviet and post-communist Europe. With this book, Alexis M. Lerner offers social scientists insights into the importance of graffiti for the expression of marginalised and oppressed voices. In particular, the study will appeal to sociologists interested in visual culture, subcultures, and politics. Perhaps most importantly, the book makes a significant contribution to street art research, a field that has largely focused on the West and paid surprisingly little attention to contemporary political graffiti.
Under the label graffiti, Lerner includes a wide spectrum of expressions, from tagging pen names in the New York subway graffiti tradition to street art made with posters, stencils, and stickers. However, the primary focus is on street art that conveys explicit moral and political opinions rather than writing aimed at achieving individual fame.
One of the strengths of the book is the richness of the photographic material and the broad geographic area it covers, with photographs from eleven countries reproduced in the volume. In the study, Lerner includes the fifteen states that constituted the Soviet Union, together with a few non-Soviet post-communist states. To compare the relationship between regime type and graffiti messages, she positions the studied states on a scale from fully liberal (e.g., the Baltic States) to fully authoritarian (e.g., Russia, Turkmenistan, and Belarus). In between, she places hybrid states, where democratic institutions are employed to achieve authoritarian aims (e.g., Armenia, Ukraine, Hungary, and Poland).
The book is structured around ten chapters. In the first, Lerner describes the limitations of free speech in the post-Soviet region and discusses how graffiti complements other ways of expressing discontent when the free press is constrained. In contrast to street protests and the Internet, she argues that graffiti takes on a unique role because it offers anonymity and remains accessible to all citizens. The central argument is that graffiti and street art can function as tools for circumventing censorship and expressing political beliefs.
Building on interviews with a smaller number of well-known Russian artists, the second chapter describes the background and evolution of graffiti in the region. Lerner explains how youth in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet states were inspired by the limited media representations of Hip-Hop culture available during the 1980s.
The third chapter offers an intriguing analysis of how, during the early years of capitalism, the work of Russian graffiti writers was co-opted by international corporations through legal graffiti festivals. Lerner concludes that while this development may have benefited individual artists, it also risked stripping graffiti of its subversive potential.
In the fourth chapter, we are introduced to some of the key artists in Russia and learn how graffiti became increasingly political during the first decade of the 2000s. The chapter also highlights the close relationship between graffiti and other political expressions, such as public performances.
The fifth chapter examines how graffiti interacts with the urban environment by analysing the locations graffiti writers choose for their work. In chapter six, drawing on semiotics, Lerner analyses how the symbolic messages of political post-Soviet graffiti are employed for political expression and action. She demonstrates substantial knowledge of references made to historical and contemporary political figures in the region. Furthering this, chapter seven discusses how graffiti can construct a story about a place, the people who live there, and the issues that matter to them.
The final three chapters engage in a comparative analysis of themes across the region. Lerner discusses how graffiti critiques political leaders, parties, and policies differently depending on regime type. In more authoritarian states, graffiti more often targets national leaders and state institutions, while in more democratic settings it frequently addresses local corruption, gentrification, capitalism, and anti-American sentiments. She also examines how political street art in Russia declined after the 2012 election and how authoritarian governments increasingly appropriated graffiti and street art for pro-regime narratives.
The later chapters further address themes such as environmental activism, anti-nuclear protests, indigenous rights, LGBTQIA+ issues, women's rights, hate speech, and racism. Particularly interesting is the discussion of how graffiti can also reproduce authoritarian and exclusionary values rather than challenge them. In particular, Lerner examines anti-Semitic graffiti and analyses how pro-Kremlin messages increasingly occupied urban space previously used for oppositional expression. The discussion of selective graffiti removal and state control over urban visual culture adds important complexity to the book's central argument.
This and several other observations complicate the book's main claim that graffiti is effective in circumventing censorship. For example, Lerner observes that in Minsk, political graffiti is mainly found in dark alleys and abandoned buildings because painting in heavily policed central areas carries a significant risk of imprisonment.
On the one hand, such examples are one of the book's strenghts, since they qualify a somewhat simplified hypothesis of effectiveness. On the other hand, the comparative analysis of geography and space could have been developed more systematically and in greater depth to clarify under which conditions graffiti can be considered effective and what “effective” actually means.
Some of these issues might have been avoided through a more substantial engagement with the extensive literature on graffiti and street art, which offers several conceptualisations and distinctions. Such a dialogue could have strengthened the theoretical framework and clarified the specific features of post-Soviet graffiti. Examples of previous research relevant to Lerner's study include Bengtsen's (2014) analysis of the development from small-scale illegal street art to large-scale legal murals; Ferrell and Weide's (2010) study of the places where graffiti writers choose to engage with the urban environment; and Kimvall's (2014) analysis of the discourse and history of graffiti on the Berlin Wall and its political role during the Cold War. In addition, positioning the findings in relation to research on Soviet political public art in a longer perspective would have strengthened the book's contribution to political science.
Furthermore, the methodological section is brief, and greater transparency regarding the amount and origin of the material would have produced a more convincing argument. Most empirical examples are drawn from Russia and European non-post-Soviet states, and it remains unclear whether Lerner conducted fieldwork in the southeastern post-Soviet region.
With this said, the book contributes important knowledge and provides a valuable foundation for future studies of when, where, and how graffiti can function as an effective political tool.
