Russian Style: Steel and Messianic-Apocalyptic Spectacle

In May 2024, the exhibition Russian Style. Steel was held at the Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy (VDNKh) in Moscow, as part of the Exhibition Forum Russia. Expo, at the stand of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic.Footnote ³ The works, “dedicated to combat operations in the area of the special military operation,” were executed on plates from standard army bulletproof vests. Each plate, uniform in size at approximately 310 × 265 mm (12.2 × 10.4 in), features a slightly curved, asymmetrical octagonal shape. Painted in various styles and arranged in a row on the wall, the plates visually evoke Orthodox icons.Footnote ⁴

Many works in the project fuse religious symbolism with images of violence. For example, Alexey Belyaev-Gintovt’s (b. 1965) piece “With God!” (2023) is a golden panel marked by two red, indexical handprints, alluding simultaneously to the shroud and to bloodstains. Konstantin Khudyakov’s “Bethlehem/Stigmata” (2024) depicts a close-up of a nail cap inscribed “Bethlehem,” driven into flesh and surrounded by blood. The accompanying text asserts: “Now our Russian soldiers are defending Christian values.”Footnote ⁵ Khudyakov (b. 1945) is a full member of the Russian Academy of Arts and president of the Creative Union of Artists of Russia, which since 1974 has included many nonconformist artists and now serves as an official partner of the project Russian Style. Other works focus on war or violence. For example, “333! For Dasha!” (2022) by the self-taught “artist-designer” DaZbastaDraw is a digital illustration depicting a Russian soldier raising his hands to the sky in a red-golden flash of light as he gives the command “333!” for a salvo of artillery fire in retaliation for the death of war correspondent Darya Dugina.Footnote ⁶ The work of Petr Skliar (b. 1986), a journalist by training, consists of a matte black panel featuring a silver rendering of a knife, a severed ear, a flower, and an inscription on a twisted ribbon: “We ourselves are wolves against evil people.”Footnote ⁷ This phrase is spoken by the protagonist of Vasily Shukshin in the iconic Soviet film The Red Snowball Tree (1974). The work is part of Skliar’s Slovografika project (“word-graphics”), a series of creative illustrations of proverbs, sayings, aphorisms, catchphrases, and famous quotations.Footnote ⁸ The album Slovografika ZOV includes portraits of combatants in the war against Ukraine, paired with phrases such as “A hero is born for himself and dies for the people.”Footnote ⁹ Another artist, Dmitry Sever (“Dmitry North”), combines Vyaz—ancient decorative Cyrillic lettering—with elements of street art to create prints for clothing and murals, such as the mural commemorating “the heroes of Donbas” in occupied Melitopol in 2023.Footnote ¹⁰

The project Russian Style. Steel is a mobile exhibition series, first presented in February 2024 in Tatarstan. By March 2026, it had traveled to at least eleven cities across Russia.Footnote ¹¹ However, these “icons on armor” represent only a part of a much broader network of initiatives and artists engaged in pro-war and nationalist activities from diverse backgrounds. The project’s initiators aspire to transform art, bridging tradition with various modern influences, as its curator Svetlana Cheprova (b. 1989) articulated.Footnote ¹² “Project ideologist” Anton Belikov (b. 1978) studied philosophy and spent eleven years “in the clothing business” before he underwent an existential crisis and withdrew to the Sinai Desert, where he wrote a dissertation on “The Aesthetic Meaning of the Canon in Byzantine Art.”Footnote ¹³ He began painting and enrolled in the art faculty at Saint Tikhon’s Orthodox University, but left after two years, disillusioned by the “cruelty and hypocrisy masquerading as piety.”Footnote ¹⁴ Subsequently, he studied monumental painting at Moscow’s Surikov State Academic Institute of Fine Arts and taught a theoretical course. In 2016, Belikov organized a pogrom at the Sakharov Center during an exhibition by Ukrainian photographers.Footnote ¹⁵ He was subsequently dismissed from the Surikov Institute and traveled to occupied Donbas, where he created a passion cycle street-art piece in a half-ruined school. In 2017, together with his wife and a colleague, Belikov founded the project “After Icon,” focused on religious street art.Footnote ¹⁶ They executed a range of street art interventions and organized an exhibition at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior in January 2019, which sparked conflict with the Orthodox Church due to his non-canonical treatment of Orthodox art.Footnote ¹⁷

In 2020, Belikov asserted: “Today I see a catastrophe for the Russian population in the CIS … Russia’s turn is inevitable … We need to start by taking back our culture.”Footnote ¹⁸ Following the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Belikov launched the project Russian Style, developing and promoting “true” Russian art and culture across various fields and comprising a network of initiatives.Footnote ¹⁹ Together with the “Good Russian People” club, they organized charity exhibitions, such as Russian Style: Clear Sky in August 2023 for the sake of war ammunition. At that time, Belikov was a contract soldier for several months. The death of Darya Dugina, the daughter of Russian far-right philosopher Alexander Dugin and pro-war publicist who was blown up in her car in August 2022, and the attack of Ukrainian drones on the Kremlin in May 2023 influenced him.Footnote ²⁰ In the interview made in the war zone, Belikov reasoned that after the exit from the Soviet Union “we haven’t arrived in Russia yet … the Special Military Operation is our last hope to reach Russia. The Russian people are being created here … This is, after all, a cultural process.”Footnote ²¹

In January 2025, two exhibitions made by Russian Style and curated by Belikov and Cheprova opened in Moscow. One of them, Russian Imperative at the Belyaevo Gallery—previously the famous place of Soviet conceptualism—showed mostly paintings, in collaboration with artists’ unions and The Grekov Studio of War Artists. Another exhibition, It’s Not at All Like in Your Rose-Colored Glasses, consisted of digital art exhibited in lightboxes. As Belikov explained, the exhibition is about “artifacts of military consciousness, war-time subculture. Here, Russian poetry, football fan symbols, anime stylizations, military mysticism, religious images, comics, proverbs and much more are mixed.”Footnote ²² On the one art piece, Pushkin. “Don’t miss!” (2022), the famous Russian poet killed in a duel, Aleksandr Pushkin, aims a pistol at the viewer.Footnote ²³

In April 2025, the project Russian Style opened the exhibition, And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, curated by Belikov and Cheprova. It has been opened in the media center of Zaryadye Park next to the Kremlin, part of the Moscow Art Prize nominees show. The Contemporary Arts Development Fund (CADF) operates the Prize, which since 2017 aims to support art that is contemporary in appearance but loyal to the authorities.Footnote ²⁴ The exhibition appeared in Zaryadye by personal invitation of Ivan Demidov, a Kremlin-connected cultural activist, the Chairman of the Presidium in CADF and the director of Zaryadye. The show, which borrows its title from Apocalypse, connects all previous projects of Russian Style. One of the new pieces is installation Generation, where the busts of Alexander Dugin and his daughter Darya stand in front of each other in a semi-circle apsid-like space with Darya’s words and the Order of Courage in a separate vitrine in between.Footnote ²⁵

This exhibition is the largest and most ambitious undertaking of Russian Style, of Belikov personally and, likely, of contemporary Russian pro-war art more broadly. In November 2025, Belikov and Cheprova received a ₽2 million award for it after placing second in the Moscow Art Prize competition, administered by the Moscow city government.Footnote ²⁶ It brought together a diverse array of authors, media, and institutions to create a pro-war, pro-Russian spectacle just steps from the Kremlin. The project’s visibility, together with its syncretic mix of styles, artists, and heterogeneous strategies, makes it a particularly revealing case for analysis.

Russian Style Project as the Flagship of Ruscism/Russism

The Russian Style projects exhibit several defining characteristics. First, they blend diverse forms of art, artists, and institutions: established aged professionals such as Khudyakov collaborate alongside young artists and amateurs like Skliar; realist academic painting is juxtaposed with internet memes; post-Soviet artists’ unions intersect with activist networks and officially sponsored art prizes. Second, many contributors are active in the media, maintaining popular Telegram channels and producing merchandise, such as art prints. Third, the project operates as an open platform to which anyone can apply. Consequently, the roster of works and artists is continually changing and expanding, although select highlights persist across all editions. An open, evolving community—ranging from close associates and like-minded peers to casual collaborators—forms the backbone of these initiatives. While they leverage opportunities provided by various institutions, including state-supported ones, at their core, these projects function as self-organized, rhizomatic networks. Fourth, Russian Style is deeply ideological, positioned at the intersection of art, cultural policy, and civil activism. Its leaders view art and culture as instruments for shaping minds and society according to their convictions. Finally, many participants express protest, resentment, and nonconformist energy directed at “liberal elites,” Ukrainians, the west, migrants, and—somewhat paradoxically—official bodies such as the church or academic art institutions. In line with this, the project draws upon strategies from earlier protest movements in Russian art and culture, including the tradition of “going to the people” (narodniki), mobile democratic exhibitions (peredvizhniki), and subcultural transgression.

Despite all this syncretism, the project achieves a somewhat unified statement. In general, it is rightly seen as popular dissent formulated through art by ultra-conservative, militant, imperialist, Russian-identitarian, and nationalist parts of society, and can be considered a “flagship” representative of R. As already mentioned, the genealogy of this double word goes back to the second half of the nineteenth century, when Aleksandr Herzen wrote: “Slavanism, or Russianism, not as a theory, not as a doctrine, but as a wounded national feeling, as an obscure memory and a true instinct, as antagonism to an exclusively foreign influence, had existed ever since Peter I cut off the first Russian beard.”Footnote ²⁷ In contrast, the conservative philosopher Konstantin Leontʹev used the words Velikorussism or Russism in the 1880s as a positive designation for the new ideology that would emerge after the Russian conquest of Constantinople (Istanbul). Already in the 1990s, R reentered public discussions through Chechen independence leaders and Russian nationalists.Footnote ²⁸ Finally, after 2022 the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament) of Ukraine officially recognized R as Russia’s state ideology.Footnote ²⁹

I leave further discussion about R itself to socio-political science. In 2026, it is still not an academic term. For this essay, it is important that R is closely related to culture and art. Mark Lipovetsky considers it as “the cultural mainstream of Putinist Russia.”Footnote ³⁰ In understanding R, “Moscow’s continuing weaponization of culture and language” is of central importance.Footnote ³¹ Building on writer Viktor Erofeev’s mid-1990s diagnosis of a Russian “crisis of masculinity” as a national lack of style—and his prediction of a new generation intoxicated, even obsessed, with style—Julie A. Cassiday argues that “Putinism was more style than ideology between 2000 and 2020.”Footnote ³² In Russian Style, identitarian resentment and an obsession with style are inscribed in the project’s very title, elevating R to a new level in wartime, which serves as its accelerant.

R is realized through dispersed and heterogeneous channels. First, there is pressure from below by nationalist-imperialist layers of society fueled by resentment. This includes, for example, the “Z-ombie uprising” of old Soviet cultural institutions, such as the artists’ unions. Many members of these institutions were deeply dissatisfied with the rise of liberal and “pro-Western” contemporary art and culture in big cities during the post-Soviet era.Footnote ³³ At the same time, to garner internal support for an increasingly authoritarian regime, Russian officials have nurtured R in various forms since at least 2014. Initially, it functioned as an ideology of “cultural sovereignty” to provide an authoritarian consensus.Footnote ³⁴ After 2022, it escalated to the level of “Z” art and culture, becoming a direct tool of war and imperial aggression. “Liberal-etatist” initiatives like CADF were recently supplemented by purges in the cultural sphere, struggles against “pro-Western” art, and the “cultural operation Z,” which was carried out through activist “Z”-channels on Telegram, often, according to investigative journalists, in coordination with state secret services.Footnote ³⁵

R can be viewed as a process of combining syncretic elements into a vague yet united cultural and ideological assemblage. As such it is also political and cultural technology; the same process we observe in the Russian Style project. It combines very syncretic artistic elements on the ground of their correspondence to the R mindset. In addition to icons, it is art from post-Soviet artists’ unions, non-conformist late Soviet art, and subcultural art of the 1980–90s. Each of those strands, which formed contemporary art in Russia, has its own tradition of nationalist, identitarian, and imperialist art. What is even more important is how their perception was reconfigured later. Let us consider each through concrete cases: Oskar Rabin, Nikolai Andronov, and Alexei Belyaev-Gintovt: leading figures of nonconformist art, late Soviet official art, and Neo-Eurasianist art, respectively. The purpose is to understand the genealogy of R in art as well as the syncretism of Russian Style.

Oscar Rabin: From Marginal Outskirts to Magistral National Culture

We can understand R as cultural imagination organized around the idea of a specific geographical entity, namely Russia. As such, it is a spatially identitarian, or geoculturally specific imagination. The first generation of unofficial Russian contemporary artists, the so-called “non-conformists” of the 1950s–70s, often sought to develop religious, mystical, and geoculturally specific art in opposition to the more universalist official art. Later, already in post-Soviet Russia, their art was reintegrated from the marginal outskirts to the core of national culture.

For example, Oscar Rabin (1928–2018) painted the poor Moscow suburb of Lianozovo from the 1950s to 70s, often repeating expressive images of daisies, barracks, violins, icons, vodka, newspapers, and cemeteries—his main symbols.Footnote ³⁶ In 1960, Soviet propaganda labeled his circle “Priests of the Garbage Dump Number 8,” whose “‘works’ evoke genuine physical disgust; their very subject matter is a sign of his spiritual wretchedness.”Footnote ³⁷ The pamphlet took its title from Rabin’s “Garbage Dump № 8,” depicting fish scraps, a bottle of vodka, and a box of “New Cheese. Processed”—a cheap snack—scattered around a large bin that dominates the picture (see Figure 1). The palette is black, grey, and brown, with white patches of spring snow and a building labeled “Shop № 3” on the horizon, reinforcing the bleakness of the city outskirts: a place for scum of all kinds. His work, not devoid of a certain poetry, was widely seen as dark and depressing. In the 2010s, historians of non-conformist art described it as “the image of contemporary hell and absolute evil … an honest description of the dark side of highly advertised socialism.”Footnote ³⁸

Figure 1.

Oscar Rabin, Garbage Dump № 8, 1958. Oil on canvas, 70 × 80 cm. © Tsukanov Family Foundation.

By that time, Rabin was regarded as a prominent part of the history of contemporary art in Russia. This was confirmed by status shows such as his 2008 exhibition at the Tretʹiakov Gallery. His activity was considered an important factor in the invention of new regimes of publicity in the USSR. In particular, the Bulldozer Exhibition (1974) that he organized was historicized as “one of the first [events] to meaningfully object to the system, and from this event, the entire split into official and unofficial [art] emerged.”Footnote ³⁹ However, his new status also brought more confident generalizations about his art as a depiction of Russia itself: “Rabin put in the foreground of his paintings the most important objects of Russian life.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Rabin’s works were analyzed as prominent examples of specific “Russian painting,” characterized by the specific organization of space, following the rules of the iconic reverse perspective.Footnote ⁴¹ These statements about the Russianness of Rabin’s art were made in 2012 and 2015 by the leading art historians and curators of contemporary art, who simultaneously opposed the rise of authoritarianism in Russia and occupied top institutional positions during the short “golden age” of institutional contemporary art in Russia.Footnote ⁴²

Such an appropriation of Rabin’s art to the level of national symbols was also realized by Rabin himself. Forced to emigrate in 1978, he did not afterwards realize himself in the world of big international art institutions. In his art, Rabin remained closely linked to Lianozovo poetics, increasingly rethinking it as “Jewish-Russian,” “Soviet-Russian,” or simply “Russian” in his numerous interviews: “However, I still have Russian moods, and the topics are 80 percent Russian.”Footnote ⁴³ “Moscow, like all of Russia, is somewhere in my heart, in my soul … And I attribute these feelings to patriotism.”Footnote ⁴⁴ This personal connection was supported by the fact that the core of Rabin’s clientele in this period consisted of post-Soviet oligarchs, who bought his works for their personal collections and for institutions of Russian contemporary art. In one of his last photos, the 90-year-old artist stands in front of his paintings—a dramatic rural landscape with an Easter egg, Russian rubles and euros placed near each other, and a passport cover with the inscription “Motherland N 1.” In this 2018 interview, he calls for a “return to something traditional” and expresses his resentment towards contemporary “machinist democratic” western art: “The end of this will come … Now, instead of the pressure of power, there is the huge pressure of contemporary art. It is not a dictatorship, but it has crossed this limit.”Footnote ⁴⁵

To be clear, Rabin was far from promoting Russian or any other nationalism. He critically reflected on the social tendencies in Russia, introducing new elements and symbols in his late paintings. For example, the 1996 work Three Bogatyrs (Tatars again …) reworks the iconic painting Heroes (Bogatyri) (1881–98) by Viktor Vasnetsov (1848–1926). The original picture depicts three epic heroes of Kyivan Rusʹ: legendary men of power who came from the northeastern margins, now around Moscow, to serve the Kyiv prince. Vasnetsov depicted them on guard: “They notice in the field if there is an enemy somewhere, whether someone is being offended somewhere?”Footnote ⁴⁶ Rabin repainted Vasnetsov’s picture in his own style and with a slightly different composition, collaging it with clippings from contemporary Russian newspapers with such titles as “Tatars again …,” “Jews,” “Abortions,” and “Aspirin doesn’t work anymore.” Altogether, it can be read as an anxious diagnosis of Russian society: that the xenophobic, paternalistic, and militant parts of its identity are again on the rise.

Rabin’s art did not change much, but its interpretations in the post-Soviet period ended up in vast generalizations about its “Russianness.” Both art experts and the artist himself made these syntheses, including statements like: “I paint my portrait against the backdrop of the country. This painting is the only decent thing I can do in life.”Footnote ⁴⁷ On the one hand, it appears the inherent logic of Rabin’s art is to organize one’s own life as much “outside” all official forms as possible, both Soviet and western, thereby providing an autonomy of aesthetic and cultural self-awareness. Following this, art critic and curator Sergei Kuskov proposed considering Soviet non-conformist art, including the Lianozovo circle, as “a manifestation of a truly special ‘Russian way’”Footnote ⁴⁸ and to refer to it as a traditionalist or conservative vanguard.Footnote ⁴⁹ On the other hand, the turn upside down from marginal outskirts to the main national road occurred almost unnoticed, “organically,” in parallel to the rise of Putin’s regime. In the 1950s–60s, “the road to Lianozovo was thus connected with social transgression.”Footnote ⁵⁰ How did it become the representation of the “eternal essence” of Russia in the post-Soviet period?

Probably one of the answers can be found in the logic of the “upside-down world,” which researchers find in Rabin, following Mikhail Bakhtin’s writings on carnival culture. Rabin often turned objects upside down in his paintings, but “only what was especially important to him,” namely self-portraits, icons, passports, and matryoshkas.Footnote ⁵¹ Combining high and low, sacred and profane (for example vodka and an icon), “Rabin penetrates not only into the taboo space of Soviet ideology but also into the sacred zones of Christian culture.”Footnote ⁵² In this way, the transition from the marginal garbage on the outskirts to the sacral center appears not only possible but also highly relevant, as in Fedor Dostoevskii’s world, where the wretched prostitutes are closest to saints.

It can also be described as the double logic of sacralization, when those who drive the cult of leadership and those who oppose it, use a similar lexicon of the sacred, whether arguing for sacralization or claiming blasphemy.Footnote ⁵³ For example, during the 2011–12 election cycle, Putin’s radical supporters from the National Committee+60 and the oppositional performances of Pussy Riot in a church used the same symbolism—prayers for and against Putin. However, this desacralization is always in question, as in the Orthodox tradition, the maximally desacralized subject—yurodivy—is the most “truly” sacred.Footnote ⁵⁴ And if Rabin turned out to be “the Solzhenitsyn of painting,” then Lianozovo was his “GULAG”—other pars pro toto synthetic geographical image of Russia.Footnote ⁵⁵

Nikolai Andronov: Between the Voice of Tradition and “Frightening Fundamentalist Utopia”

This rise of nationalism was even more articulated in official art, where it was also connected with protest energy. During the phase of socialist realism decanonization (1953–early 1970s), local regional identities, including Russian identity, were seen as victims of Soviet modernization.Footnote ⁵⁶ At the same time, the experimental young segment of official art, the so-called “severe style” and later the “left-wing MOSKh,” sought to revive certain strands of art from the 1920s–30s that had been suppressed during Stalin’s rule.Footnote ⁵⁷

One of them, Nikolai Andronov (1929–98), after the famous scandal with Nikita Khrushchev at the exhibition in Moscow Manege in 1962, was expelled from the artists’ union “for formalism.”Footnote ⁵⁸ After this, Andronov traveled extensively in the periphery of central Russia, especially in the Vologda region. Near the former monastery in Ferapontovo, he discovered his “spiritual motherland,” as well as the “national tragedy” of the Russian peasantry and the dramatism of nature. This overlapped with his personal resentment: “his own troubles, sorrows and experiences dissolved in the scale of the ruined village’s drama.”Footnote ⁵⁹ In his paintings, Andronov fused the personal, national, and natural, imbuing them with tragic sensibility. Andronov’s professional status was restored in 1966. Later he headed the section of monumental painting in the Moscow artists’ union and received the USSR State Prize. However, his art increasingly reflected neotraditionalist and primordialist positions, developed as a form of resilience during his four-year “internal emigration.”

In Ferapontovo, Andronov developed his artistic method by drawing on ancient Orthodox frescoes, avant-garde neo-primitivism like Mikhail Larionov’s art, and close engagement with the local landscape. He made his own paints from local stones, grinding them into colored powders using techniques of ancient icon painters and alchemists, “in search of the natural basis of life”—his philosophical stone.Footnote ⁶⁰ Andronov often placed the canvas on the floor, rotating and smearing paint, “allowing the material to speak for itself.” The landscape depicted itself “through” the artist, its “voice” merging with his via “the will of the material” made from the landscape itself: “the artist became the implementer of this will, obedient to reality itself.”Footnote ⁶¹ As a result, “Space begins to play a major role. The artist does not strive to convey this space illusorily but spiritualizes it. Space now helps to reveal the secret life of things.”Footnote ⁶²

This analogical, hermetic thinking appears on many levels, including Andronov’s numerous self-portraits. For him, the self-portrait was central to exploring the inner essence of art: reflecting “the visible life of different faces of one soul.”Footnote ⁶³ He depicted himself in various ways but always remained recognizable, as if training to grasp a higher inner essence through changing realities. Andronov furthered this exploration by adopting different “masks” or self-personalities in a theatrical manner. Around 1967, Andronov made at least two self-portraits in coffins. Created during his reinstatement in the artists’ union, these works apparently reflect the existential crisis he had faced. In one, the artist’s waist-up image is presented vertically, as in traditional portraits, suggesting either the coffin stands upright or that we view it from above (see Figure 2). The “deceased” holds an icon showing a saint, while flowers form a nimbus around his head. This painting can be seen as a new artistic credo after a period of personal crisis. The coffin’s geometry serves to structure space with color planes—Andronov’s central method from then on. Together with the icon, its symbolism points to the renewed importance of ancient Orthodox traditions in art and life. Irony, the courage to depict oneself in a coffin, and an expressive, “careless” use of paint link the work to popular folk culture and neo-primitivism. The eyes are closed and the mouth partly open, animating the face with an internal life of the soul that persists beyond the body’s death.

Figure 2.

Nikolai Andronov, Self-Portrait in Coffin, 1967. Oil on canvas, 59 × 65 cm, Museum Ludwig, Köln, Inv.-Nr. ML 01539 ©Historisches Archiv Köln mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv, rba_c002649, https://www.kulturelles-erbe-koeln.de/documents/obj/05013393.

Andronov applied this method of capturing the inner essence to the Russian landscape—seen as embodying the fate of the people—and to the national artistic tradition. His works coalesce into a series representing “authentic Russia” or the continuum of “truly national art.” Beneath shifting lyrical moments, not only history emerges, but also enduring tradition and a sense of eternal being. Historical time becomes merely an epiphenomenon of “true reality,” accessible by looking inward at oneself and, through this, at one’s culture. In these correspondences, Andronov’s art becomes a search for the individuality of Russian art and a revival of ancient traditions.Footnote ⁶⁴ Following this, Andronov saw the artist’s moral duty as preserving tradition and resisting the passage of time.Footnote ⁶⁵ In the 1990s, he again entered a state of “internal emigration” in response to the rise of contemporary art. He lamented: “Where is the genuine? Where is the surrogate? … The question of inheriting traditions and schools is of great importance for our craft … [but instead] we are forced to conform to ‘global standards.’”Footnote ⁶⁶

Organizers of Andronov’s posthumous exhibitions at the Tretʹiakov Gallery (2004) and the Russian Museum (2006–2007) shared this resentment. At these shows, the “Andronov myth”—a “true artist” who found the genuine Russian tradition in the village—was fully expressed, a myth that had been forming since the late 1970s. In 1977, art historian Vitalii Manin connected “the main content” of Andronov’s work—“the feeling of the originality of his native land, its legendary nature, and real authenticity”—to patriotic war in terms of soil and blood.Footnote ⁶⁷ German art historian Wolfgang Becker recalled that in the early 1980s, the Soviet ambassador in Bonn, Vladimir Semyonov, “considered Andronov to be the RUSSIAN painter par excellence and patriotically distinguished him from many others.”Footnote ⁶⁸

However, less nationalistic interpretations also appeared. Discussing Seeing off [people to war] (1967), art historian Dmitry Sarabyanov noted that Andronov’s focus on war was on its “traces,” like the omnipresence of invalids, and driven by “the tragedy of a people who sacrificed so many lives to the Moloch of war.” Sarabyanov emphasized formal qualities, describing Andronov’s style as “lyrical monumentalism.”Footnote ⁶⁹ He also linked Andronov’s work to metaphysical concerns and post-avant-garde tendencies of the 1920s–30s, such as the group Makovets, which “enriched the neo-primitivism of the 1910s with spiritual issues.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Overall, leaders of the “left-wing MOSKh” shared the Soviet concept of geographical space as sacred.Footnote ⁷¹ For example, Vladimir Favorskii (1886–1964), a major influence, reportedly claimed “space is the container of God.”Footnote ⁷²

Andronov’s posthumous exhibitions became part of the struggle over Russian art history. In 2001, Alexander Morozov (1941–2010), Deputy Director of the Tretyakov Gallery and an “apologist of the ‘severe style’”—and thus opposed to unofficial art—sought to revise the museum’s twentieth-century displays, worrying proponents of contemporary art.Footnote ⁷³ Andronov’s 2004 show was part of this campaign. The catalog, compiled by his daughter Maria, relied mostly on Andronov’s own texts and emphasized Russian artistic traditions and professional craft. Another friend from Andronov’s youth, art historian Lev Mochalov (1928–2019), contributed to the catalog for the exhibition of Andronov and his wife Natalia Egorshina at the Russian Museum (2006–2007). He linked spiritual unity to past war: “The same longing for the affirmation of unifying national values … now, having outlived his futuristic intentions, he [Andronov] finds it in the past. In what has already happened and is morally indisputable. In the example of the nationwide sacrificial heroism of the recent war. The Great. The Patriotic. The Global.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Mochalov concluded by connecting Andronov’s search for the “eternal Fatherland,” Russian colonization, and a quote from fascism-sympathizer Ivan Ilyin.Footnote ⁷⁵

The Rise of Geocultural Specificity in the Art of the Late USSR

In the post-Thaw period, creators of local versions of socialist realism shifted between ethnic and socialist worlds. Late socialist realism focused on morality and was built around the myth of the people’s spirituality, mixing conscious naiveté and ethical “rustic” passion with myth and art. This return to “roots” was polysemantic, ranging from anti-Soviet conservatism and neo-religious metaphysics (pochvennichestvo) to liberal de-Stalinization promoted by humanist intellectuals. Among non-Russian minorities, such regional socialist realisms were postcolonial as they “revealed a split between internalization of the foreign paternalistic gaze and a subtle revolt against this gaze.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Russian identity followed a similar path within the Soviet context, seen as repressive to premodern roots that needed rediscovery in the provinces. This was why Nikolai Andronov looked to the so-called “Russian North,” the old frontier of Moscow colonization since the fifteenth century, where remnants of “truly” premodern and pre-Soviet Russian culture could still be found.

Andronov and his circle saw themselves as “restoring the spiritual traditions of national cultural development artificially interrupted in the 1930s and 1940s.”Footnote ⁷⁷ However, this was a trap of double thinking: “those at the very top of the social pyramid secretly hated the social style they had created … Liberal Andronov was one of the main designers of the Soviet hyperreality of the Stagnation era.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Russian nationalism and traditionalism were seen by some in the Soviet elite as the voice of the subjugated, representing an identity struggle; even a kind of postcolonial struggle. Researchers note that Russia’s westernized elites have engaged in internal colonization since at least the seventeenth century as part of a western-style modernization process.Footnote ⁷⁹ Thus, the postcolonial subject in Russia exists in a subtler, more “internal” form than in typical postcolonial theory, which assumes a clear metropole-colony divide. To address these nuances, some researchers use terms like “empire-subaltern.”Footnote ⁸⁰ A key question is how postcolonial and post-Soviet contexts relate.Footnote ⁸¹ Significant work remains to be done in this area. As curator and art historian Ekaterina Degot argues, Russian theory and art must globalize first to address both postcolonial and post-Soviet perspectives.Footnote ⁸²

Geoculturally specific artistic imaginations like Andronov’s combine conservative, even reactionary elements with liberal, progressive, and postcolonial aspects. This approach also revived a local humanness suppressed by Soviet modernization. Andronov’s landscapes feature neo-primitive, expressive, archaic, and mythological qualities. He painted village utopias, transforming particular scenes into an image of Russia where people coexist in dramatic harmony with horses, dogs, wind, sunsets, and other forces. As his friend, artist Andrei Vasnetsov, wrote in a 1977 catalog: “[his] world is an ideal world. It is not the harsh truth of life, but rather a picturesque elegy, an ideal world of children’s visions.”Footnote ⁸³ This view contrasts sharply with the primordialist “Andronov myth” that took hold in the 1990s and 2000s, when the conservative and neotraditionalist components of his art moved toward a nationalist and reactionary mindset. It was a part of a serious transformation in Russian society.

The “Andronov myth” became part of the rising R’s broader cultural conflict, casting the artist’s posthumous exhibitions as “carefully rewritten history,” a “frightening fundamentalist utopia,” and a sign of larger trends. “Now we see how all these picturesque beauties, which reflected the final turn of late Soviet ideology towards total isolationism and fundamentalism, are once again being put on a pedestal … and the new state idea will be embodied by artists like Nikolai Andronov.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Despite opposing voluntarism in politics and art—seeing it as destructive to tradition—Andronov ultimately claimed he could judge who speaks for “genuine” art and Russia’s organic tradition. Such views, widely held in post-Soviet artists’ unions, became the foundation for the rise of R in art. The resentment and nationalist revision of art history during Putin’s rule also incorporated geoculturally specific tendencies from non-official Soviet art, like Rabin’s. For the conservative revolution, however, a third element was added: the transgressive subcultural energy of younger generations.

Neo-Eurasianist Art and the Co-optation of Late-Socialist Deterritorialization

With the collapse of the USSR, many things were legalized and brought to the forefront, including discussions about Russian national specificity, along with liberalization and the emergence of a young “wild” market. This identity talk was perceived as fresh by intellectuals, democratic neoliberal reformers, and experimental artists because it had been previously suppressed. In the 1990s, subcultural young artists like Kirill Preobrazhenskii (b. 1970) and Aleksei Beliaev-Gintovt (b. 1965) began exploring Russian national identity using contemporary art methods, such as installation and postmodernist irony. For example, in 1995 they created a thought-provoking work Oh, Goose, you are a Troika or Platinum Age Wood-Sledge. In this piece, they crafted a replica of Russia’s iconic symbol, the “Troika” (a cart pulled by horses), but replaced the horses with a taking-off latex pterodactyl and included their own life-size wax figures standing in the cart, welcoming the new era: “the Platinum Age,” with pathetic gestures (see Figure 3). In the photo by Igor Stomakhin, the artists themselves stand in the foreground of their work, which “drives” along a summer street in Moscow. This doubling enhances the feeling of surrealist estrangement, constructive playfulness with one’s own identity, and postmodernist irony, all enacted with brutal seriousness. Expression, manifestations of archaic features as part of the artistic credo, and attention to the “heavy” professional materiality of the artwork unite this piece with those of Rabin and Andronov.

Figure 3.

Igor Stomakhin, photograph of Oh, Goose, You Are a Troika or Platinum Age Wood-Sledge by Kirill Preobrazhensky and Alexey Belyaev-Gintovt, with the authors, 1995. © Igor Stomakhin.

For another of their works, U-87, shown in 1994 in the respectable Moscow Gallery Regina, they installed a wooden 1:1 model of the Junkers-87 airplane covered fully with valenki, traditional Russian felt footwear. It was an allusion to the foundational artistic myth of Joseph Beuys, according to which the famous German artist, a Luftwaffe rear-gunner during World War II, crashed in Crimea. There he was saved by Tatars and healed with felt and animal fat. But U-87 was also perceived as a search of Russian identity and “cultural-national self-determination.” As Olga Sviblova, later the director of the Multimedia Art Museum, wrote: “The intention of the project was to overcome the inferiority complex of Russian culture … during the perestroika era … ‘we’ turned out to be “Russian valenok” … a symbol of Russian conservatism and provincialism … The felt boots, clinging to the Junkers frame … are cozy and aggressive at the same time, like two hypostases of the Russian consciousness: traditional masochism and Russophile malice (hostility).”Footnote ⁸⁵

Preobrazhenskii and Beliaev-Gintovt were formed in the subcultural bohemian circles of the last Soviet generation in the 1980s. Steven Lee, following Alexey Yurchak, associates this period with the practice of “late-socialist deterritorialization,” referring to the last Soviet generation’s ability to operate simultaneously within and beyond official discourses concerning identity.Footnote ⁸⁶ It functioned as the displacement of authoritative discourses from within, achieved through racial fluidity and decontextualized overidentification with official policies. As a result, late socialism arrived at more flexible, bottom-up understandings of identity through a post-punk “minority stiob,” existing “between support and ridicule.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Two important outcomes followed in post-Soviet times. First, a variety of identity games in market conditions: ethno-movements, subversive art and culture games, the construction of an “imaginary West,” and many other imaginary identities. Together, these resulted in “the paradoxical rise, in both the former socialist world and beyond, of ethno-nationalism amid the 1990s triumph of neoliberal globalization.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Second, there was the cooptation of this deterritorialization by state interests, as happened with Beliaev-Gintovt, who became a central figure in Neo-Eurasian art and “over the course of many years has been working consistently to resurrect the Soviet ‘imperial sublime.’”Footnote ⁸⁹

Imagine a city square reminiscent of Red Square in Moscow in brown-golden tones. Strange buildings in the background resemble Taj Mahal, pyramids, Art Nouveau skyscrapers, and large circus tents. Giant five-pointed stars, as if torn from the Kremlin towers, fly over and reflect in the semi-mirror surface of the square, where either oriental script or ornaments from ancient Russian books are visible. Stands for the public, reminiscent of Soviet times or the preparations for the “Immortal Regiment” march are erected next to the building looking like Spasskaia Tower. This is a verbal description of a video animation by Beliaev-Gintovt, shown by the Moscow gallery “Triumph” in 2012. Its visuality combines Soviet, tsarist imperial, and Russian Orthodox symbolism to construct a futuristic vision of Russia as the geopolitical center of the world. The mixing of seemingly disassociated symbols—connected primarily by their supposed common “Russianness” and “Eurasian character”—provides a clear bridge to contemporary art’s strategies of oversignification, pointed to nationalistic and imperial pathos. Later, based on this work, the artist created the background animation for a series of more than a hundred video lectures, conducted by the neo-Eurasianism ideologist Alexander Dugin from 2017 to 2021.Footnote ⁹⁰

In Beliaev-Gintovt’s work, post-ironic play between critique and affirmation is decisively tilted towards the latter, appearing ironic only to those unaware of its nationalist-imperialist context and facts of the artist’s biography, such as an affiliation with Dugin.Footnote ⁹¹ Having emerged from the late Soviet far-right underground Iuzhinskii Circle, Dugin merged Iuzhinskii’s neo-traditionalism with German geopolitics, claims for Russian fascism, elements of original Eurasianism, and other components into Neo-Eurasianism. This highly syncretic far-right ideology of Russian-Eurasian messianic exceptionalism both inherits and is distinct from original Eurasianism, which in the 1920s asserted a hybrid east-west “Eurasian” identity for Russia as a challenge to western cultural hegemony.Footnote ⁹² Today, researchers understand Eurasianism both as a form of specific Russian nationalism and as a supra-national imperial ideology.Footnote ⁹³ However, it combined overt emancipatory and anti-hegemonic rhetoric with conservative and reactionary elements. Through this duality, Eurasianism anticipated not only contemporary libertarian-conservative alliances in their criticism of repressive global liberalism but also the championing of multipolarity and some of the predicaments of postcolonial theory.Footnote ⁹⁴ In the 1930s, left-wing Eurasianism viewed the Bolshevik state as the closest realization of their ideology. Today, neo-Eurasianism overlaps with the so-called “left-patriotic” neo-Stalinist milieu, asserting the uniqueness of Soviet civilization as a “Red Spiritual Empire.”Footnote ⁹⁵ In this mindset, the Soviet project is seen as deeply rooted in the “ancient” peculiarities of Russian geocultural specificity, such as collectivism. Revolutionary anti-capitalism, such as the nineteenth-century patriotic Narodnik movement and Bolshevism are considered part of the Russian tradition, interweaving neo-Stalinist etatism, imperialism, and nationalism.

Much of late Soviet subcultural art was open to various discursive articulations, consciously staying on the territory of ironic postmodernist ambiguity and fluid deterritorialized identity. Beliaev-Gintovt’s idiosyncratic style began alongside the postmodernist “New Seriousness” of Timur Novikov’s New Academy in the 1990s, incorporating elements of Russian constructivism, agitprop art, and pop art.Footnote ⁹⁶ Neo-Eurasian art aimed to construct a kind of “Eurasian Futurism” in the space between the legacy of 1920s vanguard aspirations, counterculture, Nouvelle Droite’s appropriations of the Gramscian struggle for hegemony and various non-western postcolonial futurisms like Afrofuturists. In this sense, it was analyzed as a conservative avant-garde, conservative futurism, or “the last masterpiece of the last avant-garde.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Its desired future merges technology with traditionalism to create “another,” non-western modernity, erasing or appropriating all western liberal and postmodern influences. However, these diverse elements were largely coopted by state interests and hegemonized by R. Figures like Beliaev-Gintovt, alongside Dugin, are now prominent voices in the pro-war camp and important figures in Russian Style projects.

Ruscism/Russism in a Struggle for Hegemony

R is not a coherent ideology, but rather the ambiguous cultural mainstream of Putinist Russia. Art and culture play a significant role in its ascendance, representation, articulation, and authorization as a distinct geocultural imagination and social imaginary. In times of war, R approaches hegemony, foregrounding themes of race and empire to an unprecedented degree. The study of R thus reveals the intersection of ideology, culture, and war in Putin’s Russia. The Russian Style project functions as a flagship case for examining R in contemporary art, inscribing Putinist Russia’s stylistic obsession—and its attendant identitarian resentment—into its very title. Situated at the syncretic crossroads of diverse stylistic, ideological, and institutional influences, the project encompasses a broad network of artists. This study identifies three principal artistic sources underpinning this syncretism. R coalesced from the geoculturally specific, nationalist, and imperialist elements drawn from these sources, appropriating and merging them into new, often paradoxical configurations for nationalist, reactionary, and fundamentalist reinterpretations of art history in the Putin era. Previously nuanced readings of late Soviet non-conformist and official art have given way to identitarian interpretations centered on Russia’s “essence.” Simultaneously, the resentment and protest embedded in this art have fused with the aesthetics of subcultural transgression and have been redirected toward “global elites,” international organizations, and “enemies of Russia.”

As shown through the case of Oskar Rabin, nonconformist art—once a counter‑aesthetic grounded in religious, mystical, and geocultural exploration—was eventually absorbed into the national cultural mainstream. This incorporation produced a paradoxical legacy: practices born in opposition later furnished symbolic and conceptual resources for nationalist revisionism in the Putin era. Nikolai Andronov exemplifies how late‑Soviet official art could fuse conservative and reactionary impulses with progressive, even postcolonial, currents; despite rejecting voluntarism in politics and art, he positioned himself as an arbiter of “authentic” Russian tradition. The post‑Soviet period saw a proliferation of “identity games” in the cultural marketplace underscoring the paradox of ethno-nationalism flourishing amid neoliberal globalization. Concurrently, the state appropriated deterritorialized art practices, exemplified by leading Neo-Eurasianism artist Beliaev-Gintovt’s revival of the Soviet “imperial sublime,” where an apparent ironic pose resolves into an unambiguous embrace of nationalist-imperialist ideology.

R flourished during the war against Ukraine, and its consolidation continues to intensify. It incorporates a wide array of elements, including appropriations of the Soviet legacy of decolonial internationalism, as Russian officials repurpose Soviet-era schemas of struggle against a unified west, now seeking to spearhead not an anti-capitalist international but a new fascintern, a transnational network of ultraconservative, identitarian forces. Coupled with its emphasis on racial and imperial logics and support for offensive warfare, this gives R a “schizo” quality: it strikes out aggressively while perceiving itself as defensive and condemns fascism even as it moves distinctly in that direction.

R is engaged in a continual struggle for hegemony within the spheres of art, culture, and imagination. A promising avenue for further research is to examine this hegemonic contest within discursive, artistic, and imaginative fields, where R appears alongside its opponents, competing geographic imaginations such as internationalism or decolonialism. Such inquiry can illuminate R as a hegemonic articulation tied to spatial identity: a spatial closure constituted through its relations with excluded elements. This “constitutive outside” prevents the formation of fully unified objects, acting as a force for their dislocation. As a result, R remains unstable, permeated by antagonistic articulations. In its pursuit of integrity and dominance, Ruscist art draws together disparate elements: for example, fusing religious icons with street art, or “authentic” Russian traditions with global artistic influences. These incorporations introduce internal contradictions, whose potential may be revealed through analysis of the ongoing struggle for hegemony.

The pursuit of hegemony drives R to integrate many heterogeneous elements. While this integration achieves a degree of success, it invariably results in an unstable and dynamic equilibrium. By making identitarian framework the sole common ground, R inevitably emerges as a highly syncretic and amorphous art movement. For some participants, it also serves as a façade in a repressive cultural climate or as an opportunity for self-promotion under new circumstances. Its voluntary subjugation to the vague and elusive “essence” of Russia, on one hand, and to the ever-shifting interests of the Russian state, on the other, ensures that R as art remains weaker and ultimately secondary to its artistic sources. Its current hegemony derives not from the intrinsic qualities of art itself, but from repressive cultural policies and the populism of wartime. In this regard, R constitutes a weak, unstable, and artificial artistic phenomenon. However, the persistence of the current socio-political environment, acting as an “incubator” for Ruscism/Russism, may lead to greater stability over time, as occurred with socialist realism in the USSR. This, perhaps, is the central question of our present moment.