The Soviet Art Research Seminar emerged in 2019 as a community of colleagues who felt the need to discuss their ideas and work, who sought scholarly discussion, and who did not want to fit their scholarly work into the system of stereotypes and "ready-made answers" that exists in scholarship on late-Soviet nonconformist art.
The meetings, which began in St. Petersburg, soon switched to an online format that allowed us to bring together participants and contributors from different cities and countries. We discussed theses, books and exhibitions as well as our own articles and plans. Among us from the beginning were historians of literature and film, official and post-Soviet art. Thematically, the seminar covers many aspects of "the Soviet": unofficial art scenes and communities of different regions, gender history, Soviet book publishing, samizdat and tamizdat, sociology and social history of art, uncensored literature, and the history of late-Soviet communities and informal circles.
We invite researchers who are interested in Soviet culture in any of its manifestations to join us.