The Soviet Bloc and Communist China

After the death of Stalin and during the so-called period of Thaw, Soviet art was split into official and unofficial art. This division opened up the possibility not only to practice—albeit unofficially—a Western type of modernism inside the Soviet Union but also to look at the Soviet Union from a quasi-external position, the position of “internal emigration.” Thus, a new and original artistic phenomenon emerged through artistic analysis of the functioning of the visual language of Soviet ideological propaganda and of everyday Soviet culture. This external look from the inside produced, in the second half of the 1960s, the art of Moscow conceptualism. The artists of the first generation of Moscow conceptualism in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Ilya Kabakov, Erik Bulatov, Dmitri Prigov, and Lev Rubinstein, used in their artworks the language of the “simple Soviet citizen” with the goal of analyzing and ironizing that language.