Alexis Lerner, "Post-Soviet Graffiti: Free Speech in Authoritarian States" (U Toronto Press, 2025)

Feb 16, 2026

Alexis Lerner, assistant professor and ethnographer of post-Soviet cities, shares a decade of graffiti fieldwork. She traces graffiti’s roots from Perestroika to corporate festivals. She maps how location, language, and state murals shape dissent. She contrasts illicit midnight work with sanctioned street art and previews a public online archive.

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INSIGHT

Western Media Sparked Local Graffiti

Western graffiti culture entered the USSR via media like Beat Street during Perestroika, inspiring early practitioners.
Initial encounters mixed experimentation with surprising police tolerance and informal mentorship.

INSIGHT

Festivals Co-Opt Dissent

Graffiti festivals professionalized street art while silencing unsanctioned political messages by dominating prime public space.
States and corporations co-opted artists with money and visibility, reshaping public narratives.

INSIGHT

Regime Type Shapes Murals

Regime type shapes graffiti: consolidated authoritarian states favor large state murals to project unity, while other states retain illegal or independent muralism.
Governments import foreign artists if locals refuse state-sponsored narratives.

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Post-Soviet Graffiti: Free Speech in Authoritarian States (University of Toronto Press, 2025) is an empirically grounded ethnographic study of how graffiti and street art can be used as a political tool to circumvent censorship, express grievances, and control public discourse, particularly in authoritarian states.

For more than a decade, Dr. Alexis M. Lerner combed the alleyways, underpasses, and public squares of cities once under communist rule, from Berlin in the west to Vladivostok in the east, recording thousands of cases of critical and satirical political street art and cataloging these artworks linguistically and thematically across space and time. Complemented by first-hand interviews with leading artists, activists, and politicians from across the region, Post-Soviet Graffiti provides theoretical reflection on public space as a site for political action, a semiotic reading of signs and symbols, and street art as a form of text.

The book answers the question of how we conceptualize avenues of dissent under authoritarian rule by showing how contemporary graffiti functions not only as a popular public aesthetic, but also as a mouthpiece of political sentiment, especially within the post-Soviet region and post-communist Europe. A purposefully anonymous and accessible artform, graffiti is an effective tool for circumventing censorship and expressing political views. This is especially true for marginalized populations and for those living in otherwise closed and censored states.

Post-Soviet Graffiti reveals that graffiti does not exist in a vacuum; rather, it can be read as a narrative about a place, the people who live there, and the things that matter to them.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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