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

Feb 16, 2026

Alexis Lerner, assistant professor and author of Post-Soviet Graffiti (based on a decade of regional ethnography). She traces how graffiti and street art bypass censorship, the politics of location and state-sponsored murals, and how artists navigate festivals, corporate work, and survival in authoritarian spaces. The conversation highlights fieldwork methods and a vast photo archive across the post-Soviet region.

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ANECDOTE

Walking Walls Sparked A Decade Of Research

Alexis Lerner discovered political graffiti in St. Petersburg in 2009 that contrasted with state media narratives.
That observation launched a decade of fieldwork across Berlin to Vladivostok collecting tens of thousands of images.

ANECDOTE

Couchsurfing Mapped Graffiti Networks

Lerner used Couchsurfing to find local artists and map graffiti hotspots in each city.
She built a snowball of contacts, revisited cities annually, and amassed a digitizable archive.

INSIGHT

Western Media Fueled Local Graffiti Scenes

Graffiti entered the post-Soviet region via cultural transmission like VHS tapes and Beat Street.
Early painters mixed experimentation with unexpected police tolerance during Perestroika and Glasnost.

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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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