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

Feb 16, 2026

Dr. Alexis Lerner, assistant professor and ethnographer of post‑Soviet cities, discusses a decade of fieldwork documenting graffiti as political speech. She traces origins from glasnost to commercial festivals. Conversations cover state co‑option of murals, placement and language strategies, clandestine midnight writing versus sanctioned street art, and building a digital archive of thousands of works.

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INSIGHT

Walls As Alternate Political Media

Alexis Lerner discovered graffiti carried political content absent from state media in St. Petersburg.
She used this difference to explore graffiti as a hidden channel of dissent across the post-Soviet region.

ANECDOTE

Research Via Couchsurfing Maps

Lerner used Couchsurfing to map artist areas and find local guides across cities.
That method produced a tens-of-thousands image archive and repeat visits enabling cross-time comparisons.

INSIGHT

Western Media Sparked Local Scenes

Early post-Soviet graffiti spread after artists saw Western media like Beat Street and copied styles.
Initial police responses were often ambivalent, sometimes even supportive, enabling experimentation.

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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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