Olga V. Solovieva reviews The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture

The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture. Ed. Mark Lipovetsky, Maria Engström, Tomáš Glanc, Ilja Kukuj, and Klavdia Smola. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024. 1080 pp.

Review by Olga V. Solovieva

13 November 2025

Soviet culture has been known outside the Soviet Union mostly through official channels mediated by Soviet embassies and cultural outposts. Official culture, produced by Soviet publishers, writers’ unions, art schools, and a training and reward system, has been studied variously either at face value (as culture) or more critically, either as a machinery of state propaganda or as a performative system postulating a new reality. All these approaches invariably shared one blind spot—the dissident, or nonconformist culture in the Soviet Union. The existence and works of dissident writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Boris Pasternak, who emigrated or whose work was smuggled abroad, were well-known but perceived as individual outliers and acts of rebellion. The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture for the first time presents a comprehensive survey and analytical toolbox for the study of late Soviet underground culture (1960s–80s) as a vast social phenomenon, one not just comprising repressed works of rare genius but coexisting with Soviet official culture, integral to it, even dependent on its constraints, and above all emerging from the lifeworlds on the ground. With its approach to underground culture, The Handbook allows a fresh insight into the operation of Soviet cultural reality as a whole.

The editors' main methodological achievement is their successful defiance of the ideological biases of the Cold War, which saw underground culture as antithetical to the official Soviet system and hence anti-Soviet. The Handbook radically breaks with this simple ideological binarism and challenges several long-ingrained dichotomies. The contributors show that underground culture was driven much less by anti-Soviet animus than by defiant, everyday creativity. It bore witness to Soviet reality not as it ought to have been, according to the doctrine of Socialist Realism (introduced in 1934), but as it was—the reality lived in the tenement apartments, staircases, garages, and abandoned barracks of industrial areas. The underground could consist in performative engagement with messy, everyday life, with unwelcome prerevolutionary traditions, or suspect foreign sources. If it was political, its politics consisted above all in embracing everything expunged from the Soviet understanding of the human: subjectivities, quasi-religious forms of mysticism, avant-garde forms of artistic experimentation, sexualities and gender relations, that is—all facets of bourgeois modernism.

Combining Western theories with the approaches of Boris Eikhenbaum and Yuri Tynianov, The Handbook grapples with the fact that the study of the Soviet underground requires new methodologies, terminologies, and conceptualizations specific to its idiosyncratic contexts. The editors forego the hierarchical approach in favor of a horizontal one that entails a change in the usual topography of Soviet culture: the underground was not beneath and cut off from the official culture but coexisted with it, nestling in its gray zones and interstices, sometimes coinciding with it or straddling its divides, as some underground artists participated in the official culture, and some were connected to several overlapping circles. This approach shows aspects of the underground that resemble those of the European avant-gardes theorized by Peter Bürger or counterpublic discourses in the United States studied by Michael Warner.

The study of the underground culture is a daunting task, as it eluded the official forms of recording and archiving. Its products often stayed in private hands, inaccessible to the broader public or community of scholars. Developing outside a public sphere or platforms of professional criticism, dependent on claustrophobic, hermetic groups of friends, and burdened by limited circulation, the quality of underground cultural production varied. Foregrounding the structural features of the underground culture as well as its shifting historical contexts, institutions, modes of operation, and conditions of emergence and acceptance allows the contributors to see it as a vernacular—another register of sociocultural expression or “communicative action”—that above all pushed against the sterile and aesthetically prescriptive and controlled Soviet idiom.[1] The editors’ understanding of the genealogy of the underground as going back to the beginning of the Soviet state’s ideological control over art in 1932 is productive because it allows them to accomodate such aesthetically, philosophically, and qualitatively different phenomena as Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky, Sergei Dovlatov, and groups like the Yuzhinsky Lane circle within one system of coordinates without breaking logical coherence.

The scope of the primary and secondary material discussed in The Handbook is epic. The 1080-page tome sums up four decades of meticulous work of recovery, publication, preservation, and scholarly analysis of the cultural heritage of the underground in the Soviet Union, which first became possible with the beginning of Perestroika in the mid-1980s. Some forms of underground culture were so conditioned by Soviet infrastructure, even if negatively, that they perished with the Soviet Union; some joined the mainstream; some developed into the nefarious post-Soviet fringe cultures of the extreme Fascist Right or Stalinist Left. The Handbook assesses, organizes, periodizes, contextualizes, and categorizes this vast heterogeneous material, guiding the reader through its complexity without glossing over its challenges and limitations.

The volume’s identification of Soviet culture with Russia only is unfortunate. The chapters on Belarus and Ukraine come across as a footnote, and three Baltic cultures are pulled together into one chapter. Nine Soviet Republics of Central Asia, Caucasus, and Moldova are not represented. This limitation of material is, however, compensated by the theoretical apparatus that by and large is applicable to the study of these regions and Soviet bloc countries.

The Handbook’s collection of material is in itself a remarkable achievement. But the book does much more: it provides a new epistemology for the study of Soviet and post-Soviet cultural space, pointing to problems and areas yet to be explored. It is a tour de force of reconceptualization of Soviet culture and must be read by anyone wishing to study the former Soviet Union and its complicated legacies.

[1] Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, 2 vols. (Boston, 1981–85).