A society’s graffiti tends to be accorded greatest seriousness when that society faces its direst political, social, and cultural challenges. Its appearance in the public space, quite literally overnight, confers upon graffiti a kind of meteorological value, a metric from which all manner of diagnoses, prognostications, and hindsight proceeds, largely a glossing of its textual content. At the same time, as a form of visual culture, graffiti often finds itself studied in opposition to imagery sanctioned by the political, commercial, or artistic establishments, its transgressions variously ideological, commodifiable, or aesthetic. One might infer from this book’s subtitle that Alexis Lerner intends to focus on ad hoc political expression, and to do so in those USSR successor states that have returned to repressive conditions. Instead, most of the former eastern bloc and even formerly West Berlin is under consideration, examined works date from the end of Soviet rule to the present (concentrating on 2009–22), and the status of graffiti is debated not only as expression of protest but also as marketing tool and art object.

The book’s length might automatically render such ambitions unattainable, but a discussion of exacting fieldwork methodology, myriad research trips, relationships with key graffitists, and exhaustive personal archives buoys hope in the project, which Lerner lays out in detail. Chapter 1 traces graffiti’s evolution and spread in the post-socialist world, nominating notable contemporary players and dovetailing with a previous significant scholarly account of Soviet-era activity. Chapter 2 goes much further afield, discussing graffiti both as it existed locally from ninth-century Novgorod and then gained full cultural potency on the streets of 1970s NYC and the Berlin Wall. Chapter 3, focusing on successor states, pivots to critique the co-opting of graffiti’s visual tropes and countercultural cache by commercial advertising, the art market, and governments eager to reshape public perception and sanitize public space. Chapter 4 productively restricts itself to Russia, ably making the case that major graffitists and performance artists reacted against commodification of street art, reenergized the medium, and restored critical incision precisely at the onset of Vladimir Putin’s imperium.

Next, Part Two’s three chapters intend to anchor Lerner’s peripatetic, thematically diffuse account in methodological paradigms borrowed from political science, literary theory, urbanism, semiotics, and cultural studies, promising a new way forward for scholars of post-Soviet graffiti. Finally, Part Three’s chapters fashion a loose taxonomy of graffiti throughout the post-socialist space, differentiated by social issues (environmentalism, homophobia, corruption, xenophobia) and, at last, authoritarianism, be it Putin’s, Aliaksandar Lukashenko’s, or Viktor Orbán’s. This proceeds with occasional iconographic analysis, interpretation via the inchoate theoretical conceits of Part Two, and a generous degree of autobiography, including a moving account of her family’s multi-generational intersection with the pervasiveness of antisemitic street markings.

Lerner’s personal stake in her subject is reiterated throughout, its narrative occasionally bearing a tone of memoir more than socio-anthropology. Elsewhere, a reproduction of a wall decoration co-authored by Lerner and a well-known graffitist—an experiential exercise in benign midnight vandalism?—supplants images that might better illustrate free speech under authoritarianism. Therefore, it becomes an uncomfortable task to evaluate the research of somebody this invested, this embedded in their topic, especially someone with previous scholarly publications. Alas, Lerner herself ventriloquizes Kirkus Reviews in declaring her book, midway, the perfect assigned text for undergraduates.

Ultimately this book hobbles itself by diverting words needed to support arguments and elaborate premises to, instead, teasing what lies ahead in future passages or, worse, repeating previous points that attentive readers still hold in recent memory. More detrimental, this examination of what is essentially a form of visual culture is largely devoid of visual analysis, and even textual analysis becomes overwhelmingly denotative without considering connotative delivery of these graffitied messages. On the most basic level, without discussion of hand style—signature-like features of alphanumeric elements that distinguish the work of one individual, a gang or an entire city’s practitioners—graffiti’s proliferation simply becomes a matter of frequency, not transmission of aesthetic sensibility, stylistic homage, assertion of distinctive voices, and so forth. Critiquing the nexus of graffiti and art galleries becomes a hollow exercise without determining graffiti’s artistic value (or refusal of conventional criteria, functioning more as shibboleth). When stylistic linkage is attempted here, it’s wrong: suprematism is cited as a conceptual precedent when it’s actually constructivism. Misunderstandings similarly detract from the theoretical modelings: Ferdinand de Saussure’s arbitrariness of the sign does not explain graffiti with ambiguous referents; Lerner’s chronotypes have less to do with Mikhail Bakhtin’s structuralism than with those engineers use in task analysis; a dumpster tagged with random, unrelated expletives is not dialogism.