The volume edited by Lena Jonson and Andrei Erofeev continues a series of significant monographs on Russian art and literature in times of the conservative turn after the year 2000 that have been published in recent years, such as Post-Post-Soviet? Art, Politics and Society in Russia at the Turn of the Decade, edited by Marta Dziewanska, Ekaterina Degot, and Ilya Budratskis, 2013; Art and Protest in Putin's Russia by Lena Jonson, 2015; Technologien der Seele. Vom Verfertigen der Wahrheit in der russischen Gegenwartskultur by Ulrich Schmid, 2015; Cultural Forms of Protest in Russia, edited by Birgit Beumers, Alexander Etkind, Olga Gurova, and Sanna Turoma, 2017; Reiner Aktivismus? Politisierung von Literatur und Kunst im postsowjetischen Russland by Matthias Meindl, 2017; and “Russia—Culture of (Non-)Conformity: From the Late Soviet Time to the Present,” edited by Klavdia Smola and Mark Lipovetsky, in Russian Literature (vol. 96–98, Feb.–May 2018: 1–11). The volume's originality is rooted not only in its exploration of the most recent changes in political left-wing, or dissident art, but also in its greater interest in the conservative mainstream and in right-wing esthetical (pseudo-)alternatives. Because of this, the focus on Russia's cultural landscape turns out to be more versatile and is contextualized in a more subtle way than it has been in relevant literature before. What is more, the hitherto barely explored “pragmatic” union between the authoritarian order and right-wing art in Putin-era Russia is highlighted here. The peculiar connection between the resistant radicalization of the esthetic form that we know from the 1990s, and nationalist-imperial ideology changes the very concept of the artistic alternative. At the same time, the authors pose an important question: What happens with contemporary art after cultural protests have largely subsided and the political powers have appropriated and trivialized protest esthetics?

The volume consists of four parts: I. The conservative zeitgeist and Russian cultural policy; II. The state of affairs: voices from the Russian art scene; III. Artistic counterstrategies; and IV. Theatre: a parallel development. The observation of a new social and political constructivism that simulates and reuses moral values, the historical past, and former dissent forms of art for its own purposes marks the red thread of the first part. Using examples of official commemorative projects in Moscow and Kalmykia, as well as political documents, Ilya Kalinin illustrates how “organic forms” of historical conservativism—such as the relationship to national history or soil—are “genetically modified” (29), to put it in today's political rhetoric: In this way, culture becomes a “natural resource” used for constituting ideology and profit. Lena Jonson shows how the new structuring of the art scene after 2012 and especially the increased surveillance of museums as well as the politics of financial support by the ministry of culture have enabled a state-controlled conservative turn. In this context, the affirmative rhetoric about the social and pedagogical significance of art and arguments of democracy were used to suppress unwanted esthetic manifestations and to establish a patriotic atmosphere. Alexander Bikbov analyzes the way moral-traditionalist values have been reinvented in the neoliberal policies of minister of culture Vladimir Medinskii, with the objective of economic profit. Russian “neomercantilism” operates precisely through its fusion with unity myths and historical constructs—“a moral turn made profitable” (78). Not only the political constructivism from above, however, but also neo-conservative artists create “products” of cultural hybridity that latently support the ideology, as is shown by Maria Engström. She investigates the popularity of young militant female figures in works by Aleksei Beliaev-Gintovt, the art-group Doping-Pong and the most recent Russian pop culture, that reveal a merger of eclectic multimedia postmodernism with patriotic messianism.

Valuable analyses are offered in the most comprehensive part of the volume, on artistic responses to the “conservative zeitgeist” in Russia. Daniil Leiderman investigates in what ways the per se unpolitical Moscow Conceptualist art in the late Soviet era, and in particular Dmitrii Prigov's concept of the “shimmering” have become an effective political weapon for today's protest artists. The criticism of the political and artistic establishment here lies in the semantic ambiguity: in the oscillation between various ideologies and their ironic reproduction, as it becomes manifest in works by Tatiana Antoshina and even in the seemingly unequivocal actions by Pavel Pavlensky and Pussy Riot. Taking the examples of performative practices of the Chto delat group, Jonathan Brooks Platt discerns significant shifts in alternative left-wing art after the failure of the 2011–12 protests. Radical action art has been replaced by more long-term and network-oriented projects with pedagogical approaches and small goals. Institutions such as the Chto delat school aim at “creating a more sustainable counter-public” (233). Yet, it remains open to question whether “the dialectic of heroism and weakness” (234) that Platt attributes to Chto delat's projects could in fact not also be seen as a characteristic of the radical performance art by the likes of Petr Pavlenskii. Mark Lipovetsky investigates the ambivalent semantics of the poetical performances by Roman Osminkin, who connects left-wing political commitment in the spirit of LEF with both self-irony and farce. Thus, in a performative manner, Osminkin presents a dialectic that can be described as “revolutionary pessimism” (258)—a collusion between Prigov's “shimmering” and “ideological engagement” (259).

In the very informative section “Voices from the art scene,” artists such as Andrei Kuzkin, Irina Korina, Pavel Peppershtein, Nadia Tolokonnikova, and Daria Serenko comment on the state of art in contemporary Russia. It is symptomatic that many of them reject straightforward political art and “heroic” actionism today. The frustration brought about by the political fruitlessness of art in general is epitomized in the rather cynical words of Peppershtein, who compares the conflict between radical art actions and power to the competition between two “art groups working with the same director” (140)—an unintended allusion to Boris Groys's criticism of the historical avant-garde?

Apparently, the new dialogue with and deference to the broad public of art consumers—as Viktoria Lomasko formulates it (147)—marks the actual agenda of socially-engaged Russian esthetics. The exploration of such (micro)practices that unveil a new, much more analytical, systematic, and non-spectacular way of artistic dissent is still lacking in this doubtlessly innovative and essential book. Future research will close this gap.