Sometimes a book's greatest strength is its idiosyncrasy. This is very much the case with Madina Tlostanova's What Does It Mean to Be Post-Soviet? A slim, succinct volume, it does not purport to explain post-Soviet art, nor, despite its title, does it tell the reader what it means to be post-Soviet. The question mark is not rhetorical. Throughout the narrative, the author endeavors to impress upon the reader just how thoroughly odd the situation of the post-Soviet citizen has been over the last thirty years. In summing up this atmosphere, the author writes, “There is no teleology and no point of arrival anymore” (18). Such a situation produces “a still large postimperial country which is sick with a syndrome of the lacking future and missing hope” (21). Such odd phrasings neatly capture the pulverizing psychological otherness that riddles post-Soviet space, a world haunted by oppressive memories of an all-pervasive, maniacal teleology, which has now given way to a state of nearly absolute cynicism and ideological emptiness. Even today we really have no idea exactly how this post-Soviet story will end.

Although brief, Tlostanova's study is wide-ranging: examining mythologies, imprecations, and common places that have shaped the discursive environment of the post-Soviet Russian Federation and the other former Soviet republics, such as Azerbaijan, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Ukraine. In her investigations of post-Soviet everyday life, Tlostanova writes about a number of projects in art and literature, though the choice of particular artists or artworks is avowedly lyrical, rather than narrowly historicist. The book goes to great lengths to ruminate on the complex psychic ecologies that have permeated the former Soviet Union, while also contemplating the roles such ecologies have played in fostering a range of distinctive art practices. In this environment, the author interprets art most often as something like a form of collective cathartic therapy; such observations are then discussed in informative “conversations” with the artists Viacheslav Akhunov, Anton Nikolaiev, Liina Siib, and the writer Afanassy Mamedov. As such, the book's structure does not yield anything like a comprehensive history of contemporary art in the years following the Soviet collapse, but rather a series of overtly subjective glimpses into differing responses to what might be called post-sovietism.

The book's driving conceit, one elucidated at some length, is to argue that the post-Soviet space can be productively analyzed as a zone in which the energies of “decoloniality” have been at work. The author sums up this approach as follows: “This book focuses on a specific kind of decoloniality linked with perceptive mechanisms of aesthesis and further shaping not only of aesthetic and ethical but also, inevitably, of political stances and agency that may become powerful mechanisms in decolonializing thinking, being, sensing, and corporality” (22). On this theme, one might question one of the book's fundamental hypotheses: “The postsocialist people were offered to accept, without question, the existing global hierarchy in which everyone is assigned a precise, fixed and never questioned place, and is afraid of losing that precarious position by being associated with countries—such as those of the Global South—that stand even lower” (4). In fact, one of the most notable developments of the last thirty years has been precisely the unfixed rise of the BRICS countries in the world economy—and the Russian Federation's evident eagerness to be seen as a leading member of this group. This observation might also lead one to wonder if a post-Soviet scholarly attachment to the rhetoric of “decoloniality” might also itself not be grounded to some extent within this much larger economic and social transformation.

In general, the author's theorizing on decoloniality and art hits the mark as an invigorated way to interpret the achievements of recent “activist art” in and around the Russian Federation and important multi-media work from the former Soviet empire's periphery, such as the art of Aslan Gaisumov. In its interpretations, the author's narrative often takes the form of riffs on Frantz Fanon's observations on primitivism, colonialism, and modernity, which are then thread through the conceptual matrix of later writings by Enrique Dussel and Walter Mignolo. The results are diverse and illuminating. What will eventually emerge from “the Soviet empire's ruins”? Tlostanova does not prognosticate, rather she sets the stage for asking such questions in cogent, original, and revealing terms.