Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on November 10, 2025 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a book talk by Alexis Lerner. Moderated by Timothy Frye.
“Post-Soviet Graffiti” 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, 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.
Alexis M. Lerner is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the United States Naval Academy. Her research is on the intersection of authoritarianism and dissent, with a regional focus on Russia and the post-Soviet region. Dr. Lerner is also an award-winning teacher of international relations, comparative politics, and statistics. In both her teaching and research, Dr. Lerner is committed to interdisciplinary frameworks, methodological pluralism, and data literacy.
