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In the past fifty years, the Russian avant-garde has become a canonical chapter in modernist art histories and has often served as a site for contemporary investments in radical, critical, and emancipatory artistic and political practices. However, the onset of Russia’s atrocious war against Ukraine in February 2022 has exposed the imperialist assumptions in the field—indeed, the very term “the Russian avant-garde” is a longstanding and rarely questioned shorthand for a muti-ethnic and multi-national group of artists working in the late Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union. In a context in which Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky declares that “our exhibitions abroad are a special operation, a powerful cultural offensive,” scholars and curators must wrestle with whether their work is a site of resistance or complicit in a form of soft power.

This round table brings together art historians who have thought extensively about the Russian avant-garde to consider its legacy in the light of the current crisis. They will reflect on the uses to which the avant-garde has been put historically in its reception (by scholars, museums, and artists) in the west, the USSR, and in the sovereign states that were once Soviet republics. What does it mean to write this history in dialogue with, or independently of, the current repressive regime in Russia and/or ongoing struggles to defend a sovereign cultural identity in Ukraine?