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Alexis Lerner, "Post-Soviet Graffiti: Free Speech in Authoritarian States" (U Toronto Press, 2025)
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- [00:01]
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Dr. Alexis Lerner
Welcome to the new Books Network.
- [00:30]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Alexis Lerner about her book titled Post Soviet Free Speech in Authoritarian States, published by the University of Toronto Press in 2025, which examines exactly these sorts of questions around authoritarianism and free speech through the lens of graffiti, specifically in post Soviet spaces, where it turns out that there's a lot of graffiti. Now, obviously there's also a lot of post Soviet space too. And Alexis, as I'm sure she'll tell us about, has been to a whole bunch of them and has documented all sorts of things happening around graffiti and what it means and who's doing it and why and how it's changed over time. There's so much for us to get into. So, Alexis, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [01:20]
Dr. Alexis Lerner
Thank you so much for having me.
- [01:22]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? What sorts of questions are you asking in this project?
- [01:30]
Dr. Alexis Lerner
My name is Alexis Lerner. I'm an assistant professor at the United States Naval Academy in the Department of Political Science. I should offer a disclaimer. The views expressed in this conversation are my own and don't reflect the U.S. navy or the federal government here, but more about the book. So I was living in St. Petersburg in 2009 and I was living at one end of Nevsky Prospect, and I would walk every day up that very long road all the way to St. Petersburg State University on Vasilyevski Island. And while I was walking, of course, this was before the age of smartphones. And we would chat, my roommate and I would chat or we would read the walls. And what we noticed was that the content on the walls was about jailed political prisoners, nuclear policy critiques, problems with alcoholism, and explicit critiques of the state, the party and Putin. And so what I saw on the walls, what I saw in graffiti wasn't the same as what I was seeing in the nightly news or the daily digest when I was going home. And this told me something really important that people were using graffiti as a tool to express their political discontent in an otherwise censored state. And I wondered very inductively if this was also true beyond St. Petersburg and even beyond Russia. And so I started looking to other cities, and ultimately, through my fieldwork, through my ethnography, I went everywhere from St. Petersburg. I'm sorry, from Berlin in the west all the way to Vladivostok in the East. And I traveled throughout these cities interviewing artists and activists and political officials and academics and collecting tens of thousands of images of graffiti for my own archives. And I did this over the course of a decade, and I looked at how ultimately people were using graffiti to express themselves politically in a number of different regimes.
- [03:22]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That is a really interesting kind of insight. And I think so often things come out of that, of just sort of going about one's life and going. Hang on a second.
- [03:29]
Dr. Alexis Lerner
Right.
- [03:29]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And then, of course, because we're trained as academics, we have the tools often to go investigate. Though, as you've mentioned, in this case, there's a lot of investigation going on. Berlin to Vladivostok is a lot, even if it was just those two. And of course, it's not just those two. So can you give us more of a sense of kind of where else you went to?
- [03:47]
Dr. Alexis Lerner
Sure. So I'll tell you the story of how it happened and sort of where I ended up throughout the region. So there's this website called couchsurfing. And couchsurfing is ultimately a platform for travelers that want to provide or use free homestays. But it also tends to be a social network for people that want to meet others involved in sort of countercultural or subversive circles. So this became an obvious place for me to look for people that either admired graffiti or created graffiti or even critiqued the state more generally. And so I would look at who wrote in their interests on couch surfing graffiti or street art in different cities. And I would reach out to someone in Budapest or in Prague or in Lodz or whatever, and I would say, hey, you know, where's the artist area? Where's the student area? And where should I be looking for graffiti? Is there an official wall? Where's the best stuff? And some people would write me back, of course, some wouldn't. And those that would write me back, I would use their responses to cross to cross verify this map of every city I went to. So when I went to Tbilisi, I would figure out, where is the artist area, where's the student area, where's sort of the downtown area or the tourist spots, is there officially like a graffiti wall? Something like Lenin wall in Prague or SOI wall in Moscow, and then also a market area. And I would create a map for every city. And that kind of allowed me to have more of a rigorous method, methodological approach that allowed me to compare across space, which was really, really great. And then I would go and I would follow up with these people that would respond on couch surfing. And I would say, hey, you want to meet up? We would spend the day in, you know, Moscow or Riga or whatever, looking at graffiti, sometimes creating graffiti. And at the end of the day I would say, okay, who else should I be talking to? And through this snowball, the technique, I would make my way sort of up the, the social hierarchy to the top eventually, because I was doing this over the course of 10 years. And then I would go back. So I would go back to Moscow almost every year, I would go back to other places. And so this also allowed me to compare across time. So I was able to take my. While I'm doing this sort of city exploration by map, I'm also doing these interviews and I'm also taking photos. And so in each of these places, this artist area, student area, downtown area, the official graffiti wall, the market area, and a tourist spot, I'm taking lots and lots of photos. And over time, my own archive has like tens of thousands of images. And right now we're working on digitizing them for the website. And when I would come home, I would organize each of these images by a number of different parameters. Theme, for example, was one of the main ones. So is this about, you know, political fascism? Is it about war? Is it about veganism? Is it about sports or religion? What, you know, what topic is this about? I would then, you know, look at what, where on the map it was located. I would look at what language it was in, if it had language. Some of them are of course just images. I would look at the type of space, who was the artist, if we know that, was it legal or illegal and sanctioned or unsanctioned? And again, so this allowed me to do this sort of cross national comparison and also over time, by all these different parameters in a really rigorous methodological way. And to answer your first question, and so I was in the Baltics, I was in the caucuses, of course, throughout Russia, you know, Western Siberia and Far East Russia and so on. I have collected graffiti from throughout Central Asia and also through the post communist European states. So again, Hungary and Poland and Germany and so on. So I have a really nice archive that spans the entire region.
- [07:47]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
A massive, massive archive. Right. This is one reason I wanted to talk about it early in the conversation because the rigor of what you've done, the space that you've covered, and as you said, the way it's all catalogued and analyzed across space and time, it's really a massive amount of work. And I want all the listeners to keep that in mind. Right. As we talk about this. The arguments you're making that we're going to be discussing are not about kind of one city once. Right. So very important to lay that foundation. If we're thinking then about kind of the origins of this, obviously, as much as you've mentioned, this is a project you put a lot of years into. This is not a project that you've been tracking since like 1989 or 1990. Right. So we have to go a bit before that to look at kind of the origins of Soviet graffiti and then sort of immediate post Soviet Soviet graffiti. When and where are we sort of talking for that? And what sorts of reasons and messages are we seeing at this phase?
- [08:43]
Dr. Alexis Lerner
I love that question. One of the coolest things about doing these interviews is that I was able to hear the story of how graffiti came to the post Soviet region. And I was able to cross verify it from interview to interview, which. Which makes me think that I have kind of this story. And I will say that while John Bushnell did a wonderful job, I admire the work he did when he published Moscow graffiti in 1990. I feel like I have the luxury and opportunity to pick up the torch where he set it down to talk more about sort of the Western transmission of graffiti after 1990. And so I'll share the story in the book. All of part one is this sort of oral history. Nice big block quotes, beautiful photos. I will say that the book has pictures throughout, which is really cool and something that I worked really hard to find a publisher who was willing to do that. So I'm really, really lucky that the University of Toronto is willing to do color images and not just a section in the middle. Right. Throughout, which is. I love. I'm very, very lucky. So the story goes that there's this person named Basket, right. Everybody uses their self designated pseudonym. So Basket. And Basket calls himself, and I think other people call him this too, sort of the grandfather of graffiti and. And super nice guy. And he's Talking about the mid-1980s or the era of perestroika and glasnost. And he's like, I Don't have a VHS player. My friends don't have VHS players. Only politicians have VHS players and we don't have any money. So we're like sitting in this little cafe in St. Petersburg near the Petrogradskaya metro station and there's a little, you know, VHS player in the corner. And we're so excited. And we're watching like one of the three VHS tapes they have on hand, which happens to be called Beat Street. Beat street is an American production from 1984. It's about these guys in the Bronx who, they're break dancers, but in the back of the breakdancing scenes there's all this graffiti of New York city in the 80s. So they're watching Beat street and they're super inspired. And these guys decide, okay, we can't get good paint. We can only get neutral colors in St. Petersburg. So we're going to go to Riga to the paint factory and we're going to go buy some, some really beautiful colors of paint and we're going to bring it back here and we're going to get to work. And there are all these really great early stories from this era when these people would be painting and you know, maybe the police would come and they were worried that they were going to get in trouble, but the police would only end up complimenting for them for their work. Or there was another interviewee who told a story of how she was painting. She got picked up by the police and they brought her back to the station. She thought she was going to be in trouble for hooliganism or something else, and that the police ended up asking her to paint a mural for them on the inside of the station. And so this was a really exciting time when people were playing around with ideas and aesthetics in a way that, that was really new for the, for the region.
- [11:40]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that sounds really fun in a way. It certainly kind of comes through in those oral interviews, what the origin was like. How does it get to a point then where it's kind of all over the post Soviet sphere. Obviously it's goes further than just this one group. How does that happen?
- [11:58]
Dr. Alexis Lerner
These original people painting were able to both train sort of a second wave. And keep in mind they also did it because when they were able to build these sort of informal graffiti schools, they would get paid. So that's nice. But also to, you know, use their, their skill to inspire the next generation. And so this so called second wave kind of happened in the early 2000s, well into the post Soviet era. And this is around the time, you know, MTV Europe is exploding in popularity. They have their 24 hour music videos too. And all the music videos are showing graffiti. And so this is super, super popular. And all these international organizations are coming into the region. Nike and Nescafe and Monster Energy Drinks. And they're sponsoring these essentially large graffiti festivals which are also called graffiti jams. And jams are, okay, so jams are really exploitative, right? So on one hand, right, it's, it's freezing cold. The artists are painting basically merchandise for these companies like skateboard decks and sneakers. But they also do benefit. So they're, they're part of a community. They get an opportunity to practice their skills without like worrying about the police catching them. They get some positive publicity. Maybe they get, I don't know, an award with some monetary amount. But they also have durability, which is really exciting for them. So they know that their work won't be painted over right away. That's really a positive for them too. And so while these graffiti festivals are happening, of course, you know, these designated festivals and spaces where you can paint and you, you know, you have certain topics you can paint on that are approved by the judges. You know, no politics and no porn is a way that some artists talk about it. The zones where illegal graffiti was still happening was being increasingly buffed by city censors. So they're painting over sort of the graffiti that's happening outside of these festivals. So it has this like duality happening. And these big conversations are coming out around this time too about the ethics of doing advertisements for companies. We see at this time, if you're walking around Russia, you know, a major Russian city around this time, you're looking down at your feet outside the subway station and you're seeing advertisements for women's clothing and, I don't know, concert halls and events and liquor stores. I don't know, you're seeing advertisements for everything. And also sort of the ethics of working with the state being co opted by companies, staying true to yourself. We have massive arguments with artists like Creel Cotteau. And I talk about this in the book where he's saying like, you know, if you are not writing against the state, you are essentially speaking on behalf of the state and you're expressing your tacit support for the state. And that's wrong according to some artists. So even the US Consulate at this time is sponsoring graffiti festivals during the US Russia reset. This is a huge part of that kind of culture happening. And so what ends up coming about is that the Russian State also sees a benefit of these graffiti festivals. And, you know, the Russian state is. No, is not. There's precedent here for using public art to shape narratives, to shape public narratives as a form of propaganda. And that's true here too. So we have, you know, the city of Moscow putting out a festival of, you know, Moscow is the city, the best city in the world, and giving its official stamp of approval when artists who previously created really critical works are willing to come to the state and, like, paint, I don't know, big murals of Mayakovsky and Maya Plisetskaya in a Soviet ballerina and so on. And so that is what the aesthetic really becomes by the late. No, no, no. Two thousand and tens.
- [15:56]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Got it. That's really interesting to think about. This kind of tension with the state. Is that happening kind of outside of post Soviet Russia? Like, is that sort of dynamic there in the broader post Soviet sphere too? Or is it spreading in different ways?
- [16:11]
Dr. Alexis Lerner
So it is. And I believe that there's something about regime type here. So we see these big state sponsored murals in Poland, Kazakhstan, Russia, Azerbaijan, but we don't necessarily see them in some of the other states and certainly not created by the state like they. They might be big murals, but they're often created illegally or by artists themselves. So there is something here about regimes moving from sort of hybrid, authoritarian maybe to something more consolidated. And the degree to which they use these big murals to shape public narratives about sort of unity and what the state stands for and this renewed idea of nationalism. And we see a lot of this. And even I did a book talk a few weeks ago and one of the people in the audience said, oh, I was a ballerina in Moscow and I remember seeing that mural of Maya Plisetskaya with my friends, and we were all on our way to ballet practice or whatever, and we would take pictures with it and we thought it was so inspiring. So there is a plausible deniability here that, oh, we're just making the city more beautiful, you know, we are just adding to the public space, making it brighter and happier. But again, of course, these festivals and these initiatives don't allow certain political narratives to be included and certainly nothing pornographic. This is especially true in Azerbaijan, where this became a big issue of contention. But yeah, and of course, these artists who are unwilling to paint for the state in these festivals are essentially flooded out of these public spaces and they're encouraged to, I don't know, paint in galleries or in residential districts. You know, they don't have the same access to those downtown areas. That they once did in these states that are using these large murals. And states are happy to bring artists in from Brazil and France and all over the world to paint these murals if local artists are unwilling to do so. And that, I think is really telling too.
- [18:18]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, no, that definitely is an interesting piece to keep in mind. I want to pick up, though, on a thread you mentioned earlier, the sort of second wave, right, the people that are being taught in some cases by those first few people gathering around that one at vhs. Aside from sort of, I suppose, that kind of lineage of who you were taught by, are there any other ways we sort of distinguish second wave graffiti in terms of techniques or goals or anything like that?
- [18:44]
Dr. Alexis Lerner
Second wave graffiti also arguably became very political. And so if the first wave, and this is outside of the festivals, if the first wave was about testing out ideas and thinking about color theory and paint and the surfaces you're painting on, of course a wooden door is different than a subway underpass is different than a stone wall. The second wave is more about politics. This is, this is a time when people start explicitly painting about leaders, about political parties, about policies that they disagree with. And something I found is that this differs from regime type to regime type. So in some states, for example, more consolidated authoritarian states, you're going to see more pro democratic, content specific critiques of leaders like, you know, I hate Lukashenko or whatever, or there's a really nice one in, I think it was 2018 in Moscow. A tsar can only be a tsar as long as someone believes him to be a tsar. Of course, using the word tsar to talk about the tsarist era of Russia. But the implication is that someone like President Putin can only be the leader of a country as long as people approve him to be a leader of said country and believe him to be the rightful leader of said country. That's a little bit different than a hybrid authoritarian state where we see more about different specific policies. In Prague, for example, we see a lot about corruption. Well, maybe this isn't a hybrid authoritarian state, but in some states we see more about corruption. More about, for example, in Kyrgyzstan today, there's a lot about domestic violence and human trafficking and treatment of women. And then in liberal democratic, democratic states like Prague, we would see corruption. Things about the G8 or now the G7 critiques of Europe. No to gentrification. There's a lot of art about gentrification, for example, in contemporary Berlin. And of course, today those states have a lot of pro Ukraine content on the walls as well.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's really interesting. The kind of general trend of political sorts of things. But of course, what the politics are and what the context in which those politics can be talked about is very different. Thinking then about this idea of kind of the different surfaces, right, as you said, you know, wood is different or a subway underpass is different, but also where they are makes a difference too. So can you tell us about some of the choices made between kind of not just what the graffiti is saying, but where it is and how that contributes to the politics?
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Dr. Alexis Lerner
My absolute favorite Second Wave example of what you're talking about, the integration of space and location with graffiti, is that of Misha Most, who is writing, I don't know, around the second wave era, Article 29 of the Russian Constitution, onto a wall adjacent to the Kremlin. And this is. I mean, you can see the Kremlin, right, in the background of the photograph of this, of this Image. And Article 29 of the Russian Constitution is all about freedom of ideas, freedom of speech, protection for. For having different opinions and so on. And the proximity of this basically freehand writing to the seat of Russian political power was very intentional. To say, hey, reader, this is your constitutional right. Do you know about your rights? But also to comment on using an illegal form of expression, to comment on censorship. This idea that people don't know their rights and we have to use these illegal channels in order to help them understand what rights they have, that's really, really powerful. Another example of this is using. It's a stencil, and it says, I love independent courts. I love free speech. This is in 2012, in March, right around the time of the election in Moscow. And the idea that someone had to write I love free speech on the walls using graffiti is very tongue in cheek and indicates that we do not have access to free speech specifically in that state. And as you said, there's more beyond Russia, of course, too. And there's something specific about where something exists. So, for example, in Minsk In Belarus, around 2011, there would be an abandoned parking garage on the outskirts of the city, and you would have Pahonia, which is a symbol sort of. It's a. It's a old symbol of identity used in contemporary Belarus to. As a. As a symbol used by the opposition. And you would see that kind of in a. In a space where maybe. Maybe people wouldn't necessarily go unless they knew that that was where sort of this countercultural community was collecting. Another example is in Berlin, for example, today, a more liberal, democratic state where we have sort of blue. Who's a Very famous graffiti artist painting sort of a faceless figure chained to his capitalist desires. He's wearing a watch on both wrists, and the watch is chained together and that hovered over a tent city. And the watch is gold, right? Indicating sort of this. This being trapped by. By money and your work and sort of these. These sort of ties. And so this is a really powerful, I think, commentary on. On what matters in life and, you know, what possessions we are owed. There's also a really good example from Riga to think more liberal, democratic examples where, you know, in Riga, in Independence Square, there's this Lady, Lady Liberty, or Lady Freedom, and she has three stars that she holds over her head, and she's sort of a figure, a symbol of Latvian pride or Latvian identity. And here we have a graffiti like, right down the. Down the road, know, a couple steps away from that beautiful statue of Lady, Lady Liberty being pushed through, or Lady Freedom, rather, being pushed through a meat grinder, which is a common critique that we see throughout the Baltics of sort of Baltic national identity here, Latvian national identity being forced to accommodate European norms and how that's undesirable, perhaps, for some segments of the society in Latvia. So it's a really interesting way that space can integrate with art. Of course, it's always intentional. Right. An artist chooses the colors with great intention, chooses where the art will be located with great intention, what kind of surface it's on, what it says. Something really interesting that I've noticed over the years is when artists will use the national language, like Hungarian or Estonian, as opposed to English or. Or even Russian. For example, in Prague, it might say something anti Russian in Russian, whereas in Belarus, it might say something anti Belarusian in English. And it ultimately matters, according to the artist, who is the audience. So who is intended to read this? And if you take a photo of it and put it on the Internet, the Internet will last long beyond any transient graffiti on the wall. So it has a much larger audience.
- [26:17]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's a really interesting aspect to this. But I want to talk a little bit more about kind of something you've mentioned a number of times, but we haven't yet dived into, and I want to make sure we do. Which is, of course, the extent to which doing any of this graffiti, kind of regardless of where you put it, isn't always legal, Right? Some of it is, some of it isn't. We've talked about that in terms of kind of whether or not you do what the state wants with the festivals. But. But how might we be thinking about this? Sort of licit, illicit behavior type thing and kind of some of the behaviors around it, like you have in the book some examples of maybe putting up the graffiti in that place is like fine, or at least kind of not definitely a problem. But if you do it at 2 in the morning, then like that raises some other issues. So can we talk about this sort of not just where it is, but when and what the law says?
- [27:11]
Dr. Alexis Lerner
In the book I have a whole chapter that uses the framework of Bakhtin on the chronotope and applies it to this type of graffiti writing as though graffiti was a narrative. And I play around with this idea. The chronotope is sort of the intersection of the temporal, the spatial and the reader's interaction. And so I suggest that there are a few different chronotopes at play here. And the first is of course the midnight chronotope. And that's kind of what we think of when we think of graffiti. It's someone going out, stealing some paint from a store, going out at 2am, running from the police, writing with impunity. This is sort of what we think of. And of course when the, when the day breaks and the people with suits, you know, wearing, carrying their briefcase, walking down that same street, they might see the same graffiti, but they never actually encountered the artists themselves. And so this, this very, very specific temporal space, specifically that midnight graffiti exists within. And the festivals that I talked about before, they do something really different and they, they co opt. So I have an entirely new chronotope. This like co op, the chronotope of the Chrome, the co opted graffiti festival. And here we have artists that are coming out from the shadows into the light, maybe signing their name, explicitly writing on behalf of the state, going from writing very subversive critical content or at the minimum illegal content. And all of a sudden they are painting for the state, they are maybe getting money to do so. They are not, you know, getting the free paint or stealing the paint. They are getting offered any kind of paint they wish. They are in fact these festivals, they, the state will often pay for a lift, right? So that machine that you need to get higher or lower on a wall so you can make a really big mural, they get prime real estate in terms of where that mural is located. These are often these four or five story buildings, really beautiful, right downtown where they get a lot of foot traffic, a lot of people can see their work. You know, there's music at these festivals, there's, there's food trucks, right? And there's Kids running around. It takes something that used to be in the shadows, running from the police, you know, carrying your backpack and your balaclava to painting right out in the open, taking your time, leisurely doing so. And so that really changed the nature of graffiti. And so it made it so that people who, even though they're writing I hate Lukashenko on the wall of a bus stop or making a sticker of Viktor Orban wearing Mickey Mouse ears with the word Vicky Mouse at the time of the Hungarian elections in 2010, those are really dwarfed by these big murals and these big sort of approved areas where graffiti can be created. And I think when you're talking about these approved spots, I think of a really great example of the dominance of these state co opted narratives over these traditional spaces where free expression could happen. I think of the example of Yuri Zhukov. There's this big mural right on the Arbot, like this walking pedestrian street in Moscow and this huge mural of General Zhukov from World War II. He's a famous Red army general and he's very decorated. He's in military uniform and he's quite literally looking down, he's looking out. But the mural itself faces Tsoi Wall. Now, Tsoi wall is in honor of Victor Tsoi. It's a space where people would write lyrics of Victor Tsois which are seen to be a bit subversive, especially in the late Soviet era, but they would still do so through the post Soviet period. And they would gather there as a place where people would play music and hang out. And it was often like a very countercultural space. So we have this big mural of Yuri Zhukov looking down. I'm sorry, not Jerry. Of General Zhukov looking down over soy wall. And this is symbolic of the way in which public spaces and public art has been used by the state to erase or flood out or at minimum just threaten the future of this kind of free expression.
- [31:37]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's a really interesting comparison. And kind of goes back to the way in which the festivals aren't just a sort of one off disruption. Right. Like they create this whole new way of thinking about and conceptualizing graffiti. But also like who gets to do art and what does it mean to be an artist and kind of who gets to make those sorts of decisions. When we look at kind of this. The content of it though, are we seeing the same sorts of things if we look at graffiti that maybe seems, I don't want to say less political because it's not right. But like some of the examples you've Given us around, you know, this leader with the Mickey Mouse ears, or, you know, justice is being perverted. Like, that's in many ways quite directly targeted at, like, political leaders. Whereas you did mention earlier a few examples around graffiti about, like, violence against women, for instance. Right. Which is obviously still political, but is a bit different in terms of the focus. Do we see differences in terms of, like, how that graffiti is treated or where it's placed, or is it sort of all within the context of what you've already been telling us about?
- [32:42]
Dr. Alexis Lerner
I'll give the story of my grandfather's home. So my grandfather's home in Munkac, it's in Western Ukraine now, You know, at the time it was Hungary. Now it's Mukachevo in Western Ukraine. It was Mukach, Hungary. And when I was going to Western Ukraine to do field work, he came, pulled me aside before and showed me, you know, here's where my home was. I wrote my name on it before I got on the Kastner train during World War II and was, you know, sent away by my family to. During the Holocaust. And I went to his home and I found his name. And I have a photo of it in the book. And underneath his name or around his name, there are Jewish stars everywhere. And I thought this was really interesting. It was kind of an example of using the outside of the packaging, if you will, here, the packaging being the external walls of the home, to indicate something about what was inside the package here, the contents of said home. And so if he was saying, this is my home. This is where I lived, here's my name, the Jewish stars around his name indicated to me a transition from first person to third person. Right. Here's what type of person lived here. Here's the kind of thing you would find inside this home, kind of person you would find inside this home. And so there's a lot of social issues that come up throughout the region, particularly about Holocaust memory. World War II memory. I found in Lodz, Poland, a sticker of a Jew crying in traditional garb, holding a Torah. So the, you know, the five books of Moses. I saw a Holocaust survivor jumping roped with barbed wit. I'm sorry, jumping roped with barbed wire in Berlin. I also saw, of course, the big mural of Anne Frank in Berlin. And what these tell me these, you know, some of these are. Are not necessarily full of vitriol, but there are many examples that are right. We have Roma get out or Jews are vermin on the wall of a Jewish private school. And this Shows me that there's agency here not just for the people that are interested in talking about the issues that are important to them, but also for the state. So, for example, if the state can decide what content remains in public spaces, there's this very famous story in Minsk about these two DJs who are seen as symbols of the protest movements in 2020 in Belarus that, you know, there were murals about them that were consistently put up and the state would take them down and the people would put them up again and the state would take them down again. If the state can so quickly take down these murals of what it sees to be politically, you know, politically confrontational, but allows Jews or vermin to remain in the public space for an indefinite amount of time, that seems to me to be really problematic. I will say overall, in terms of what issues, whether political or social, remain in a public space, it's often the issues that are important to a local community. And so I'm originally from the Detroit area and you know, in the city of Detroit, there's for example, the Packard plant, which is in some ways a symbol of when Detroit was at its industrial strength. And when you go to the Packard plant, well, the Packard plant's being taken down. But, you know, a few years ago when I went to the Packard plant, I looked at the graffiti there. There was graffiti like at least Katrina was quick referring to Hurricane Katrina which destroyed the city of New Orleans. And so, yes, Katrina was quick. Know, the city of Detroit and the abandonment of the like, industrial project and white flight and all of that, that left a city in ruins essentially. It may look the same, but you know, this, this, this claim, at least Katrina was quick. I thought that was really poignant. And so those are issues that are important in the city of Detroit. Likewise, you know, the issues that are important in Berlin might be showing a Holocaust survivor jumping roped by with barbed wire or showing, you know, a person chained to their capitalist desires or, or whatever. Whereas the issues that are important in a more consolidated authoritarian state may be political leaders and political officials and so on and, and calls for democracy. And that just may be that those are the important things locally that people want to talk about. Because after all, anyone with a spray can or a permanent marker or Sharpie can, can go out in the streets and contribute to these public discourse. This public discourse.
- [37:29]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's a really interesting point about kind of what's there. And also, as you said, what's allowed to stay there is a big part of it as well. Was there anything that particularly Surprised you in, well, going to all these places, seeing all of this, and then kind of making sense of the archive and putting together the book.
- [37:46]
Dr. Alexis Lerner
One of the most surprising experiences I had was in Moscow. And I'll preface that, you know, I had people follow me with earpieces in Belarus and, you know, I had neo Nazis chase me in Poland and Ukraine. And so I had, you know, lots of experiences that were concerning but not surprising, for better or worse. What was surprising to me perhaps was going out with Basket, who again, is a very. The grandfather of graffiti. Late at night, one night in Moscow. And it was so exciting, right? He's like, okay, meet me at midnight at this metro station. And we go to the metro. And the metro in Moscow is very beautiful, right? All this ornate art, public art there. And so we go, go to this stop and we get the snacks and supplies and we get some paint cans and then we go to another stop and we walk through this old kind of industrial space that's been repurposed as an artist space, which is very common there. And we go through this door and up the stairwell and down through, out through this courtyard and through another doorway and then so on, and the lights are off and we get to this final location. I'm like, okay, we're going to paint something really amazing. And it turned out to be a third party Apple reaction, you know, Apple retailer or resale shop. And so like an iPhone kind of third party store. And he was there to paint the logo for it. And I thought to myself, wow, this is not what I expected. We were there for, you know, hours painting, painting this mural on the wall of this Apple store. And it, to me, it was really telling that, you know, people still need to make a living. And, and I asked him about it. I said, you know, is this something that people give you a hard time about? And he says, no. You know, everybody understands that we have to make a living, we have to support our families, and this is our skill set and this is how we do it. And there are some artists again, that think that it's very, very concerning for someone to paint, paint for companies or corporations, even international corporations. But I think this was a really interesting experience for me and something that I didn't see coming. We can't look at graffiti as existing within a vacuum. It's really an integrated part of society overall. People, this is their lives, right? And they can't only create subversive content. It also reminds me of during the elections in 2012, there were all these artists that were so critical in 2008 and 2009. And they would paint about the war in Georgia. And all of a sudden they were making these large murals for the state of all of these Soviet heroes. And I thought to myself, how could these people be doing this? Isn't this against what they stand for? And it tells us that it's a bigger part of society and we have to look at it holistically. And of course, if they're not going to paint for the state, someone else will. And again, someone else will get that paycheck. And so we. So this was really surprising to me throughout my work.
- [41:08]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah. And I mean, I think it goes to the point that is so evident from the massive amount of work that you've done. Kind of all the different nuances is that nothing is sort of all one thing or all the other.
- [41:17]
Dr. Alexis Lerner
Right.
- [41:18]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And that's true in the arts and that's true in the artists as well. So thank you for kind of letting us go along with you, I suppose, on a fraction of the journeys that you've gone on. And it does make me curious whether this is something you're still working on. I mean, you mentioned a website. I don't know if you want to mention that for a moment or give us a sneak peek of anything else you might have going on, even if it's unrelated.
- [41:42]
Dr. Alexis Lerner
Right. So I am working on an online gallery with some librarians and this is really exciting. We're making it so you can click through to the gallery and see for example, all the art that's about, I don't know, gentrification or all the art that's about Budapest, you know, in a particular year, whatever it is. Right. You can see, see, you can use all these like filters to see the different parts of the archive. It's a huge undertaking, as you might imagine. But that's something we're working on and it's very exciting. And also unrelated perhaps. I'm looking at co optation in a totally different sense. I'm looking at political opposition in this new project. I'm looking at political opposition leaders throughout the region in all 15 post Soviet states. And what sort of aspects of their biography help to explain why they are co op, you know, why they get co opted or repressed or successfully tolerated and allowed to run for office in a given election year. And I find that one of the aspects of their biography that really stands out is their ties abroad. And so for at least this was overall one of the, the features that seem to stand out. And so if they had strong ties. If they have strong prominence in the west, they tended to be less likely to be repressed and perhaps more likely to be co opted. And by that I mean given some kind of state benefit in exchange for their loyalty, at least in an election year. So that's what I'm working on now. I'm also working on sort of a coffee table book version of my book, which is really exciting and and can't wait to share it with all of your listeners.
- [43:24]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that all does sound very exciting. So for anyone who wants to dive into the world now, they can, of course, read the book we've been discussing titled Post Soviet Free Speech in Authoritarian States, published by the University of Toronto Press in 2025. Alexis, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [43:42]
Dr. Alexis Lerner
My pleasure. Thank you so much again for having me. It's been a blast.
- [43:46]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Sam.