A survey of artistic and intellectual life in the USSR from the post-Stalinist “Thaw” period to the collapse of the Soviet empire and its cultural aftermath in the 1990s. Topics include: the recovery of suppressed cultural memory; the fluid boundaries between official and unofficial cultures; internal and external exile; Aesopian language; alternative modes of creation and dissemination (samizdat, tamizdat, unauthorized exhibitions and concerts, etc.); Russian conceptualism and post-modernism. Taught in English, readings in English.