Infrastructures of Soviet Underground Culture

Institutions of the late Soviet underground (here understood following Peter Bürger as the norms governing the production and reception of works of art) consisted of atypical, small-scale, ephemeral, self-organized infrastructures such as, for example, samizdat periodicals, readings, exhibitions, conferences held in private apartments. Geographically not limited to Moscow and Leningrad, they allowed participants to carry on their creative activities in an uncensored way; nevertheless, they were shaped in a complex dialectic with highbrown, authoritative forms such as thick journals or academic seminars. Alter native topographies were established and symbolically charged places were temporarily taken and appropriated. In the second half of the 1970s underground institutions under went a gradual process of consolidation and served to the conceptualization of the so- called second culture in reference to neglected pre-revolutionary legacy and to Soviet of ficial culture.