Engineering the Soviet artist's soul

This thesis examines the art historical discourse surrounding Soviet Socialist Realism. The author critiques the recent emergence of scholarship on this topic for blindly privileging and imposing the liberal humanist values of self-determination and artistic autonomy onto a radically different culture. Ultimately, the author argues that art historians of the Soviet era must interrogate their historically and politically constituted biases in order to allow Socialist Realism a space to exist outside of western hegemony.