Beneath the facade of total conformity in the Soviet Union, a dynamic underground community of artists and intellectuals worked in forced isolation. Rejecting the mandates of state-sanctioned Socialist Realist art, these dissident artists pursued diverse creative directions in their private practice. When they attempted to display their work publicly in 1974, the carefully crafted facade of Soviet society cracked, and the West became aware of a politically subversive undercurrent in Soviet cultural life. Responding to the international condemnation of the censorship, Soviet officials allowed and encouraged the emigration of the nonconformist artists to the West. This dissertation analyzes the foundation and growth of the nonconformist artistic movement in the Soviet Union, focusing on a key group of artists who reached artistic maturity in the Brezhnev era and began forging connections in the West. The first two chapters of the dissertation center on works that were, by and large, produced before emigration to the West. In particular, I explore the growing awareness of artists like Oleg Vassiliev of their native artistic heritage, especially the work of Russian avant-garde artists like Kazimir Malevich. I look at how Vassiliev, in a search for an alternative form of expression to the mandated form of art, took up the legacy of nineteenth-century Realism, avant-garde abstraction, and Socialist Realism. From there, I investigate issues of text and communication in Soviet society, considering both the official language of power from state propaganda, to the coded language of the communal apartments, shaped by the awareness of constant surveillance. In this section, the artworks of Komar and Melamid, Erik Bulatov, and Ilya Kabakov are discussed. The second half of the dissertation focuses on works produced by artists who left Russia for various western capitals. At issue are works that take a retrospective point-of-view on the experience of life in the Sov (open full item for complete abstract)