Once considered the art form meant to inspire and nurture socialist spirit, in the late 1980s Soviet mosaics faced complete oblivion. This was the result of a political crisis followed by the further collapse of the USSR in 1991.

“Mosaic reminds me of our hopes for the future,” my grandfather, a certified geologist who travelled around the forests of the USSR, commented on his attitude towards Soviet mosaics. It wasn’t until recently that Soviet mosaics got a second chance to draw the public eye, with the release of Decommunized: Ukrainian Soviet Mosaics (2017). The book is the first extensive study of the coloured monumental panels created in the period from 1950 to 1980. It accumulates hundreds of photographs taken by Yevgen Nikiforov, a young Kyiv-born photographer. During the times of Euromaidan, the annexation of Crimea and the beginning of the war in Donbas, when the mood towards Russia and the USSR soured in Ukraine – and monuments of Lenin were demolished across the country – Yevgen went on a trip to over 100 Ukrainian cities and villages to preserve the memory of Soviet monumental art while it was still intact. He discovered more than 1000 surviving Soviet mosaics, some of which were destroyed just a few years later due to the decommunization law of 2015 that banned communist symbols and slogans.

The beginnings of Soviet monumental art

In 1918, following the Revolution, Vladimir Lenin presented his Monumental Propaganda plan. Th