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The Last Soviet Artist is a collection of graphic reportages published by n+1 in 2025. The book was written over the course of the Victoria Lomasko’s trips across the former Soviet republics. The first part of the book describes society in Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Georgia and the North Caucasus: gender rights, grassroots initiatives, fragments of Soviet heritage and new trends. The second part focuses on the Belarusian Revolution of 2022 and the last major protests in Russia on the eve of the full scale invasion of Ukraine: what happens to the lives of ordinary people in times of historical change? The third part of the book was written in exile. These three sections are united by a central subject: generational conflict in the post-Soviet space. The book won the 2022 Free Voice award from PEN Catalan and Prix Couilles au Cul pour le Courage Artistique at the Festival de BD d’Angoulême.
Victoria Lomasko’s (b. 1978) practice of graphic reportage synthesizes image and text, taking the form of novels, journalism, comics, paintings and monumental murals. A renowned dissident voice in the highly censored environment of contemporary Russia, Lomasko’s seminal graphic novels, including Other Russias and Forbidden Art, have an honest style exposing the country’s inequalities and injustices whilst amplifying and defending the plight of Russia’s many voiceless and unseen communities. Travelling across Russia and neighbouring countries, often at huge personal risk, her work often embraces a magical realist sensibility as a method of processing subjective and visceral experiences. Lomasko’s most recent novel, The Last Soviet Artist, finished three weeks before Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine, is a timely work anticipating the region’s seismic political changes that won the 2022 Free Voice award from PEN Catalan and Prix Couilles au Cul pour le Courage Artistique, Festival de BD d’Angoulême. In 2024, a movie titled Tree of Violence about work the artist completed on the eve of the war was distributed by TV-ARTE.
