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The laundry on the line drips with oil. The cloths represent Lake Baikal, the Yellow Sea, and the Red Sea, all of which suffered ecological disasters in the twentieth century. This painting warns future generations against the dangers of pollution.
Mikhail Rozhdestvin, To the Laundry, n.d.
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A Russian Orthodox Church is painted with a towering red smokestack on top. The church and the smokestack are connected, and the golden paint of the church turns into the red paint of the smokestack at its bottom right corner. The melding of church and industry reflects the secular character of Soviet communism, based on “the religion of progress.�
Nikolai Litvinenko, Do Not Violate the Ecology of Morality, 1989
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The branches of a tree strangle one another, locked in a deadly embrace. The image of a self-destructive tree acts as commentary on the environmental concerns in Russia in the 1990s, when people began to take stock of the damage to the environment inflicted by the Soviet government’s industrialization campaigns. Alexander Lozenko, The Tree, 1991
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