[1] As Joseph Bakshtein explained, "The creation of this nonconformist tradition was impelled by the fact that an outsider in the Soviet empire stood alone against a tremendous state machine, a great Leviathan that threatened to engulf him.
"[3] The central figures of the movement were Ilya Kabakov, Irina Nakhova, Viktor Pivovarov, Eric Bulatov, Andrei Monastyrski, Komar and Melamid, poets Vsevolod Nekrasov (ru), Dmitri Prigov, Lev Rubinstein, Anna Alchuk, Timur Kibirov, artist and prose writer Vladimir Sorokin, and also such writers as Viktor Yerofeyev and Julia Kissina.
So, then, we can say that our own local thinking, from the very beginning in fact, could have been called 'conceptualism'.The Moscow Conceptualist artists faced difficulties exhibiting their work in the cultural atmosphere of the late Soviet Union.
[citation needed] At the Manezh exhibit of 1962, which featured the work of many aesthetic precursors to the Moscow Conceptualists, then-Party first secretary Nikita Khrushchev excoriated the art and artists he saw there.
[citation needed] The art movement was largely ignored outside of the Soviet Union, and within it, it was confined to a narrow circle of Moscow artists and their friends.