Russia has exceptional art education and the best art school in the world. I am proud as an American that we weaponized shitty art as a cultural weapon (Pollock bukkake)

Within the former USSR, there is very, very little demand today for the socialist-realist works produced during the Stalin era. No one goes to see museum exhibitions of the visual art except as a historical oddity, and the doctrinaire literature of that time is rotting unread in myriad provincial libraries. Its own market rejected it. Meanwhile, some of the Western abstract expressionists still appeal to a decent audience of art lovers.

The USSR was selling art to fund the KGB. Stone glass houses.