The rebellion of art: lessons from Soviet internationalism’s collapse for contemporary globalism

This paper examines the collapse of Soviet internationalism through the lens of artistic resistance, using cultural analysis and chaos theory to explore tensions between unity and diversity within universalist projects. It analyzes the works of Sergei Parajanov, Andrei Tarkovsky, Vladimir Vysotsky, Bulat Okudzhava, and Chingiz Aitmatov, whose films, songs, and narratives did not oppose Soviet ideology from outside but operated within its symbolic framework, exposing its internal limits. Through folklore, spiritual motifs, and personal memory, these artists rendered visible the fragility of ideological coherence and the contradictions embedded in the internationalist project. While art did not cause the Soviet Union’s unravelling, it amplified systemic dissonances and made legible the symbolic limits of imposed identity. Conceptualised as a ‘strange attractor,’ Soviet internationalism generated bounded instability rather than equilibrium, orbiting an unattainable ideal of unity. The paper concludes by situating this analysis in structural – rather than historical – relation to contemporary frameworks such as cosmopolitanism, pluriversalism, and global citizenship, suggesting that sustainable internationalism depends not on cultural standardisation but on the capacity to host multiplicity, with art functioning as a critical diagnostic of universalist ambition.