Soviet nonconformist art was Soviet art produced in the former Soviet Union outside the control of the Soviet state. The art movement started in the Stalinist era and was, in particular, outside of the rubric of Socialist Realism. Other terms used to refer to this phenomenon are Soviet counterculture, "underground art" or "unofficial art".

From the time of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 until 1932, the historical Russian avant-garde flourished and strove to appeal to the proletariat. However, in 1932 Joseph Stalin's government took control of the arts with the 1932 decree of the Bolshevik Central Committee "On the Restructuring of Literary-Artistic Organizations", which put all artists' unions under the control of the Communist Party. Two years later, Stalin instituted a policy that unified aesthetic and ideological objectives, which was called socialist realism, broadly defined as art that was, "socialist in content and realist in form." Moreover, the new policy defined four categories of unacceptable art: political art, religious art, erotic art, and "formalistic" art, which included abstraction, expressionism, and conceptual art. Beginning in 1936, avant-garde artists who were unable or unwilling to adapt to the new policy were forced out of their positions, and often sent to the gulag, as part of Stalin's Great Purges.

In the wake of World War II, referred to in Russia as The Great Patriotic War, Party resolutions were passed in 1946 and 1948, by Andrei Zhdanov, chief of the Propaganda Administration formally denouncing Western cultural influences at the start of the Cold War. Art students such as Ülo Sooster, an Estonian who later became important to the Moscow nonconformist movement, were sent to Siberian prison camps. The nonconformist artist Boris Sveshnikov also spent time in a Soviet labor camp. Oleg Tselkov was expelled from art school for 'formalism' in 1955, which from the viewpoint of the Party might have constituted an act of treason.

The death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, and Nikita Khrushchev's subsequent denunciation of his rule during his Secret Speech at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 created the "Khruschev Thaw"; a liberal atmosphere wherein artists had more freedom to create nonsanctioned work without fearing repercussions. Furthermore, Stalin's cult of personality was recognized as detrimental, and within weeks many paintings and busts bearing his likeness were removed from public places. Artists such as Aleksandr Gerasimov, who had made their careers painting idealized portraits of Stalin, were forced out of their official positions, as they had become embarrassing to the new leadership.

The "thaw" era ended quickly, when in 1962, Khrushchev attended the public Manezh exhibition (an episode known as the Manege Affair) at which several nonconformist artists were exhibiting, including Ülo Sooster with his Eye in the Egg. Khrushchev got into a public and now-famous argument with Ernst Neizvestny, sculptor (1925-2016), regarding the function of art in society. However, this altercation had the unintended effect of fomenting unofficial art as a movement. Artists could no longer hold delusions that the state would recognize their art, yet the climate had become friendly and open enough that a coherent organization had formed. Additionally, punishments for unofficial artists became less severe; they were denied admittance to the union instead of being executed.

As a "movement" nonconformist art was stylistically diverse. However, in the post-thaw era its function and role in society became clear. As the Russian curator, author and museum director Joseph Bakstein wrote,

The duality of life in which the official perception of everyday reality is independent of the reality of the imagination leads to a situation where art plays a special role in society. In any culture, art is a special reality, but in the Soviet Union, art was doubly real precisely because it had no relation to reality. It was a higher reality.... The goal of nonconformism in art was to challenge the status of official artistic reality, to question it, to treat it with irony. Yet that was the one unacceptable thing. All of Soviet society rested on orthodoxy, and nonconformism was its enemy. That is why even the conditional and partial legalization of nonconformism in the mid-1970s was the beginning of the end of the Soviet regime.

Timur Novikov was one of the leaders of St. Petersburg art in the 1980s. In 1982 his theory of "Zero Object" acted as one of the foundations of Russian conceptual art. In 1988 he founded Neo-Academism.