Twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the legacy of the USSR is still being felt across former republics and satellite states, where repression and censorship keep artists and journalists in check. In train yards and dark alleyways, however, cultural expression is alive and well -- graffiti and murals that tell the lively, bitter, controversial stories over the last years, through scrawled political slogans, abstract art, and stencils of Putin. Over the past few years, Georgetown University graduate student Alexis Zimberg and her creative assistant Nicholas van Beek have journeyed through city centers, abandoned buildings, and highway overpasses in Hungary, Russia, Belarus, the Czech Republic, and Latvia researching street art and graffiti in the region. What they found was a brilliant underground of political ferment -- forced into the backstreets by governments ranging from Belarus's autocratic Lukashenko regime to Russia's uneasy pseudo-democracy to Latvia's struggling technocracy. 

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