As Americans who recognize our lives have unalterably changed since the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center buildings in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC, we can empathize with the much more traumatic effect on Russian minds and psyches generated by the break up of the Soviet Union in 1991.  The dissolution of the Soviet Union was not just a wrenching political change, but the implosion of an ideologically framed culture.
Unfortunately, the magnitude of this dislocation was not understood by the Harvard technocrats who traveled to Moscow in the early 90's to lend assistance.  But it was well understood both aesthetically and at a gut level by the husband and wife artists, Valera and Natasha Cherkashin.  In the same way an insightful interpretation of the unofficial art in the 70's and 80's foreshadowed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cherkashins' art portrays the gradual adjustments of a painful but necessary societal transition.
The Cherkashins installations and photographic collages demonstrate, that a society cannot move on until it arrives at a mature acceptance of its past. Their work reflects the understanding that a socially mature and healthy acceptance does not try to blot out the people's cultural history by destroying all Soviet icons. Rather it comes to terms with those cultural and ideological aspects that need to be rejected while simultaneously maintaining physical representations of the icons that offer both an aesthetic and historically valid memorialization of the past.  Thus, the importance of the Cherkashins' famous beauty contest of the Moscow subway station statues. 
Even in those situations where statues or other artworks were not stigmatized by past repressions -- it is only human nature to no longer notice what one experiences on a daily basis. The historical role of the artist is to help us see anew.  The Cherkashins fulfill this role in an exemplary manner.
To trace their photographic collages from the late 80's to the beginning of the 21st century is to see the physical, economic and social change being experienced by the Russian people. Superficially, Cherkashin's work traces this transition and changes to the apparel of the Russian people -- but the deeper and more fundamental change is shown in the carriage and physical expressions of the people.
For those who seek an understanding of how this post-Soviet transition period is affecting the Russian people, they have no better guide than looking and truly seeing the Cherkashins' installations and photographic works from the late 80's onward.

Nina Gruen and Claude Gruen
Art collectors
San Francisco, USA