Sothebys July 1988 sale of contemporary Soviet art made US $3million and was a watershed in the opening of Soviet art to the West. Artists who were once hanassed by the KGB now have to face the unfamiliar world of the Western marketplace.

Filmed right on the spot , USSR Art captures the excitement, the anxiety and the confusion that comes with radical social change, featuring candid discussions with Soviet artists who now find themselves celebrities in a world they barely understand.

They are "trapped between a repressive past and an uncertain future, in the hands of history and there is no turning back."