According to Victor Tupitsyn, the mission of Socialist Realism was to represent the Soviet identity and disseminate it through an official iconography. The massive presence of leaders’ icon-like portraits strongly influenced the society’s visual culture, while controlling social identification with the icons that also functioned as models. These authoritarian representations served not only to encourage identification, but they also had utopic and transreferential (historically contextualizing) functions. Contesting Socialist Realism, soc-art initiated a dialogue with the former, and gave rise to the “icons of iconoclasm”. A representative of soc-art, Boris Orlov professed to be an imperial artist: he was drawn to imperial style and art, and obsessively researched ancient totems, Roman portraits, Baroque and Classicist art as well as Stalin’s monumentalism. He tried abstracting this imperial character in his art, conceiving of it as an architectural model, then realising it as a postmodern pastiche (before postmodernism). This is how his sculptures were conceived, made of different materials and objects of different character, such as Bust in Rastrelli's Style (The Emperor), Imperial Bust or Triumphal Bouquet. Termed by him as poly-style, these works are the archetypes of artworks based on the imperial idea, while at the same time, owing to their ironical nature, they deprive similar official artworks of their gravity and convincing power.