The Bulldozer Exhibition was an unofficial art exhibition on a vacant lot in the Belyayevo urban forest by Moscow and Leningrad avant-garde artists on 15 September 1974. The exhibition was forcefully broken-up by a large police force that included bulldozers and water cannons, hence the name.

Socialist realism was the official cultural doctrine of the Soviet Union that mandated an idealized representation of life under socialism in literature and the visual arts. The doctrine was first proclaimed by the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 as approved method for Soviet cultural production in all media. Following World War II, socialist realism was adopted by countries politically aligned with the Soviet Union. The primary official objective of socialist realism was "to depict reality in its revolutionary development" although no formal guidelines concerning style or subject matter were provided.