In the 1970s-1980s Ilya Kabakov was associated with the unofficial movement of Moscow "Romantic Conceptualism," known also as NOMA. It was not so much an artistic school, but a subculture and a way of life. (3) In the time after Khrushchev's thaw, the trials of Sinyavsky and Daniel, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, cultural life in the official publications and museums became more restricted. A group of artists, writers, and intellectuals created a kind of parallel existence in a gray zone, in a "stolen space" carved out between Soviet institutions. Stylistically, the work of the conceptualists was seen as a Soviet parallel to pop art, only instead of the advertisement culture they used the trivial and drab rituals of Soviet everyday life - too banal and insignificant to be recorded anywhere else, and made taboo not because of their potential political explosiveness, but because of their sheer ordinariness, their all-too-human scale. The conceptualists "quoted" both the Russian avant-garde and Socialist realism, as well as amateur crafts, "bad art," and ordinary people's collections of useless objects. Their artistic language consisted of Soviet symbols and emblems, as well as trivial, found objects, unoriginal quotes, slogans, and domestic trash. The word and the image collaborated in their work to create a rebus-like idiom of Soviet culture