Russian art is, our mind’s eye tells us, a rather sober affair, involving snow, communal drudgery and a sense of sinister political mission. Or it’s Julie Christie crying into her sable collar. Evil Empire versus high romance. In the contemporary art world, the taste for things à la russe isn’t there yet, but this may change with Moscow Breakthrough, a month-long series of events and conferences on Russian contemporary art taking place in London.

Central to the programme is an exhibition at the Bargehouse Gallery of work by more than 20 Russian contemporary artists. However, having just been to Moscow to meet the artists and gallerists associated with this exhibition, I would say that contemporary art still hasn’t got rid of its Soviet headache. The presence of the old ideology (art serves political and social imperatives) hangs like a grey fog over creative practice.

Walking through an exhibition of Russian Pop Art at the New Tretyakov Gallery in central Moscow, I found myself encountering a narrative of envy and strategic tomfoolery as the display of late 20th-century Russian art unfolded. Soviet Russia isn’t somewhere you would associate with Pop Art, because there wasn’t an approved consumer culture (and hardly any supermarkets) from the 1950s to the 1980s and Pop Art, as its American progenitors had it, fetishised consumer goods.

But America’s influence is felt in almost all the work produced in this period (except, interestingly, that of Ilya Kabakov, a true original): joke Jasper Johns paintings, fake Andy Warhols, louche Lichtensteins follow one after another — Pop Art used as a style through which a language of protest could safely be made.

Many of the artists represented in the latter half of the Tretyakov exhibition — itself a milestone in Moscow’s cultural landscape — are represented in Moscow Breakthrough. Vladimir Dubosarsky, born 1964, and Alexander Vinogradov, born 1963, play with fame in the form of large-scale painted assemblages of Western fashion icons, which line their installations like wallpaper.

Cast together, these figures project a lurid sense of overblown blandness. I’m not sure how much we should think of Russians as innocents when it comes to the full onslaught of Western celebrity trivia — they seem to lap it up, in fact — but maybe this is what the artists find intriguing. More disturbing is the work of Vassily Tzugolov, born 1957, whose Stray Bullet series — cartoon-like paintings of great figurative dexterity — show drive-by shootings, kidnap and torture. Welcome to modern Russia.

For a dose of humour, you have to turn to Oleg Kulik. Visitors to his performance at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in March 2003, where he stood naked and covered with mirror-ball tiles on a platform suspended from the ceiling, revolving slowly to the sound of From Russia With Love, will be familiar with his brand of attention-seeking mischief.

Kulik is probably the most sexual person I have met: “There are two lines in my work — bestiality and transparency. Bestiality as a form of openness, honesty and complete emotional, physical bareness and freedom. Transparency as a pivotal aspect of how I move from responsibility to somewhere else,” he says.

Sex and outrage are present in everything he does, and he and some colleagues have been called defilers of their country’s reputation, with nationalist TV programmes lambasting Kulik in highly personal terms. Don’t expect anything nice from Lolita, his new work for the London show.

If Kulik represents the hardcore of performance practice, then Dmitry Tsvetkov’s beautifully embroidered machineguns and maps offer a gentler critique of a country still armed to the teeth. Smothering them in folkloric tenderness, he neutralises them. This is art working as an antidote to the policies of the state.

Remove the suspicious oafishness of the Russian state dinosaurs, and Kulik, Tsvetkov and their kind lose their useful antagonist. Fashion chic is one way forward, perhaps: the collaborative group AES+F produce super-slick C-prints showing boys and girls posing in their underwear while clasping mortars and bombs. The images are strangely beautiful and the drawings for the prints stunning.

If there is a star in this exhibition, whose work transcends political conditions, it has to be Sergey Shehovtsov, who, with Valery Koshlyakov, creates astonishingly adept sculptures out of furniture foam. Saatchi has, I’m told, already bought Shehovtsov’s work, so watch this space.

Moscow Breakthrough is at Bargehouse Gallery, Oxo Tower Wharf, Bargehouse Street, London SE1 (www.oxotower.co.uk/Moscow.html 020-7401 2255), until Nov 20

Recurring themes

Children
Almost always pretty and innocent.

Weaponry
Everywhere. Too many guns, and too few people to lock them up.

Nakedness
A favourite strategy of Russian male performance artists.

Embroidery and folkloric traditions
Beneath the stern faces, we are warm-hearted people.

Political double-entendre
Words and symbols littering second-rate pieces of work.