While art mavens have been fretting about the identity of the Next New Thing, it's already arrived. I'm talking about contemporary Soviet art. During the past few weeks, two shows of it have opened (Natalya Nesterova at Hal Bromm, and Igor Kopystianski and Svetlana Kopystianskaya at Phyllis Kind), and, by the time you read this, Guernsey's huge auction of mostly contemporary Soviet art will have taken place. At least two traveling museum exhibitions are also scheduled - the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth's 1989 show of 20 youngish Soviet and American painters, and the Seattle Art Museum's exclusively Soviet show timed to coincide with the 1990 Goodwill Games.

How can we account for this recent activity? Is it simply a market-inspired trend with a shelf life shorter than the time it will take to master the Soviet artists' tongue-twisting names? Or is it, as Chicago art dealer Bill Struve suggests, a once-in-a-lifetime opening to an entire culture that has been, until recently, closed to us?

Struve is one of those dealers who have pioneered the sale of unofficial Soviet art. (Art by Soviet émigrés, on the other hand, has been shown frequently during the last 10 years.) The short history of the American market's regular access to contemporary Soviet art began in 1985 with the creation of Sovart, an alliance between New York-based German banker Volkert Klaucke and consulting firm Livet Reichard Co., Inc. Klaucke supplied the Soviet connections and Livet Reichard the marketing expertise. In 1986, they took a group of art dealers that included Struve and Chicago/New York dealer Phyllis Kind to Moscow to select work for the Chicago Art Fair. At that time, according to Kind, the group's visits to nonunion/unofficial artists' studios were monitored by the KGB, and works were substituted for some of those they'd chosen. The selections that did make it to Chicago's Navy Pier - including works by Grisha Brushkin, the artist whose $416,000 painting paced the contemporary works at Sotheby's Moscow auction last summer - sold well. In May 1987, Kind presented a five-person show in her New York gallery called "Direct From Moscow," and the rest, as they say, is history. (The first major American show of unofficial Soviet art was actually Komar and Melamid's "smuggled" debut at Ronald Feldman's in 1977 before the duo had left the Soviet Union.)

Sovart's role was to grease the wheels to purchase art that was not officially recognized in a society in which private citizens cannot own foreign currency. Go-betweens - such as Sovart - tend to hold the cards in such situations, but from the outset improvisation has been the order of the day. Struve has been able to bypass Sovart by establishing a sympathetic contact in Mezhkniga, the expediting agency for foreign trade. Livet Reichard is no longer regularly involved with Sovart, which arranged the Nesterova show at Hal Bromm and with whom Kind is breaking relations. Klaucke has been accused, by numerous artists, dealers, and other involved parties, of not paying artists, of not telling artists where artworks have been placed, and of demanding first rights to works he's helped export from the Soviet Union. (Klaucke could not be reached for comment.)

On the Soviet side, the situation is - to put it tactfully - chaotic. The conflicting policies of the artists' union and the Ministry of Culture are a microcosm of Gorbachev's ongoing headache with the entrenched bureaucracies. Art is customarily exported either through the Union of Soviet Artists or through the International Salon in Moscow, which shows only official artists. (Official or union artists enjoy access to scarce art materials, studios, and exhibitions from which the government buys their works.) Lately, according to first-hand accounts confirmed by the Soviet Embassy in Washington, Pavel Horoshilov, general director (fine arts division) of the Ministry of Culture, has set up an alternative-art salon with a wider range of artists in an abandoned church known as Bolshaya Polyanka. Given the spectacular success of Sotheby's Moscow auction (which brought in $3.4 million on a presale estimate of $1 million), it seems clear that some elements within the government have awakened to the fact that cultural production is the USSR's most likely source of foreign currency and prestige.

So far, the key players (all of them commercial) are few - essentially the handful of dealers (plus Ronald Feldman) and go-betweens I've already mentioned. An emerging kingpin is likely to be dealer Eduard Nakhamkin, who reports that he is concluding an agreement with the Ministry of Culture and the Union of Soviet Artists to wholesale the work of 50 to 60 Soviet artists, some of whom will be shown in his six New York and California galleries. The new relationship between Soviet émigrés and the Soviet government was applauded by Nakhamkin at an October 6 ceremony at which Secretary of State Shultz was awarded an honorary degree from Tel Aviv University and accepted Nakhamkin's gift of an Ernst Neizvestny sculpture to the university in his honor. The émigré art dealer remarked from the Essex House podium that "today it became possible for me to not only represent Russian émigré artists but to...represent Soviet Artists."

How all this will affect unofficial Soviet artists is difficult to predict. Many recent visitors to the Soviet Union believe that the distinction between official and unofficial artists is rapidly crumbling and that the old order seems positively unhinged. (They point to artists with hard [foreign] currency from European sales buying airplane tickets and to the new cooperative or private galleries in Moscow that are selling art for hard currency.) Artists Igor Kopystianski and Svetlana Kopystianskaya cautiously observe that "the cultural situation has not changed that much - yet." With the proceeds from recent sales, they look forward to working full-time in their studios but point out that they have not yet received the money owed them from the Sotheby's auction. (Diana Levitt of Sotheby's noted that the ministry of Culture assured the auction house that payment was imminent but that "if we haven't received confirmation soon, Lord Gowrie [chairman of Sotheby's/London] plans to return to Moscow in a few weeks to look into it." Pending resolution to this problem, Sotheby's would like to make its Moscow auction an annual event.)