An exhibition with more than 250 works of Russian and Soviet art is set to open to the public on September 14 at the Pompidou Center in Paris.
The works were donated to France's National Museum of Modern Art -- mainly by the charitable organization of Russian billionaire Vladimir Potanin.
"It's not cultural PR," said Oksana Oracheva, the director general of the Vladimir Potanin Foundation. "It's trying to communicate Russia to the world through its soul, not its politics."
The artworks by more than 60 artists span several decades of contemporary art in the U.S.S.R. and then Russia.
They cross the main movements encountered during the period 1950-2000. such as the Sots Art movement, a reaction against the official aesthetic doctrine of the state that originated in the Soviet Union in the early 1970s.