The archive of Leonid Talochkin—the "chronicler of unofficial art"—was long the stuff of legend, with only a select few having ever seen the collection in person. Yet, perhaps even more significant than the artworks or the photographs of exhibitions are Talochkin’s own notes, which could serve as the foundation for an exhaustive study of post-war Soviet and Russian art. A vital component of these records consists of his diaries.

*Tomorrow — See Yesterday* (*Zavtra — sm. vchera*) marks the first publication of Leonid Talochkin’s diaries. Personal entries are interspersed with accounts of exhibitions, concerts, and artistic gatherings, alongside glimpses of everyday life and expansive, thoughtful reflections. Together, they form a detailed portrait not only of the artistic milieu of the 1960s—the period covered in this volume—but of Soviet society as a whole. Above all, Talochkin writes about people: those he interacted with, loved, admired, or found himself disappointed by. His diaries fill gaps in the historical record, covering topics such as the work of kinetic artists—including Vyacheslav Koleichuk and Lev Nusberg—Yury Mamleev’s writing of his novel *The Shatuny* (*The Tramps*), the emergence of the Yuzhinsky Circle, the creative trajectory of Boris Kozlov, and events involving Lev Kropivnitsky and the Lianozovo Group. Alongside key figures of the cultural underground, the names of others—now largely forgotten—also appear.

*Tomorrow — See Yesterday* is the result of more than seven years of work, carried out in collaboration with the State Tretyakov Gallery (a partnership that also yielded the 2022 catalog *I Knew Them All*). Research into the archive of Leonid Talochkin is still ongoing: work is currently underway on a corpus of his diary entries from the 1970s, as well as an expanded index of names.

Leonid Talochkin (1936–2002) was an archivist and collector of Soviet unofficial art from the 1960s to the 1990s. In the early 1960s, Talochkin became part of a circle of Moscow nonconformist artists and began collecting their work. By the mid-1970s, his collection comprised approximately 600 pieces, and he had dedicated himself entirely to the unofficial art scene and the task of documenting it. To avoid prosecution under the Soviet-era law against "parasitism" (evading socially useful labor), Talochkin was compelled to take on various jobs, including working as a doorman, a stoker, a technician, and a night watchman.