Mr. Rabin painted still lifes and landscapes, often imbuing them with wry critiques of Soviet life, but his fame rested as much on his defiance as on his artistic ability.

In 1974 he was among the organizers of an outdoor exhibition in Moscow by so-called nonconforming artists — those who were denied exhibitions in recognized galleries and museums because they refused to limit themselves to the officially sanctioned style of the day, Socialist realism, which emphasized heroic scenes and sculptures and left no room for impressionism or abstraction or unpleasant subjects. The artists met an unforgiving resistance.

“When they gathered in an open lot on September 15,” Hedrick Smith, who was then a reporter in Moscow for The New York Times, wrote in his 1976 book “The Russians,” “they were brutally dispersed by plainclothes police dressed as workers and operating bulldozers and dump trucks.”

By some accounts, the police had to pluck Mr. Rabin from the upper reaches of a bulldozer he had clung to as it advanced on him. The aborted art show has ever since been known as the Bulldozer Exhibition.

The international reaction was so strong that a few months later the Soviets allowed another show by the nonconforming artists, but the tensions remained. Mr. Rabin continued to incur official wrath and endure the occasional arrest.