The art historian Igor Golomstock, who has died aged 88, is best known for his book Totalitarian Art (1990), the first serious study of the similarities between the socialist realist art of Stalinist Russia and the art of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Maoist China, an area of debate long considered taboo in Igor’s native country, Russia.

Igor argued that totalitarian art was not so much an artistic genre, but a cultural phenomenon with its own aesthetics and ideology, arising from the use of art as a propaganda tool of the totalitarian state. Despite the various regimes having disparate histories and cultural traditions, the artwork produced under such regimes had surprisingly similar themes – happy, hardworking families, heroic soldiers and, above all, wise and benevolent leaders – all produced in a similarly “realistic” style (though without the more unpleasant elements of reality), and often on an epic scale.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The German pavilion, foreground, faces the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition, demonstrating the closeness in style between the art of the two regimes. Photograph: Alamy

In Igor’s book, which I translated, he argued that such similar artworks demonstrated “the universality of the mechanisms of totalitarian culture”, regardless of whether the regime was on the far right or the far left – a view very much at odds with the official Soviet line.

The inspiration for the book came some 25 years earlier, when Igor was working in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. A colleague had found an illicit copy of a German art journal from the years of the Nazi-Soviet pact hidden behind library shelves. Igor showed the illustrations to a discussion group he ran for schoolchildren, asking them to name the artists. As he expected, they rattled out the names of the main Soviet artists of the Stalin years. He asked them to look more closely at a reproduction of a working-class family listening to a wireless – and they all looked bewildered. Hanging on the wall, above the heads of the family, was a portrait not of Stalin, but of Hitler. Igor, needless to say, soon had to leave the museum.

“It was then,” he wrote in his preface, “in the bowels of the totalitarian system, ‘in the belly of the whale’, that I first had the idea of this book: it arose from an intuitive sense of the strange closeness between two artistic systems that were … ideologically hostile to one another.”

Decades later, he was able to expand his initial insight into a substantial work, through the reproduction and juxtaposition of hundreds of images of Soviet, German, Italian and Chinese paintings, sculptures, architecture and posters of that period. At the time of publication his thesis seemed controversial, but one needs only to glance at the illustrations to see how easy it could be to make the same mistake as Igor’s schoolchildren. Pavel Korin’s painting of the medieval Russian warrior-prince Alexander Nevsky looks more Germanic than Russian; Alexander Gerasimov’s paintings of Soviet leaders are interchangeable with paintings of Hitler by Hermann Otto Hoyer and Heinrich Knirr.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In his book Totalitarian Art, Golomstock juxtaposed hundreds of images like these posters of Mao and Stalin, to illustrate his thesis. Composite: both Alamy

Igor was born in the old Russian city of Tver, then known as Kalinin. In 1934 his father, Naum Kojak, a Karaite Jew, was sentenced to five years in the gulag. Igor’s mother, Mary Golomstock, registered him for school under her own surname, and the parents divorced.

In 1939 Mary, together with Igor and her second husband, Iosif Taubkin, volunteered to work as a doctor in Kolyma, a huge region in the Russian far east that was in effect a single labour camp – an almost autonomous state run by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. The family remained there until 1943 and Igor witnessed much that scarred him. His antagonism towards the Soviet regime had its origin in these years.

After the family’s return to Moscow, when Igor was about 15, a change occurred in him. He described himself as having been a foul-mouthed, barely educated child. Influenced by a friend, he began reading Dostoevsky. His love of the writer stayed with him throughout his life, balanced by a hatred of Tolstoy, whom he saw as the father of socialist realism.

Igor qualified first as an accountant, in 1949, then studied art history at Moscow University. For several years he worked for the ministry of culture; one of his jobs was accompanying travelling art exhibitions the length of the Soviet Union.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lenin by Alexander Gerasimov, whose pictures of Soviet leaders were interchangeable in style with paintings of Hitler by German artists. Photograph: Alamy

In 1960, with the writer and scholar Andrei Sinyavsky – a close friend – he published the first Soviet book on Picasso. In 1965 Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, another dissident writer, were sentenced to terms in the gulag for publishing abroad. Igor was also sentenced, for “refusal to give evidence”, though in the end he received only a fine.

In 1972 he emigrated to the UK. This was during a brief period when Jews could emigrate on payment of a vast sum. Friends and sympathisers rallied: Yevgeny Pasternak, Boris Pasternak’s son, volunteered “to ransom a hundred grams of Golomstock”. Another sponsor was the British artist and critic Roland Penrose, who knew of the book on Picasso.

After several years, first at Essex and St Andrews universities, and then at Oxford, where I met him, Igor spent the rest of his life in London, making radio programmes for the BBC Russian Service. He also co-curated the exhibition Unofficial Art from the Soviet Union at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London, 1977), the first big show of its kind in the west. This included work both by artists who were already well-known, such as Ernst Neizvestny, and by artists such as Ilya Kabakov, who has since forged an international reputation.

Igor also published books about Bosch and Cézanne (under pseudonyms, 1974 and 1975); English Art from Hans Holbein to Damien Hirst (2008); and several books, in English translation, about Russian unofficial art. His last publication, in Russian, was Memoirs of an Old Pessimist (2011). The complete memoir is due to be published in English next year.

A new edition of Totalitarian Art was published in 2011, incorporating material on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and showing Igor’s original thesis to still hold true.

Igor married Nina Kazarovets, a biologist, in 1960. They separated in the mid-1990s but never divorced. He is survived by their son, Benjamin, and by his companion of many years, Flora Goldstein, an archaeologist.

• Igor Naumovich Golomstock, art historian and writer, born 11 January 1929; died 12 July 2017