Borovsk, Russia, Dec. 14 Reuters Victims of Stalin-era repression.
But on March 25, just one month after Russia sent tens of thousands of troops to Ukraine, Ovchinnikov created a new piece.
He painted a girl in a blue and yellow dress, the colors of the Ukrainian flag, and bombs fell on her from above. In block capitals underneath her he wrote “STOP”.
The mural violates a new law passed by the Russian government that effectively criminalizes opposition to military operations in Ukraine.
“Police said the article discredited our military,” Ovchinnikov, 84, told Reuters.
The mural was painted over, and Ovchinnikov was ordered to pay a fine of 35,000 rubles ($554) on a new charge of “disrespecting the Russian military”, with a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
In response, he painted a new work in which the word “Bezmiye” (Russian for “madness”) is spelled with the Latin letter Z. This has become a symbol of what Moscow calls a special military operation in Ukraine. The police quickly smeared it over.
In Borovsk, population 12,000, Ovchinnikov and the police started a cat-and-mouse game.
Instead of painted murals, he painted the words “pozor” (shame), “fiasco” and “basta” (enough), each with the Latin Z. Each in turn was smeared by the police.
Borovsk regional administration did not respond to a request for comment.
For Ovchinnikov, his opposition to the Ukrainian conflict is underpinned by a family history of Soviet-era oppression. His grandfather was shot dead by Lenin’s Bolsheviks in 1919, and his father was arrested during his 1937 Stalinist purges.
The history of oppression in Russia is attracting attention as a motif of his works. In 2017, he persuaded local authorities to erect a memorial to the victims. This is a stone taken from the Solovetsky Islands in the Far North of Russia, the site of the Soviet Union’s first concentration camps.
“The closed nature of this topic of political repression and the erasure of historical memory is exactly the same as what is happening in Ukraine,” Ovchinnikov said.
Reported by Reuters Edited by Alexandra Hudson
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