Russian pensioner’s protest art is streets ahead of the police

Russian pensioner Vladimir Ovchinnikov gained a following over 20 years for his street murals in the small town of Borovsk, about 115km southwest of Moscow, many of which depicted the plight of victims of Stalinist-era repressions.

On March 25, just over a month after Russia sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine, Ovchinnikov created a new work, one that would place him in serious legal jeopardy.

He painted a girl, in a blue-and-yellow dress, the colours of the Ukrainian flag, with a bomb falling onto her from above. Beneath her, in block capitals, he wrote: “STOP”.

The mural fell foul of new laws enacted by the Russian government that effectively criminalise opposition to the military campaign in Ukraine.

“The police said that this piece discredited our army”, said Ovchinnikov, 85.

The mural was painted over and Ovchinnikov ordered to pay a 35,000 rouble ($554) fine for the offence of “discrediting the Russian army”, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

In response, he painted a new piece, on the same spot, writing the word “bezumiye” (“craziness” in Russian), spelt with a Latin letter Z, which has become a symbol of what Moscow calls its special military operation in Ukraine. The police promptly painted over it.

It triggered a game of cat-and-mouse between Ovchinnikov and police in Borovsk, a town of 12,000 people

In place of the painted-over mural, he drew the words “pozor” (shame), “fiasco”, and “basta” (enough), each with a Latin Z. Each in turn was painted over by the police.

The Borovsk local administration did not respond to a request for comment.

For Ovchinnikov, opposition to the conflict in Ukraine is underpinned by a family history of Soviet-era repression. His grandfather was shot by Lenin’s Bolsheviks in 1919 and his father was arrested during Stalin’s purges in 1937.

He has drawn attention to Russia’s history of political repression as a motif in his art. In 2017, he persuaded local authorities to erect a monument to its victims — a stone taken from the Solovetsky islands in the far north of the country, the site of the former Soviet Union’s first Gulag prison camp.

“This topic of political repression and the closed nature of this topic, the wiping of historical memory, is one and the same thing as what is happening with Ukraine,” Ovchinnikov said.

Reuters