Artist Vladimir Ovchinnikov has died, the creator of those very street drawings in B...

Forwarded From Plot

Artist Vladimir Ovchinnikov has died, the creator of those very street drawings in Borovsk. He fought for the memory of the repressed and spoke out against the war

Hi, this is Anton. I’ve been to Borovsk more than once, and I remember Ovchinnikov’s drawings well, they are just about the town’s main local attraction.

Ovchinnikov, a former engineer-economist, took up street art in the mid-1990s, when he retired. He painted different things: sometimes safe subjects from the history of the ancient town, sometimes tragic episodes from the past, such as the confiscation of church valuables from the Pafnutyev Monastery of Borovsk.

The most important subject for him was Stalinist repression. The artist’s father, Alexander Ovchinnikov, spent 11 years in the camps “on suspicion of assisting a Trotskyist-monarchist group”: he was arrested during the Great Terror, several months before his son Vladimir was born.

Ovchinnikov Jr. spent years fighting for a memorial to the repressed in Borovsk. In the end, in 2017, a “Solovetsky boulder” was finally installed in the town, but without names.

The artist tried to preserve the names on his own: he ran a website about the victims of political terror, painted their portraits on the town’s walls, which, however, were very quickly painted over with spray cans. “On orders from the city administration,” Ovchinnikov assured.

When Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the 84-year-old artist immediately began painting anti-war graffiti in Borovsk: “Stop!!!”, “Enough Z”, “No to war”, “Glory to Ukraine”.

In April 2022, the Borovsky District Court fined Ovchinnikov 35 thousand rubles for “discrediting the army.” In court, the artist recalled Article 58 of the RSFSR Criminal Code (“counterrevolutionary activity”) and said: “This law is just as vicious as that one.”

Vladimir Ovchinnikov died on May 13. He was 88 years old.