November 11: artist Elena Osipova's birthday
В Leningrad I was born Elena OsipovaArtist and anti-war activist. She has been called "the conscience of St. Petersburg" and "the conscience of Russia." She is turning 81.
Silence is the most terrible thing
Elena Osipova's family and education
Elena's parents met during the Great Patriotic War. Her mother worked in a medical battalion and was awarded the Medal for Military Merit. Her father was a radiologist.
After the war, her mother worked as an accountant at a bakery. Her father went off to fight in Japan and only visited her once afterward, when she was a few months old—her parents' marriage didn't work out.
Elena's passion for painting probably comes from her grandfather, who was an artist and died during the Siege of Leningrad from malnutrition.
In 1967, she graduated from the Tavricheskoye Art School in Leningrad (now the Roerich Art School). Her diploma project—a drawing of a premiere at her beloved Bolshoi Drama Theater—was deemed "seditious" and too surreal.
It was necessary to write in gray tones
For the next 40 years, she taught painting. She spent three years as a drawing and technical drawing teacher at a rural school near Leningrad. She considered her most fruitful years working at the art studio at the Yusupov Palace.
Later she worked in art schools in St. Petersburg.
She retired in 2009 after the death of her 28-year-old son, a theater stage worker, who died of tuberculosis. She was 63.
Elena Osipova's first pickets
She attended her first picket in 2002, in '56, after the terrorist attack at the Dubrovka Theatre Center (Nord-Ost). She wrote on a piece of Whatman paper:
Mr. President, change course immediately!
In the following years, she took part in protests after the terrorist attack in Beslan, against the war in Syria и Iraq, in defense of the defendants in the "Bolotnaya Square Case" and in memory Boris NemtsovShe spoke out against the participation of Russian troops in Crimea and Donbass.
Actually, I should have started with the Kursk. But I wasn't ready yet.
Children understand everything quickly. Adults want to close themselves off and quickly move on [past the poster] – not to see, not to hear. Who will punish you if you stop and read?
In February 2022, she attended a protest against the outbreak of war in Ukraine. She redirected lines written in 1939 to Russia. Tsvetaeva Germany.
Oh, mania!
Oh, mummy of war!
You will burn, Russia.
Madness,
Madness
You create!
I went out to make sure that everyone really supported [the war] and that everyone was so happy about this event.
Another of her posters showed a mother taking a machine gun from her blindfolded son:
Don't go to this war, son!
Exhibition and detentions
In February 2023, her solo exhibition opened at the Yabloko party's St. Petersburg office. A few hours later, security forces cordoned off the building under the pretext of a bomb threat. Dozens of Osipova's anti-war posters and paintings were confiscated from the exhibition.
After arrests, police officers usually take the artist to the station and then drive her home.
The entire police force has memorized my passport.
Some [police officers] said that if there are many of you, then we will be on your side
In her work, Elena Osipova uses religious motifs and biblical stories, intertwining them with calls for peace and understanding of tragic events.
In August 2024, she held a solo picket near Kazan Cathedral. Next to the anti-war artwork, she placed a poster honoring the Orthodox feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord (popularly known as Apple Savior). "Apples from Osipova" were painted blood-red.
The forces of good must come out anyway, otherwise the future is bleak.
She doesn't sell her political posters, so no one could accuse her of "selling her beliefs." Many of her works have been confiscated by law enforcement for examination and remain in custody. Osipova keeps the ones that survive street pickets or raids at home, in one of the two rooms of her communal apartment.
She has to repeat some of the confiscated stories in order to take them back to protests.
I don't need anything anymore and I could die at any moment. I'm in a hurry to do something useful for the children.