Russian security guard who doodled eyes on $1m painting sentenced
A court in Yekaterinburg, Russia, has ruled that the security guard from the city’s Yeltsin Centre who doodled eyes on a 1930s painting by Anna Leporskaya in December 2021 is guilty of vandalism and that he must serve 180 hours of “compulsory labour” and undergo “psychiatric evaluation”.
The painting was loaned to the Yeltsin Centre by Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery and is reported to be worth 75 million rubles ($1.2m). Now, the Tretyakov Gallery has refused to petition for the charges against the security guard, 64-year-old Aleksandr Vasiliev, to be dropped, despite a series of mitigating factors, including the death of his wife, murder of his son, and his position as a veteran of the Afghan and Chechen wars.
Earlier this month, the general director of the Tretyakov Gallery, Zelfira Tregulova, penned a letter to Vasiliev’s lawyer, Aleskei Bushmakov, which he posted on Facebook on August 15th.
Tregulova wrote that “taking into account the circumstances of the criminal case, the damage inflicted to the painting Three Figures” and “the high level of public attention in connection with the incident”, the gallery did consider closing the case “via reconciliation”, but ultimately they concluded that it “does not regard it as possible to take such an appeal to the magistrate”.
At a hearing on August 19th, Bushmakov expressed that Vasiliev had asked for forgiveness from Tretyakov, the Yeltsin Centre and the Russian state, as local Yekaterinburg publication It’s My City reported. “So what now? Execute him? Hold a public flogging?” Bushmakov allegedly asked the court.
Interestingly, the case has been noted for its political edge. For a long time, The Yeltsin Centre has been in the crosshairs of Russian nationalist and Oscar-winning auteur Nikita Mikhalkov, who claims that it is anti-Russian, pro-Western liberalism and needs to be closed. Back in June, on his YouTube channel, he argued that the Centre should even be declared a “foreign agent”.
