Several shots at close range and a final bullet to head. These were the violent last moments of exiled Russian artist Semyon Skrepetsky, known for his satirical, neo-primitivist paintings. From a painting in the Russian Orthodox style depicting Soviet leader Joseph Stalin cradling Putin to portraying pro-RussianChechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov as a hooker, the artist had a wide range of political targets.
Skrepetsky often courted the absurd and mixed it with a good dose of offensiveness. He favoured bold, beautiful colours, using the terms “psychedelia” and “skreprealism” for his art. Communism, dictatorships, exile, death: better to make fun of these heavy subjects than be crushed by them, seemed to be his motto.
And he entertained himself and his international audience until the very end. On the Friday before his assassination, he staged a protest in the streets of central Berlin on Russia Day, carrying his iconic painting of Stalin holding Putin like the baby Jesus before pulling a Russian flag out of his pants and putting it in a trashcan. It would be his last act of defiance against authoritarianism, which he hated in all forms.
He was killed while walking his dog the following Monday in Biała Podlaska, a Polish town near the border with Belarus.
“The murder that took place is an unprecedented incident in Poland. It has deeply shocked many people and has increased concerns among Belarusian activists and journalists living here,” said a Belarusian exile based in Warsaw. “Given the history of transnational repression in the region, many are now worried about their own safety and future.”
Skrepetsky, whose real name was Robert Kuzovkov, was born in 1981 in a village in Altai, a mountainous region in Russia. He emigrated to Poland in 2021, fearing political persecution. In recent videos posted on Facebook, he wore his signature beret and displayed arms covered in tattoos. With a strip-teaser’s flair, he removed layers of clothing to reveal T-shirts with provocative messages like, “Russia is a prison of nations” or “Russian culture” with the words bleeding onto a Russian doll bearing Putin’s face.
The artist’s flight to Poland came at a time of regional tumult. Belarus’s 2020 presidential election results – which the European Parliament described as “fraudulent777948_EN.pdf)” – sparked a wave of massive protests. The Belarusian regime, led by President [Alexander Lukashenko](https://www.france24.com/en/tag/alexander-lukashenko/) and supported by Moscow, reacted by ordering its goons to beat up and imprison the protesters they encountered in the streets. Fearing the repression, several hundred Belarusians sought asylum in Poland and [Lithuania](https://www.france24.com/en/tag/lithuania/). Among them were several Russians – including Skrepetsky.
A life in limbo
The émigrés found themselves in limbo. Their home was only several hundred kilometres away, but they couldn’t return. Planning a future in their host country was also difficult. Government policies toward the refugees were constantly shifting, and acts of sabotage by Russian agents, often involving young and vulnerable exiles, heightened the sense of fear and paranoia among the local population.
Skrepetsky came to Poland alone but soon managed to bring his wife and five children to Biała Podlaska. He rented a spacious, 70-square-metre apartment in the northern part of the city and soon got back to work. He would sit down at his table scattered with markers and film himself patiently filling his drawings in with color. Activism was his oxygen and what fuelled him.
His works of art multiplied, as did his activism – and so did the objects of his attacks.
Decaying regimes and the dictators – like Putin and Lukashenko – who run them were his main target. Constantly trolling Kadyrov was also part of his agenda. A versatile artist, he created a pencil sharpener with the Chechen on all fours, with the pencil’s tip designed to sodomise him.
But the Russian opposition was also on his radar, with special criticism reserved for late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and his wife Yulia Navalnaya. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and even the Ukrainian people also became the object of his fierce attacks over the past two years.
Skrepetsky was a free spirit, capable of aligning himself with ideologies he had previously lambasted. When he learned that Russia would have a pavilion at the Venice Biennale in May, he went there and recorded himself in a crowd of people brandishing Ukrainian flags and singing a patriotic hymn, “We will fight for our freedom (svobodu)”.
As a Russian citizen, he knew about the seductive allure of Russian soft power – from the splendid Nutcracker ballet to the literary works Fyodor Dostoyevsky – and how the Kremlin used these cultural masterpieces to normalise its image while it demolished Ukraine’s own priceless heritage. He wanted to expose the cracks in the regime and show its rot; in a February portrait of Putin, the gleaming, alabaster face is impassive as in real life, but marred by maggots crawling out of his cheek.
