Elena Osipova: the 76 year-old Russian artist who protests Putin’s war

Elena Osipova, a 76 year-old artist and activist, protested against Russian President Vladimir Putin for the first time in 2002, when the second Chechen war took place. Two decades later, she continues speaking out; this time against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Osipova’s mother died during the Nazi’s siege of St. Petersburg, which killed more than a million civilians during the Second World War, perhaps that’s why her paintings talk about war and suffering.

A few days after the first Russian attack on Ukraine, the artist took to the streets of St. Petersburg with anti-war slogans and many people cheered for her.

Image: By Alexei Kouprianov - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76486992

However, she was later arrested by Russian police. The video of her arrest was reproduced by several international media.

Photo: BBC

Moreover, her latest exhibition with 20 works that featured anti-war themes was raided by police in St. Petersburg, according to the Agence France-Presse.

One of the slogans that Elena Osipova writes on her anti-war posters addresses the Russian soldiers and says: "'Put down your weapons and you will be heroes'", the BBC reported.

Osipova summed up her opinion to BBC journalist Steve Rosenberg: "What is happening is a shame. They are killing so many people. The authorities are trying to arouse patriotic feelings in the public. But it is all a hoax. And many are deceived by the propaganda that has gone on for years and has changed people."

Interviewed by Spanish journal El País, Elena Osipova warned about the repression that will make the protest in Russia invisible: "There is a risk of what happened in the USSR, where critical people were sent to psychiatric hospitals" .

Elena Osipova refers to the Soviet-era dissidents who, like the iconic scientist Andrei Sakharov, were sent to psychiatric wards when they criticized the government.

The artist subsists on a pension of 6,000 rubles (about 70 euros), she told El País. It used to be more, but the amount was suddenly reduced without explanation, she said.

That inexplicable reduction in the pension, argues Osipova, is an example of how Putin's Russia works. State mechanisms are used to their full extent to punish anyone who opposes the war.

Osipova’s paintings are some of the scarce anti-war demonstrations that can still be seen in Russia today. The several protests seen in the media in the  early days of the war have almost completely disappeared.

The Russian police have visited Elena Osipova's house on more than one occasion, and they have confiscated several paintings. Authorities told her the works  would be returned but she seems doubtful, an El País journalist wrote.

Osipova's style is naive, with a simple poetry, somewhere between Chagall and the plasticity of orthodox icons. In one of her works, as quoted in 2015 in The Russian Reader, she stated: "Russia is a bird, not a bear."

Elena Osipova is willing to continue fighting Putin in the streets or through her work. When asked by El País if she’s afraid she might end up in prison she said: “Afraid of what? I have been to the police station, to trial, so many times… “

In the interviews she has granted international media, Osipova shows herself to be an idealist closer to the Soviet universe than to current capitalism. She says that money has rotted Russian society.

Elena Osipova's paintings are the silent cry of an opposition to the war that, although encapsulated, still exists within Russian society.