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T he State authorities’ decision to compel Boris Sheynes and his wife Marina Krieger (a noted linguist and translator of fiction and scientific literature) to leave the country was motivated by the fact that both man and wife were outspoken critics of the Communist one-party rule and the official Soviet art dogma. An ethnic Jew and a prominent artist who refused to join the Communist Party despite several overtures, Boris Sheynes had irked the federal authorities with his invariably popular personal exhibitions, his art works finding ready buyers among both domestic and foreign collectors, and enthusiastic reviews of his book illustrations and portraits of Russian avant-garde artists. Above all, Mr. Sheynes’s independent spirit and his method of earning a living – creating art work that finds a direct appeal to the eyes and the conscience of an average person, rather than courting purchase orders from State agencies – intensely alarmed the leaders of the Moscow branch of the Union of Artists of Russia who had been waxing fat and complacent on a constant flow of hefty governmental commissions. Equally unsettled by his progress were the upper echelons of the governmental apparatus, the Communist party, and the all-powerful KGB.
The unholy alliance of those structures launched a campaign of rabid, no-holds-barred persecution against Boris Sheynes. Despite his participation in its art shows, the Union of Artists declined to purchase a single artwork created by Mr. Sheynes. His exhibitions and artwork purchase orders were frequently interfered with, and even canceled, by the authorities. His style and his views on art were held up to open excoriation and abuse by the “elders” of the Union of Artists. Among his most vicious detractors were Professor of Art A. Goncharov and Art Historian A. Chegodaev with his daughter Maria Chegodaeva, prolific sycophants of the State-approved art and zealous persecutors of any nonconformist trends within the Moscow art community. For his iconoclastic views, expressed verbally and, to a still greater degree, in his art works, the system’s gruesome payback was in backstabbing and backbiting, both in the open and behind the scenes.
On the material level, Sheynes was subjected to abysmal work and living conditions. The State allowed him barely enough income to keep himself and his family within an inch of starvation. His art was sold off to foreign and domestic buyers at artificially reduced prices and without the author’s consent and authorization.
All of the above contributed to Boris Sheynes’s decision, sometime in 1980, to apply for an exit visa from Russia. It was a very reasonable action to take on his part in view of the above-described circumstances. In response, however, the Russian authorities denied his petition as “ill-advised.” Mr. Sheynes’s second petition was suspiciously “lost” by the officials. During that trying period, Boris and his wife Marina – branded “refuseniks” for their denied petition for exit visas – experienced ostracism and extreme destitution. Marina found herself shunned by friends and colleagues, was stripped of her title of Senior Engineer, and was fired from her position at the Moscow State University. At the same time, Boris was forced to find other customers than the State organizations, which totally shut off their patronage at the instigation of the KGB.
Nonetheless, much to the surprise and consternation of his State persecutors, the central galleries, or “salons,” of Moscow readily accepted Boris Sheynes’s lithographs, and quickly sold them to domestic and foreign art collectors who preferred them to the works of the State-approved Communist artists. The latter bitterly resented that success. A steady flow of complaints to the “competent organs” turned into a deluge, as is doubtlessly reflected by the bulging dossiers on Boris Sheynes in the KGB archives (access to which, however, has been “silently denied” to him and his son despite a written request). Russia’s gendarmerie was intensely alarmed by the Artist’s visits, together with his wife and underage son, to the United States Ambassador’s residence on Spasso, which on weekends hosted gatherings of Russia’s most prominent dissidents and critics of the regime.
Seeing the danger of a rising star in the dissident community of Moscow, and of his successful competition with the State-approved artists of the day, the authorities of the Russian Federation decided to make a harrowing example to all by tossing Boris Sheynes out of the country when he was totally unprepared for it, both materially and emotionally; and stripping him of his valuables, in order to cause him to lead a life of hardship and privation away from home. Flouting all rules of departure from the country, the Russian Ministry of the Interior, acting through the Office of Visas and Registrations, arbitrarily reinstated his initial denied petition for the exit visa, and “granted” it.
The sheer manner of those proceedings points to their blatant illegality and malicious aim. The Russian authorities’ reversal of their initial action occurred without any shred of written official notification, and exclusively through telephonic and face-to-face communications. In March 1985, Boris Sheynes’ underage son Dmitry picked up a telephone call from a woman who introduced herself as Comrade Sazonova and asked to speak to either of his parents. When she was told they were not at home, she instructed him to let them know that their petition to leave the country was given “a positive disposition.”
The “leave to emigrate” entailed draconian requirements, and consisted of marching orders. The Sheyneses were given only two weeks to pack and leave; later extended to a month because Boris’ brother Iosiph had to be issued a new passport in order to be deprived of it along with other rights of citizenship. All the passport-bearing adults in the traveling unit were deprived of their passports and other citizenship rights. In addition, Boris Sheynes was ordered to give up his membership in the Union of Artists, which he had held for decades. That surrender of the membership occurred in the OVIR office because the elders of the Moscow bureau of the Union of Artists, at whose instigation the Russian Government had ordered the forced removal, did not wish to directly implicate themselves in the process. Boris was so utterly unprepared for this departure that, immediately before the air flight date, he attempted to “lose” his visa at the Customs, in the hope that he would not be required to go. Unlike his second exit-visa petition, that document was promptly “found” and returned to its holder.
The removal was attended by acts of robbery and fraud from Russian State officials. A part of Boris Sheynes’s compensation for his work in the print shop was his being allowed to produce and retain prints containing his signature (“autolithographs”). Over the decades of work in the print shop, Sheynes had accumulated a collection of highly valuable, high-quality autolithographs, which he kept in his studio. The authorities found out about their existence from several reconnaissance visits made by officials of the Russian Ministry of Culture to his studio, on the pretext of “congratulating” him on the success of his 1978 exhibition at the Central House of Art Workers. The Government also knew (or had reason to know) about the monetary worth of those art pieces, which had passed muster and obtained approbation from professional committees and were eagerly purchased by foreign and domestic art collectors.
Each Sheynes lithograph carries a proven market value due to its masterly execution. Lithography is a virtually dead art today because, in its pure form, it is a dauntingly labor-intensive process calling for a staggering physical effort combined with meticulous accuracy of execution on the part of both artist and printer. Whereas his coworkers made do with only one trial before producing a print, Boris Sheynes made no fewer than seven trials with multi-pound stones for each lithograph. Sheynes worked his fingers to the bone to ensure quality, and in turn was very exacting with the technical support staff – the printers - and, above all, with himself, for which he earned immense respect from the printers. To this day, Sheynes takes pride in having achieved the formation of a working partnership with the printers, many of whom had gone through a rigorous training in the pre-Revolution Russian printing industry. When the printers learned he was ordered to leave, one of them frankly told him, “Boris, what kind of shit are you leaving us with?” and was not wide off the mark in observing so.
As a condition for being allowed to take the remainder of his own art, Sheynes was required to deed over, as an “uncompensable gift” to the State, over five hundred lithographs and other graphic art works. The booty was removed by a Comrade Korobkov, Director of the Moscow Art Fund, and Comrade Kuz’min, Director of the Combine of Graphic Art, from Boris Sheynes’s art studio on Bryanskaya Street 2 and taken to the Combine’s principal office where a Madame Gurashvili issued a document purporting to be a gift deed, bearing an official seal and “witnessed” by some “engineer.” The fraud lay in those papers not being a valid deed of gift under the Soviet law of the day – it lacked a notary’s signature and seal. Nor were they a contract of any kind, either. They were a complete nullity and an instrument of gross deception directed at a seasoned artist with no college education or any knowledge of business transactions.
There were other no less shocking and appalling infringements on Boris Sheynes’s civic and human rights by the ruling “junta” of the Russian Federation. Although the “gift” document made mention of only 450 art pieces being tendered to the State by way of “an uncompensable gift,” about a hundred or more were taken above that number by many officials who, under some pretext or other, made entry into Artist Sheynes’s studio and selected a “memento” for themselves among the art works still left in his possession. Those included officers of the KGB, functionaries of the Customs, a high-ranking MVD general, and shady bureaucrats from the Ministry of Culture. Those acts cannot be characterized otherwise than looting.
More than this, the Russian Government made Boris Sheynes remit to the State the shelf price of each and every work of art he was allowed to take with him, in the total amount of 15,000 Soviet rubles — a staggering amount in 1985. He was further required to photograph each art piece he owned and to turn the photos over to State officials. More than this, the Government interfered with Sheynes’s plan to participate in the Regional Exhibition, forcing him to rescind his contract and return to the organizers their advance payment. Furthermore, the Sheyneses were not permitted to take with them more cash than 400 USD, even though the traveling group included two ailing adults and a minor. The punitive purpose of the removal was fully revealed by the savage treatment by Russian Customs officers of the scant property the Artist was eventually allowed to take along with him. Before his very eyes, a female officer named Sedda Vasyl’yevna broke up a picture frame with her own hands. The crate containing canvasses, frames, brushes and other art instruments arrived entirely smashed. It was a real “pogrom” by unbridled thugs in Russian uniforms.
In April 1985, the Sheyneses completed their departure preparations – in which a remarkably large number of prominent intellectuals and dissidents of Moscow and beyond afforded them a helping hand and moral support – and were flown out of Moscow to Vienna, Austria. There they stayed for about a month while their travel documents were being processed. From May 1985 through December 1986, due to Iosiph’s worsened health, Boris Sheynes and his loved ones resided in Italy while on their way to the United States. During that hiatus, the three adults and the teenage boy subsisted on a meager refugee dole. Their sole proof of identity consisted of international refugee documents. In the pre-EC era, such papers were clearly insufficient to permit moving freely around Italy and Europe, let alone to earn a living. More than this, the fraudulent exaction of the exorbitant “gift” by the Russian government prevented Mr. Sheynes from selling the remainder of his pieces at affordable prices. Indeed, he had to forbear from selling his remaining art for fear lest he arrive in the States without any portfolio.
In the early fall of 1986, Boris Sheynes was honored with a personal exhibition in the Netherlands. In December 1986, he arrived in the United States and settled in Chicago, where he commenced a series of Italian and Dutch landscapes. In 1990, Mr. Sheynes started working on compositions on wood panel screens, based on earlier lithograph images of St. Petersburg (Leningrad). In America, Mr. Sheynes became a popular artist, and was honored with solo exhibitions at the Opera House of Woodstock, Illinois (1990), the Riverfront Art Gallery, Chicago (1994), the Dime Museum, Chicago (1994), and the Dittmar Gallery of Northwestern University (1997). Mr. Sheynes also participated in numerous group exhibitions. Furthermore, despite his limited English, he was requested to teach an art seminar at the Summer School of the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, and to read lectures on the Russian and Soviet avant-garde art at the University of Venice, Italy, the University of Chicago and the Northwestern University in the United States.
In recognition of Boris Sheynes’s artistic achievements, including projects dedicated to the Russian aviators and the prisoners of Nazi concentration camps, the work performed in Russian book illustration, the series of woodcut engravings, and the portraits of Russian avant-garde artists of the 1920s and 1930s, the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs honored Artist Sheynes with five prestigious grants. (Those awards were voted not by City Hall bureaucrats but by Chicago artists who readily understood and appreciated the merits of Sheynes’s art.)
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