T his is the answer of the last of a dead tribe, a master of visual art, to the systematic exploitation, ill-usage, stealing, and besmirching of his image as a leader in graphic art, by a cabal of crooks, liars, torture masters, nonentities and failures calling themselves the Ministry of Culture, the Academy of Arts, the Union of Artists, and miscellaneous other fancy names, in league with organs of the Russian Government that purport to uphold and interpret the law, but in fact serve the base purpose of covering up the dirty business of their predecessors.  Explicit reference in this address is made to Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, Ella Pamfilova, his so-called human rights advisor, Yuri Chaika, Procurator General, Vladimir Ustinov, Minister of Justice, Vladimir Lukin, Ombudsman of Human Rights, Nikolai Patrushev, Director of Federal Security Service [read “KGB”], Alexander Sokolov, Minister of Culture and Information, Mikhail Shvydkoy, his deputy minister, Sergei Lavrov, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Yuri Ushakov, Ambassador Plenipotentiary of the Russian Federation to the United States.  

This is a statement of appeal to the judgment of mankind, calling for a universal condemnation of the rule of oppression, exploitation and thieving in place for centuries in the Russian Federation, a country that occupies one-sixth of the world’s land surface.  Today’s Russia represents a most odious and loathsome form of contemporary totalitarianism and the hotbed of all the congenital ills of a corrupt and despotic body politic.   The Russian Federation is a miasmatic and stagnant stump surviving the fall of a giant on clay feet – the Soviet empire.  The national government is in the hands of cadres of the dreaded Soviet secret police, the KGB. The all-important office of President of the Russian Federation is, at the present time, held by Vladimir Putin, a “sub-colonel” of the KGB who had performed spying work in Communist East Germany.  Subcolonel Putin’s henchmen include veterans of the Soviet KGB, kindred spirits among the younger members of the post-Soviet elite, and servile parvenus.   

However, instead of being isolated as a negation of all humanitarian values, Russia’s ruling regime is being courted to join the international community and solicited as an equal business partner by the leadership of nations whose economies depend on the untrammeled influx of the Russian oil and gas – natural riches that really and truly belong to the long-oppressed people of Russia but are being sold out, stolen, and squandered to bolster the totalitarian regime of ex-KGB apparatchiks and their descendants. By attending the Russia-EC summit in Samara in May 2007, the leaders of Europe’s free nations unforgivably acquiesced in the revival of key aspects of the Soviet totalitarian epoch brought about by Putin & Co.

Boris Isaac Sheynes (original name “Борис Исаакович Шейнес,” pronounced “Boris Isaakovich Sheines”) is perhaps the only surviving master in the field of lithography and other graphic art. A Moscow art critic, Boris Brodsky, perceived Sheynes’s art work as “conveying a concrete sense of creative activity which is beyond the conventional understanding of art.  Every piece, every bit of it is filled with meaning.  It is a profoundly serious and meaningful art.” It was the nonconformist content of Sheynes’s art, in combination with his enormous popularity with art lovers at home and abroad and his open defiance of the Communist totalitarian regime, that led to his expulsion from his native country in April 1985.  That punitive measure was accompanied by numerous and miscellaneous instances of outlawry, including the seizure of a staggering number of valuable lithographs and other graphic art works created and rightfully owned by Mr. Sheynes, and the employment of false pretenses for such despicable robbery by representatives of the Russian Ministry of Culture in cahoots with the Communist Party apparatus, the Municipality of Moscow, the Ministry of the Interior (“MVD”), the Office of Visas and Registrations (“OVIR”), and the Committee for State Security (“KGB”). 

Boris Sheynes’s efforts to prosecute the pack of scoundrels and thieves comprising the Russian officialdom have proved equally unavailing under both the Russian and international law.   His petitions to the Ministry of Culture, the Procuracy General and the Human Rights Ombudsman were made a mockery of by the officials who handled them. This is because the Procuracy, the President’s Advisor on Human Rights, and the Federal Ombudsman on Human Rights are creatures of the very State that had exiled and robbed Mr. Sheynes, and accordingly do the bidding of their State sponsors in suppressing his just complaints and grievances against the regime and its minions.   More than this, those Russian legal aid societies and the international adjudicative forums to which Mr. Sheynes has turned for help have turned a deaf ear, being, as they are, nothing more than “Potyomkin’s villages” – a mere illusion of democratic institutions; strawmen bereft of any substantive powers and preoccupied only with their self-preservation and self-perpetuation.

Boris Sheynes now seeks recourse to Public Opinion because recourse to the courts is a virtual dead end when, instead of the proper application of the law, dirty politics is the name of the game.  An American jurist had remarked that a court has neither the strength of the purse nor the strength of the sword – instead, it has the strength of Reason.  But in a land where, since the Dark Ages, the letter of the law has been made a mockery of, and Reason pilloried, tortured, murdered, or consigned to slave labor in the frozen wilderness, the court system is much worse than a nullity - together with the so-called “law enforcement” organs, it is a convenient tool of oppression and a nimble henchman of the Regime.  In a situation where the law is flouted and the courts pander to the bully, Boris Sheynes has no choice but to take his case to the highest court of all – the Court of Public Opinion, guided not by political chicanery but by the universal principles of Fairness.  A thief should be in one place only – the jail cell – and not in the comfort of a high-backed armchair in a cushy government office.  Boris Sheynes lacks the resources to send his abusers and exploiters where they belong. 

But thank God for the Internet!