Vlady Kibalchich; follow-up obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Weissman, Socialist Review, September 2005
Susan Weissman pays tribute to the Mexican artist and son of
Victor Serge, Vlady Kibalchich, who died recently.Vlady
Kibalchich, born in Petrograd in June 1920, died on 21 July
2005 at home (in his studio) in Cuernavaca, Mexico, after a
difficult battle with cancer which began as a melanoma but
spread to his brain. He was 85. It is customary to say that
someone of that age had a 'full life', but in Vlady's case
it is an understatement. The 20th century was his life. La
Jornada headlined his death by saying 'a subversive creator
and critic of power has died'. For Vlady the Russo-Mexican
artist (painter, muralist and lithographer), art was
resistance, and his themes were revolution and liberty. He
was called a heretic and a rebel, but one who transformed
his rebellion into art. Though he painted with Renaissance
formulas and Venetian colours, everything about Vlady was
revolutionary. His art, his daily life, his writing - social
revolution, cultural revolution, revolution of material,
revolution of colours. His murals can be seen in the
Biblioteca Miguel Lerdo de Tejada in Mexico City, and in the
National Palace of the Revolution in Managua, Nicaragua. In
1994 he was commissioned to produce four monumental
paintings for the ministry of the interior. True to form,
Vlady used this commission to question power through his
art. The paintings soon suffered the fate of revolutionaries
in disfavour - they were 'disappeared', sequestered in the
old Lecumberri prison because the authorities decided they
were a tribute to the Zapatista rebellion. They will
resurface, we are told, in an exhibition of his work next
year. Vlady belonged to the world, but he was Mexico's
national treasure. Last year he donated some 4,600 works to
Mexico's National Institute of Fine Arts, enough to fill a
museum in itself. There will be a homage to Vlady at the
Palacio de Bellas Artes in April 2006. And just this month
Vlady's dream of an exhibition in Moscow was fulfilled -
though he was too sick to be there to see it. Political
development Vlady lived in Mexico for 64 years, but he
dressed in a Russian peasant blouse, had a long ponytail and
always wore a worker's cloth cap. While his father, the
anarcho-Bolshevik revolutionary novelist and historian
Victor Serge, was arguably more Belgian-French than Russian,
Vlady was considered Russian, though his real nationality
was that of revolution. Vlady's life mirrored the political
development of the Soviet Union - born in the civil war,
child of the opposition, gulag and defeat. Vlady said he
understood nationalism, and for that reason he detested it.
His teacher was the history he lived through and
participated in, his friends the generation of
revolutionaries surrounding him - erudite autodidacts of the
times. Vlady often said that this generation is on the way
to extinction. He was one of the last links, and a Mexican
newspaper called him the last Bolshevik. Trotsky once
accused Serge of having the temperament of the poet or
artist. It was much more true of Vlady. Like his father,
Vlady was largely self-taught. Serge's teachers were the
Russian anarcho-populists in exile after the assassination
of Tsar Alexander II - his parents were part of the group
Narodnaya Volya, and his uncle was executed for his role in
the assassination itself. Vlady's teachers were the exiled
Left Oppositionist Bolsheviks sent to internal deportation
in Orenburg. Vlady did attend high school for a while, but
was expelled for insisting that free trade unions existed in
France. Vlady's mother, Liuba Russokova, was Lenin's
stenographer. Lenin was a frequent guest in the apartment at
the famous Astoria Hotel in Petrograd. Vlady liked to tell
the story of the time Lenin visited, to find the baby Vlady
crawling naked. Lenin affectionately picked up baby Vlady,
only to find himself bathed in the warm jet of Vlady's
urine. Depending on the audience, Vlady would adjust the
story, saying instead, 'I shat on Lenin.' The Astoria was
just a few blocks from the Hermitage, or Winter Palace,
where Vlady spent many of his days while skipping school
which he found boring. The Hermitage changed his life - it
was his refuge, and he spent countless hours in the rooms
featuring the artists of the Renaissance. Vlady said his
house was filled with the fire of revolution - tales of
sacrifice, repression, death and pogroms told in many
languages and cultures. He grew up in Leningrad, Berlin,
Vienna, Orenburg, Brussels, Paris and Marseilles. In 1921
Serge went on Comintern assignment to Germany and
participated in the German Revolution of 1923, then to
Austria until 1925. Vlady's first language was German, but
he was most at home in Russian, French and later Spanish.
Vlady's first Trotskyist act came at the age of seven when
he rescued a portrait of Trotsky from under the heels of the
GPU agents ransacking the apartment. As they arrested his
father, Vlady wept - not in fear but in anger. He was a
teenager when he accompanied his father into the gulag of
internal exile. Liuba, Vlady's mother, was driven insane by
the Stalinist persecution and remained behind, hospitalised
in Leningrad. In Orenburg Vlady and his father nearly
starved and nearly froze to death. They survived thanks to
food packets and money from the sale of Serge's novels in
France. Magdeleine Paz sent one with flour, sugar, rice and
olives, and Serge gave Vlady a single olive which he divided
among a group of schoolmates - none of them had ever seen
one. Art was Vlady's escape from the tightening noose of
Stalinism, the detention of his father and his mother's
growing insanity. Art was also his resistance. In April 1936
Serge and his family were expelled from the Soviet Union,
just a few short months before Stalin began the trials that
ushered in the Great Terror. They were saved; their comrades
were not. Serge, Liuba, baby daughter Jeannine and Vlady
went first to Belgium, then to Paris just as the
thunderclouds of fascism were darkening Europe. In Paris,
Vlady came into contact with the surrealist painters and
poets. Along with his father, Vlady joined the Poum (the
anti-Stalinist Spanish Marxist Workers Party who were
largely massacred by the Stalinists and fascists during the
Spanish Civil War of 1936-39). As Paris was falling, Vlady
and Serge were making their way to Marseilles, teeming with
refugees in search of a visa out of the nightmare. Liuba
retreated from sanity and lived out her life in a mental
institution in Aix-en-Provence. Jeannine was temporarily
with friends in the Dordogne. In Marseilles Serge hooked up
with Varian Fry, Mary-Jayne Gold, André Breton and others in
a lovely villa Serge dubbed 'Chateau espère-visa.' The
surrealists around Breton shifted their presence from the
cafes of Paris to the beauty of the chateau. Vlady,
considered the passionate young Marxist of the crew,
developed his entrepreneurial talent, collecting dried fruit
and nuts and making them into croque-fruit, or fruit rolls
to sell so there would be food to eat. While Serge wrote The
Case of Comrade Tulayev and André Breton was writing Fata
Morgana, Vlady sketched relentlessly. Serge and Vlady
finally sailed for Mexico (the US refused a visa to the
Bolshevik Serge), first being detained in Martinique, Santo
Domingo and then Cuba. On the boat Vlady read Bukharin and
Preobrazhensky's The ABC of Communism, which prompted Serge
to angrily toss it into the sea, telling Vlady now was the
time to study a Spanish primer. In Mexico Vlady was part of
a political group of exiles, mostly from the Spanish Civil
War. He met his wife Isabel Diaz Fabela, who survives him.
Victor Serge died in 1947, the year Vlady and Isabel
married. In 1949 Vlady became a naturalised Mexican citizen.
For the next two decades he travelled and painted. He spent
1966 in Paris and 1968 in New York thanks to a Guggenheim
grant. Vlady is celebrated as part of the school of 'Nuevo
muralismo mexicano' along with Orozco, Rivera and Siqueiros.
Yet Vlady reacted against the nationalistic works of Rivera,
Orozco and Siqueiros, and came to lead Mexico's 'rupture
movement'. Autocratic absolute power In an interview in
Mexico Vlady was asked what he thought of Rivera and
Siqueiros. In particular, Vlady was asked if his 'Sergean
vision of the Stalinist fantasma' coloured his view. Vlady
swore that wasn't the case. But Siqueiros lost the talent he
had, Vlady insisted, not because a painter is bad because he
is a Stalinist, but because Vlady believed he was a
Stalinist because he was a bad painter. In 1986 Vlady took
me to an exhibition of his work at Bellas Artes. His
gigantic portrayal that he painted and repainted for years
of the Persian emperor Xerxes hung in the museum as a
testament to the absurdity of autocratic absolute power. All
around the grotesque Xerxes (a Cyclops in Vlady's painting)
were tiny soldiers trying to follow his command to whip the
sea for swallowing his fleet. Unfortunately the next day the
workers at the museum went on strike, making entry
impossible without crossing a picket line. Vlady said to me
sardonically, 'If only the workers understood the content
and message of the work they are now making it impossible to
see.' For Vlady it was incomprehensible that the workers
struck when he - Mexico's uncompromising revolutionary
artist - finally got an exhibition, and he saw it as a
comment on the condition of working class consciousness in
Mexico. In 1989 Vlady and I travelled to Russia. It was his
first time back in 53 years, and we were there to press for
the rehabilitation of Trotsky and Serge in the glory days of
glasnost and perestroika. Having Vlady as my Russian tour
guide was like a stroll through the 1930s. His Russian was
beautiful and we walked the familiar streets of his youth,
stopping at the art museums as well as the infamous
Lubyanka. When he saw the Kremlin he noted that it was
yellow, the colour of cowardice. In the Manezh (art museum)
across the street, Vlady imagined the exhibition of his
work, a lifelong dream finally realised this month, the
month of his death. At a public meeting at the house of
writers discussing the rehabilitation of Trotsky (this was
March 1989, at the time of the then Soviet Union's first
semi-free elections), several relatives of Left
Oppositionists came to Vlady to introduce themselves. It was
both moving and strange, this collection of the children of
the revolution's heroes, converted into enemies and
undesirables. In 1987 Vlady commented that he and his father
lived 'in the tail of Trotsky's comet'. He belonged to a
unique generation who saw clearly, fought tenaciously but
were defeated. Vlady was generous of spirit and intellect,
an artist and a revolutionary to his core - he refused
compromise yet socialised in wide circles of poets,
politicians, writers, artists and dignitaries. He had the
kind of energy that makes his death unbelievable - Vlady
just seemed immortal. Vlady is survived by his wife Isabel,
his sister Jeannine and five nephews.