Vlady Kibalchich Russakov - Life

Life

Vlady was born on June 14, 1920 in Saint Petersburg, Russia (then called Leningrad), during the Russian Revolution. He was the son of writer and photographer Victor Napoleon Lvovich Kibalchich, better known as Victor Serge and Luiba Rusakova.

Serge was secretary to Leon Trotsky . When Stalin took over the Soviet Union, his family was exiled to Kazakhstan, where the family lived in extreme poverty. In 1933, his mother succumbed to mental illness due to the stress of their situation and was committed to the psychiatric clinic of the Red Army. Vlady accompanied his father to the gulag. His schooling at this time was from Bolshevik professors allied with Lenin deported by Stalin .

Due to pressure from writers and intellectuals such as André Malraux, the family was allowed to leave the Soviet Union in 1936. They lived for a few months in Belgium before moving to France. At this time, Vlady became militantly in favor of the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, he did not go and join the war because of his age. His time in Belgium and France gave him his first experience with modern art, which inspired him to become a painter. In Paris, Vlady began to study in the workshops of various painters there such as Victor Brauner, Wilfredo Lam, Joseph Lacasse, André Masson and Aristide Maillol. He continued to do so until 1941, when the imminent German invasion of France forced the family to move again as refugees.

The family went to Marseilles to board a boat to leave Europe but Vlady’s mother needed to be hospitalized again. When Vlady and his father left for Martinique, they had to leave the mother in a hospital in Aix-en-Provence where she remained until her death in 1943. From Martinique, the father and son went to the Dominican Republic. They were initially attracted by the climate and people of the country. His father began to write again but was concerned about Vlady’s lack of Spanish and proclivity to hang around with other refugees in bars. Their visa to live in Mexico was approved with help from then ex-president Lázaro Cárdenas, and they left for the Yucatan peninsula after a short stay in Cuba .

They arrived to Mexico in 1943, when Vlady was twenty one years old. After landing in the Yucatan, they soon moved to Mexico City . Although Vlady and his father quickly integrated into the artistic and intellectual circles of the country, their economic situation was precarious. Vlady worked hard to get his first artistic exhibition in 1945, but his father died days afterwards. That same year, Vlady married Mexican Isabel Díaz Fabela and two years after that, became a naturalized Mexican citizen.

Vlady developed his artistic career in Mexico but kept frequent contact with Europe. His first visit back to the continent was in 1950, as it was recovering from World War II, traveling to Holland, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Spain, Italy, England and France, where he made a series of lithographs. From 1964 to 1965 he traveled in various countries again, as well as in 1969, when he visited Belgium, France and Portugal .

In 1989, following the Gorbachev era, Kibalchich traveled to the Soviet Union to press for the rehabilitation of Trotsky and Serge.

Vlady lived and worked in Mexico City until 1990, when he moved to Cuernavaca, to a country house with a large studio. He continued to live there with his wife and work until his death on July 21, 2005 from brain cancer. He left behind his wife Isabel who later died in 2010.