Vlady (Vladimir Kibalchich) — painter and muralist with roots in the USSR
Vladimir Viktorovich Kibalchich Rusakov, known in Mexico simply as Vlady, was born in Petrograd in June 1920, on the 14th or 15th by different accounts, in the first years of Soviet Russia. He was the son of Victor Lvovich Kibalchich, the Brussels-born revolutionary writer known as Victor Serge, who had come to Russia in 1919, and Liuba Rusakova. His father belonged to the Left Opposition from 1928, and in the 1930s father and son were sent into internal exile in Orenburg. After French intellectuals, Romain Rolland among them, intervened on Serge's behalf, the family was allowed to leave the USSR in 1936.
Vlady lived with his father in Belgium and France. After the German invasion of France they left Europe, sailing by way of Martinique, the Dominican Republic and Cuba to Mexico; the United States had refused them visas. They arrived in 1941 by most Mexican accounts, on 5 September according to one, and in 1943 according to others. In Mexico Vlady moved among other exiles, many from the Spanish Civil War, and quickly entered the city's artistic and intellectual life. His first solo exhibition opened in 1945. In 1947 he became a Mexican citizen, married Isabel, and lost his father, who died in Mexico City.
His career gained momentum in the 1960s; in 1966 a French government grant took him to Paris to make lithographs, and he took part in the gallery that helped establish the Generación de la Ruptura, the painters who broke with the Mexican muralist school. Between 1974 and 1982 he painted his major work, the cycle The Revolutions and the Elements, some two thousand square metres of fresco and oil on canvas in the Biblioteca Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, a seventeenth-century building in the historic centre of Mexico City. He also painted murals in the National Palace of the Revolution in Managua.
The Palacio de Bellas Artes mounted a major retrospective in 1986. In 1989 he travelled to the Soviet Union to press for the rehabilitation of Leon Trotsky and his father, and from 2000 his work was shown in Russia, including at Orenburg in 2003 and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow in 2005. In 1990 he moved to Cuernavaca, where he died on 21 July 2005, aged eighty-five. He donated some 4,600 works, about a thousand of which form the collection of the Centro Vlady of the Autonomous University of Mexico City.
"Left the USSR with his father in 1936, lived in Belgium and France, and after the German invasion of France sailed via Martinique and the Dominican Republic to Mexico, arriving in 1941 (or 1943, by other accounts); Mexican citizen from 1947."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Petrograd, Russian SFSR (Soviet Russia; now St Petersburg)
Born in Petrograd in 1920 to the writer Victor Serge and Liuba Rusakova, he spent his childhood and youth in Soviet Russia, including years of internal exile with his father in Orenburg in the 1930s, before leaving the USSR in 1936.
Petrograd, Russian SFSR (Soviet Russia; now St Petersburg). At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.