She has made a name for herself as a critical chronicler of the Putin regime, and the latest work by Russian illustrator Victoria Lomasko (44) is due to be published in German at the beginning of 2023. Working on the translation of her book “The Last Soviet Artist” is almost complete, said Lomasko on her Instagram channel. It is to be published by Diaphanes Verlag in Zurich in February.
Lomasko left her hometown of Moscow three weeks after the Russian army invaded Ukraine and went into exile in Germany.
in one Instagram post Among other things, she wrote at the time: “For me, what is happening is not just the story of a terrible war in Ukraine and appalling repression in Russia: the vast landscape known as the ‘post-Soviet space’ is changing, and the The whole world will follow her.” Putin’s regime, whom she calls a “dictator”, can only be described in one word: “fascism”.
In Germany, Victoria Lomasko took part in the Documenta in Kassel, among other places, where she documented numerous events in drawings on behalf of the curation team.
She currently lives in Leipzig, she writes on her Instagram page. Until recently, she had lived and worked in Stuttgart as part of a Jean Jacques Rousseau fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude.
In her pictorial narratives, which usually combine text and drawings, Lomasko has been documenting the dark side of everyday life in Russia for years, and this has repeatedly drawn the attention of the security authorities. Among other things, she accompanied civil rights demonstrations and truck driver protests, LGBT festivals and court cases against government critics with the drawing pad
In her new book, Lomasko deals with the question of “what has become of the Soviet legacy” in drawn travel reports, as the publisher’s announcement puts it. In addition to Russia, she has also traveled to Armenia, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, the Russian republics of Dagestan and Ingushetia, and Belarus.
According to her publisher, Lomasko combines in “The Last Soviet Artist” “external events with personal feelings and comments and describes the social transformation processes in the former Soviet republics: the fight for the rights of women and LGBTQ people in deeply patriarchal societies, the painful aftermath forced ethnic resettlements under Stalin, the final change from Putin’s totalitarian regime to a dictatorship.”
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