Background
Sysoev, Viacheslav was born on October 30, 1937 in Moscow.
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Viacheslav Viacheslavovich Sysoev
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Self-taught artist. Specializes in sharp political cartoons on Soviet life, bureaucrats, foreign policy, and abuse of human rights. All this brought him into conflict with the Soviet authorities. Several short imprisonments.
Became virtually hunted by the Committee for State Security. Went into hiding for 4 years. In 1980, detained at the notorious Ganushkin psychiatric hospital in Moscow in the special department for dissidents.
However, his caricatures continued to be published in the West. Became a cause celebre in France, with several artistic personalities signing letters of protest against his harassment. The Paris magazine Canard Enchaine published his drawing The Monument to the Unknown Gulag, which made him internationally famous, and which was later reproduced on the cover of Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma.
The International Association for the Defence of Artists (AIDA) brought pressure to bear on the Soviet authorities, and he was at last released on 9 February 1985, and restored as an artist in Moscow. Some of his cartoons (on China) have since been published in a Soviet magazine.
