Dmitri Vrubel

Dmitri Vrubel was a Russian painter, born in Moscow in 1960 and trained in the graphic art department of the Moscow State Lenin Pedagogical Institute after taking up painting at the age of fifteen. He is remembered above all for a satirical mural on the Berlin Wall, later part of the East Side Gallery, titled My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love, which shows the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and the East German leader Erich Honecker in a fraternal kiss taken from a 1979 photograph by Regis Bossu. The authorities removed the mural in 2009 during a cleaning effort so that Vrubel could repaint it. With his wife Viktoria Timofeyeva he also made a large calendar of portraits of Vladimir Putin, The 12 Moods of Putin, in 2001. Vrubel died in Berlin in August 2022 from complications of COVID-19.