Шарик – “Balloon”

Vox populi

Шарик – “Balloon” –, often called “the Russian Banksy”, who fills with his creations the empty walls of Simferopol in the Crimea, has recently become a star of the Russian net. Although his graffitis are not as witty or as elaborated as those of his namesake, their great potential vantage is that they intentionally represent the topoi of today’s Russian reality: the manager-mafioso who has his concise opinion on everyone else (хуй = dick), the invasion of the West symbolized with Coca-Cola, the violence of the authorities, the delusion in every ideology, and so on.

The graffiti below seems to give a visual answer to the last piece of the above series of ten. Stalin, the Master – “under whom there was still order”, “who made great the Soviet Union” – returns and sweeps off every ideology and foreign infection that have crippled the people of Russia, just like the self-conscious worker did on the revolutionary ad in Stalin’s own times.

Unfortunately, this graffiti also represents a popular topos of today’s Russian reality. And an increasingly popular one.