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Biography
Dmitri Vladimirovich Vrubel (Russian: Дмитрий Владимирович Врубель; born 14 July 1960) is a Russian painter. He is best known for his East Side Gallery-painting My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love, depicting the kissing communist leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker.
Vrubel was born in Moscow. His surname is a Russification of the common Polish surname Wróbel.
Work
My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love depicts the kissing communist leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker. It was inspired by the kiss they had in 1979, during the celebration of the 30 years of the GDR. In 2009 the painting was destroyed by the authorities, in order to have it repainted by Vrubel.
In 2001, he and his wife, Viktoria Timofeyeva, created a large format calendar containing portraits of Russian President Vladimir Putin called "The 12 moods of Putin". Each page of the calendar portrayed a different image of Putin and was an unexpected hit with the Moscow population.
