Georgi Mikhailov Collection

Georgi N. Mikhailov, born in 1945, was a physics professor at the University of Leningrad. In 1975, he began hosting an open house in his apartment on Sundays which exhibited works of art which had been banned by the Soviet government. The Soviet police force, the K.G.B., searched his apartment in 1977 confiscated 5,000 slides of paintings, which resulted in his dismissal from the University of Leningrad. In February 1979, Mikhailov was arrested and jailed in Leningrad. 300 of his paintings were destroyed at this time. The chapter of Amnesty International in Munich, Germany began advocating for his release. Mikhailov remained in prison in Leningrad for a year before being sent to three Soviet labor camps in Northeastern Siberia between 1980 and 1983 as a political prisoner. He maintained a camera while in the camp and smuggled the negatives to his mother in Leningrad. After being released in 1983, Mikhailov was rearrested two years later and jailed in Leningrad. After his release, he was granted a visa to immigrate to France, and married a French woman, Veronique, in 1985. In 1987, Mikhailov taught a summer course at the Tolstoy Foundation in New York. Georgie passed away in Berlin, Germany on October 10, 2014. The collection was donated to Archives & Special Collections by Lawrence Tobin, a personal friend of Mikhailov.