[1] An admirer summarized her work as "a free-spirited romp across complex and significant ideas about personhood, identity, representation, linguistic performance, and political action.
Anna Alchuk Mikhalchuk (А́нна Алекса́ндровна Михальчу́к) was born into a Jewish family in Bosjnjakovo [ru] in the Sakhalin Oblast in the Soviet Far East.
[4] She identified with her grandmother whom she never met, since the old lady spent the last thirty years of her life locked away in a psychiatric institution.
[4] During the build-up to the Dissolution of the Soviet Union, in 1987 and 1988 she was a co-publisher of the samizdat publications "Paradigma" ("Парадигма") and "MDP" ("МДП").
[6] In 1983 Alchuk's mother, Maja Koljada, had been denounced and accused of "spreading untrue facts, contrary to better knowledge, which denigrate the Soviet state and social system".
[5] Towards the end of the 1980s she got together with a group of Moscow artists and conceptualist poets, to take part in the exhibitions of the new conceptual art movement.
Later she participated in music and poetry stage performances, for instance with the cult musician Sergey Letov and the Three-O group [ru].
She was the editor-compiler of a collection of articles entitled "Женщина и визуальные знаки" ("Woman and visual signs") which appeared in 2000.
During the final years of the twentieth century, hers became an increasingly international presence in the contemporary arts world, featuring in exhibitions not just in Russia, but also in Britain, Germany, Hungary and Sweden.
What appalled many in Russia and, as news of the trial spread, many international observers, was the fact that the authorities proceeded not against the vandals but against the exhibition organisers, Yuri Samodurov and Ludmila Vasilovskaya.
Alchuk found herself identified in the Russian press not as an adventurous artist and lyric poet but as a political figurehead of opposition.
[3] (The outcome of the trial was that Samodurov and Vasilovskaya were found guilty of inciting religious and ethic hostility under Article 282 of the Criminal Code.
But when politics forced its way into our space and started to destroy it, when things were taken away from us that shortly beforehand had seemed to belong to us, my wife, myself and other (sadly only a few) intellectuals who defended their language and their right to artistic expression, were suddenly labelled "Putin critics" .... Anna Alchuk's diary of dreams shows that being a "Putin critic" is a life-threatening occupation.
[5] Michail Ryklin later wrote, "Once acquitted by the court, she saw herself facing a community for whom the things for which she had fought and made sacrifices (initially it almost seemed and if this was about a common call for freedom of artistic expression) had completely lost their meaning.
It was, it transpired, far easier to endure being a target of religious fanatics than having to put up with the repressive passivity of most of her fellow artists.
[3] On March 21, 2008 Anna Alchuk left the couple's Berlin apartment, telling her husband she was going to the shops to buy washing powder.
He urged them to take more seriously the possibility that there might be a political aspect to her disappearance: "Through her critical engagement with Russian society, and because of her Jewish provenance, Mrs Mikhalchuk was exposed to daily repression and threats of violence.
He had worked through 27 numbered note books in which Anna, like most serious writers, had confided her thoughts and dreams, insights and, increasingly, her nightmares.