year in the boarding school for gifted children. In 1945 he got a place in the Kiev Shevchenko State Art School, which was situated at the time in the building of the Kiev Art Institute. In 1952 he graduated from the art school and applied to the Kiev Art Institute, but he did not get a place because admissions were strictly regulated according to ethnicity. He began earning some money by making copies of pictures by well-known Soviet artists for palaces of culture and other similar state institutions. In 1953 Brusilovsky went to Moscow. He worked as an artist and designer in the All-Russia Exhibition Centre but he decided to further his education and went to Leningrad, where he began studying in the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in the graphic design department. He studied with artists such as Ostap Shrub and Minas Avetisyan. He graduated from the Institute in 1959 (his thesis supervisor was Alexei Pakhomov) and then he was assigned a job in the city of Sverdlovsk. Creative work Sverdlovsk In Sverdlovsk, Misha Brusilovsky began teaching drawing in Shadr Art College, and he also began working with the Central Ural Publishing House as an artist-illustrator. He met Vitaly Volovich, Herman Metelev, Andrei Antonov, Anatoly Kalashnikov and other Sverdlovsk artists, and he also met the artist Gennady Mosin with whom he had been friendly back in the Repin Institute. He worked with Mosin on mounted pictures. He also took orders for monumental pieces. The chairperson of the Sverdlovsk Union of Artists A. G. Vyaznikov, who in the interests of his own career was waging a wide-scale war against formalism and some bureaucrats in the Sverdlovsk branch of the communist party had a negative reaction to Brusilovsky's work. In 1961, for Brusilovsky's thirtieth birthday, the Sverdlovsk Union of Artists organised an exhibition of painting and graphic art in the Sverdlovsk House of the Artist, together with an exhibition of another Sverdlovsk artist K. Zyumbilov. On 10 May 1961, the newspaper "The Ural Worker", in "The audience responds" column, published a note by the name of "An unnecessary enterprise", signed by a certain "public servant N. Efimov" in which all of Brusilovsky's pieces which had been presented at the exhibition came under criticism. The painting "1918" In 1962 Brusilovsky began working in collaboration with Gennady Mosin on the painting "1918". The decision to paint the painting was a provocation