Vladimir Aleinikov

Vladimir Dmitrievich Aleinikov was born on 28 January 1946 in Molotov, the name then used for Perm. His father, Dmitry Grigorievich Aleinikov, was a watercolour painter and a veteran of the Second World War, described as a gifted all-rounder who was also a musician, gardener and inventor. His mother was a teacher of Russian language and literature.

In April 1946 the family moved to Kryvyi Rih in Ukraine, his father's home town, and he finished secondary school No. 25 there. As a schoolboy he wrote poetry and prose and also studied music, painting and graphic art. From 1962 to 1964 he belonged to a group of young Kryvyi Rih poets, and from May 1962 his first poems were printed in Ukrainian newspapers. In 1963, during Khrushchev's campaign against formalism in the arts, he was publicly criticised in the Ukrainian press.

In 1964 he enrolled in the history and theory of art section of the history faculty of Moscow State University, where he came to know leading figures of the Moscow artistic underground.

In January 1965 Aleinikov and the poet Leonid Gubanov founded SMOG, a literary association of young poets whose name is usually read as an acronym for Courage, Thought, Image, Depth. Aleinikov became its leader. In February and March 1965 the group gave readings in Moscow, including on Mayakovsky Square, staged demonstrations in defence of creative freedom and produced samizdat collections. The authorities responded with expulsions from institutes and other pressure on members. Aleinikov was expelled from Moscow State University in the spring of 1965, reinstated in 1966, and graduated in 1973.

His poems began to be published abroad in 1965, but in the Soviet Union he was not published, and for more than twenty five years his verse circulated in samizdat. Between 1971 and 1978 he lived without a settled home, travelling the country and working on archaeological expeditions, as a loader, a yard keeper, in a school, on a factory newspaper and as a publishing editor. In the early 1980s he wrote poems for children and reviewed manuscripts for Moscow publishers, and he became known as a translator of poetry from the languages of the Soviet peoples, including Chuvash, Lithuanian, Abkhaz and Tajik poets.

With perestroika his work reached readers at home. His first books of poems, including Predvecherye, appeared in 1987, followed by large collections in the early 1990s and many volumes of prose recalling the underground era and his contemporaries, among them Tadzimas, SMOG and Dovlatov and Others. A collected works in eight volumes was published by Ripol Classic in 2015. He sat on the editorial boards of the journals Strelets and Kreshchatik and was a member of the Moscow Writers' Union and the PEN Club. His honours included the Andrei Bely Prize (1980) and the Bunin Prize (2012), and his book Pir was longlisted for the Russian Booker Prize in 2005. He was also a painter and graphic artist.

From 1991 Aleinikov divided his life between Moscow and Koktebel, the seaside village in Crimea long associated with Russian poets. He was married and had a daughter, who spoke to the press after his death. In 2011 he received an honour for services to Kryvyi Rih, the city where he grew up.

Vladimir Aleinikov died in the night of 28 October 2026 at his home in Koktebel, at the age of 80. His death was announced by his publisher, Ripol Classic, which called him one of the brightest and most original voices of contemporary Russian literature, and by his friend the writer Yan Brushtein.

His daughter told TASS that he had complained of heart trouble the day before and had taken medicine, and that in the morning her mother went to wake him and found that he had died. The death was reported by RIA Novosti, Kommersant, NTV and Vesti. The funeral was planned for Koktebel, with the date to be announced.

Aleinikov is remembered as the central figure of SMOG, one of the first openly independent literary groups of the post Stalin generation, and as a poet whose work survived decades of exclusion from Soviet print. Writers including Arseny Tarkovsky, Alexander Mezhirov, Genrikh Sapgir, Ernst Neizvestny, Andrei Bitov, Yevgeny Rein and Sasha Sokolov wrote admiringly of his poetry, and his memoirs are a significant record of the Moscow literary underground of the 1960s and 1970s. In 2026 he was included in a list of 300 Russian poets recommended for study at university philology faculties.