This is a painting of a fellow painter named Sasha Arefiev who said that he could never beat the guy sitting next to him because all his cards kept coming up as crosses. In this capture of a game, the bandit next to him in the hat and tie is Lenin and there was no way that he could be beat. Sasha is the figure that’s top center and his hat says “APEX” which in Russian is short for his last name but in English is directly translated to “nuts”. Sasha, just like the other painters, always had the secret police follow him and he was imprisoned twice because of his wonderful paintings while in the Soviet Union. In the lower left of the painting is Sasha’s beautiful wife Zanna Yatzenko. In 1978 the family was able to emigrate to France.