Dear Ms. Totaro:

    Having exhausted all official paths and possibilities to restore my gift of aft to America - 1,500 personal works consisting of paintings, graphics, drawings, watercolours, three-dimensional compositions, collages, pop art, and sculptures; and having lost my rights as creator to my own creative works; and having lost my faith in the humaneness of this free country; I, as a resident of America who has lived nearly ten years in the U.S. capital, am hereby appealing to the Washington Area Lawyers for the Arts for pro bono legal assistance in the matter of procuring the return from Russia to Washington, D.C., of my gift of art to the American people; the restoration of my rights as author to the 1,500 works of art in question; and compensation for all the losses which I have sustained at the hands of the the U.S. Department of State's officials over the past ten years who have bome responsibility and culpability in this matter.

Pertinent information

    The extraordinary circumstances of my fight for human rights in the Soviet Union from 1982 through 1987 had placed both me and my life's work of creative art under the threat of physical destruction. To avert the threat to my work, I made a gift of 1,500 works of my art to America, the country that had supported me in my struggle. This gift was made in full compliance with Soviet law, on the one hand, and with the effective American position, 28 U.S.C. 1491, on the other.

    A series of important events preceded this contract:

• A personal, nearly four-hour meeting with the American ambassador and the cultural attache, Gregory Guroff, in Moscow (spring, 1984). Both diplomats are art collectors, and both accepted some of my graphics and paintings as gifts of thanks at that meeting;
  
  
• The official acceptance by the Consular Department of the American Embassy in Moscow of the documents of deed to the 1,500 works of art, accompanied by a hill catalogue of the art, which the Soviet KGB had intended to bum after the pogrom of my country studio in Akademposyolka, outside of Moscow (fall, 1984; winter, 1985; summer and fall, 1987);
  
  
• The mutual development with American diplomats in the Ambassador's residence in Moscow of the optimal conditions for the safekeeping of my work and conveying it to the Embassy in the case of my arrest, death, or exile from the Soviet Union (spring 1985);
  
  
• The multiple oral guarantees - (written confirmation was not made in light of the negative pressure from the Soviet and American sides in this instance) - of the Cultural Attache and the successive attention to the matter of this gift through the cultural, political, and consular departments of the American Embassy, from the spring of 1985 through the fall of 1987 up to the very moment of my deportation, conclusively;
  
  
• The extreme restrictions by the Soviet authorities surrounding my enforced deportation - along with my wife, whose leg they had broken - with only ten days notice and under the threat, in case of noncompliance, of being sent to jail or into the Gulag;
  
  
• In the course of those ten days, with daily contact with the American Embassy, the Consular Department from November 20 to November 30, 1987, coordinated our steps with regards to our gift, which was ready for shipping by legal means, after our sending to the Embassy all copies of the documents of deeds and my documents transferring to them my power of attorney.
  

• The crates containing the 1,500 works of art, each marked "Property of the American People and the American Government-Alexander Zhdanov," were filmed by John Ritchie and a cameraman from CBS TV in the spring of 1987, after the KGB had broken out our windows.