This is the painting with which the artist steps into grand‑scale art, though its roots reach back to his very first brushstrokes and an unexpected path he chose early on. After his second year, while classmates headed for the Black Sea, the Siberian‑born student travelled to the White Sea, then joined the monumental‑painting workshop in Veliky Novgorod—a city whose every brick holds the spirit of Rus’, tragedy, and glory. There, beside St Sophia Cathedral, he made the first sketch: quick, intuitive, almost prophetic. So expressive was that study that it survived time unchanged, serving as the seed for a vast historical canvas about Russian revolt, civil war, pain, hope, and the terrible price a people pay for inner schism. The theme extends the artist’s earlier diploma work, sharpening his meditation on the Russian spirit—its patience and fury, the tragedy of division, the strength that endures. This is not a single historical episode but an archetype, a painted monument. On the canvas: a crowd, a square, the ancient cathedral that has witnessed princely weddings, executions, and battle prayers. People fight for their own truth—one carries an icon, another a sword, a third empty hands. It is no chronicle but a metaphor: Russia in eternal rupture, endless inner struggle, yet convinced the struggle is not in vain. More than three years went into the painting: a second, larger sketch, two years of research—costumes, weapons, architecture, chronicles—three full compositional versions, and finally a return to the first, most vital idea. The lesson: truth may lie not in complexity but in the honesty of an initial impulse. The finished canvas exceeds five meters, executed with austere, powerful brushwork. The studio barely contained it, and for the diploma defense it was removed from its stretcher and carried like a banner—both literally and symbolically. By then the work had taken on a life of its own. A feature‑length documentary filmed the process—doubts, despair, discovery—providing a visual diary of an artist creating his first monumental statement. “Square by St Sophia. Riot” is less about one event than about the arc of Russian history—its pain, pride, and cyclic return. It stands as a warning and a question: how are we different from those who once rushed, shouting, into the fray for their truth, and what have we really inherited from them beyond blood and stubborn resolve? By tradition, the artist defended this painting last—an honor reserved for the strongest diploma work of the year.