In the 1970s Western journalists called him Soviet Henry Moore, whereas domestic media condemed him as anti-Soviet. A nonconformist artist, Vadim Sidur was clamped down by Soviet censorship and authorities, since his works stood in stark contrast to the canons of socialist realism. Nowadays he is a universally acclaimed artist, whose sculptures can be seen in streets and squares of Russia, Europe and the USA.

Vadim Sidur was born in Yekaterinoslav in 1924. From 1942 to 1944 he was a soldier at the frontlines of the Great Patriotic War until wounded and demobilized. In 1953 Vadim Sidur graduated from the Monumental Sculpture Faculty at the Stroganov Art School. Afterwards  the sculptor lived and worked in Moscow.

Vadim Sidur repeatedly faced officials rejecting his art works and accusing him of formalism and pacifism. Nevertheless, he made city decorative sculptures to order and customized gravestones. The sculptor could never in his lifetime exhibit his creative works in the USSR; at the same time more than 30 exhibitions of his works took place abroad. His sculptures were set up in Germany (To Victims of Violence, Kassel and The Appealing One, Düsseldorf), the USA (Einstein's Head) and others.

The most famous works by Vadim Sidur are The Wounded (1963), Despair (1963), Babi Yar (1966), Monument to Victims of Violence (1974), cycle The Feminine (1977), and The Formula of Grief (1981).

Along with creating sculptures, Vadim Sidur worked on graphic art. In particular, he illustrated the book of poetry Cinema (1970) written by Yury Levitansky. Moreover, the artist himself wrote poems and short stories, which were distributed by samizdat (dissiden underground press in the USSR) and published in the West.

Over thirty years of his creative life Vadim Sidur brought into being more than five hundred sculptures and thousands of graphic art works. Numerous exhibitions and publications in Europe and America gained him wide popularity abroad. In different years his works enriched collections of the German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, the Nobel Prize winners in literature Samuel Beckett and Pablo Neruda, the Nobel Prize winners in physics Jan Oort and John Bardin, the composer Benjamin Britten, writers Milan Kundera and Heinrich Böll, the industrialist Norton Dodge, and many others.

After Vadim Sidur's death, which fell on the epoch of Gorbachev's Perestroika, the artist's creative heritage was publicly recognized the national patromony of Russia.

Vadim Sidur Museum
The State Museum of Vadim Sidur was founded in Moscow in 1989. It is the only Moscow state museum entirely dedicated to modern sculpture. The artistic heritage of Vadim Sidur is so peculiar and many-sided (including numerous sculptures and graphic art works, as well as poetry, prose and even cinematography) that it in itself represents an epoch in the history of Russian art.