From the middle of 1920’s onward Gan battled an increasingly severe alcohol addiction. It may be partially attributable to the concussion he received during World War. Gan understood the drawbacks and in 1927 enrolled in therapy at a neuropsychiatric hospital. However, ultimately it was unsuccessful. In 1933 his addiction led to a falling out with Shub; soon after Gan left Moscow permanently.
for gan [...] ‘anti-marxist’, ‘bourgeois’ attitude of many artists and officials of his time is unacceptable and insupportable. in his opinion, the communist revolution means a definite break with everything of the past, including its art and culture. —willem g. weststeijn, slavist
Caricature on Alexei Gan and his magazine Kino-Fot made by Alexander Rodchenko.
Not much is known about Gan’s life after 1933, although some historians claim he wandered Siberia working as an architect and decorator. According to one source, Gan brilliantly decorated Khabarovsk port to celebrate the arrival in 1934 of Chelyuskin sailors saved from the Arctic ice.
The same source says that drunk Gan cursed Stalin, which in the Soviet Union of the 1930’s was one of the fastest routes to prison and death. Additionally, Gan’s anarchist past was a recipe for disaster.
He somehow managed to survive the Great Purge of 1937 but was unable to live through the subsequent wave of repressions initiated by the outbreak of World War II. Aleksei Gan was sent to prison in Tomsk in 1941 for counter-revolutionary agitation and shot to death the following year.