Sveshnikov was determined to continue his career as an artist and enrolled at the Moscow Institute for the Decorative and Applied Arts in 1944. He was suddenly arrested and accused of participating in the assassination attempt on Joseph Stalin at the beginning of 1946. Boris was innocent and did not admit his guilt but was sentenced to hard labour and spent years in the camps in the Russian North. The living and working conditions were very hard but Sveshnikov’s creative skills were noted and he obtained a job at a woodworking factory where he was able to start drawing and painting again. His art helped Boris to survive and he called this time of his life as a period of absolute creative freedom.

In 1954 Sveshnikov was released and lived in Tarussa near Moscow. He moved back to the capital after he was exonerated and his criminal record was removed in 1957. In the 1960s he worked as a book illustrator He lived for the Goslitizdat publishing house making hundreds of black and white drawings and works in colour for the fairly-tales of Hans Cristian Andersen, Hans Hoffman and Grimm brothers among the others.

Sveshnikov became one of the leading figures of the Moscow circle of unofficial artists and developed his unique magical and fantastic realist style originated from the Old Masters of the early and high Renaissance. He moved on to a pointillist manner of painting with an elaborate web-like coloured pattern and his paintings were exhibited in the USA, France, Germany and other European countries in the 1970s and 1980s.

Camp drawings by Boris Sveshnikov were published in the album by Memorial society in 2000. His works are present at the Zimmerli Art Museum at the Rutgers University of New Jersey, the Museum of Modern Art, the Pushkin Fine Art Museum and the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg, many regional museums in Russia and in important private collections in Russia and abroad.