Words Will Break Cement

by Masha Gessen

  Voina videotaped the action and, as it would do with all its actions in the future, edited it into a short clip with an accompanying text narrative. The video made it into a show in Kiev, and Voina went there and even restaged The Feast on the Kiev Metro. They were a bona fide art group now.

  ———

  ONCE THEY RETURNED FROM KIEV, they launched a series of actions that had the cumulative effect of making people feel as if Voina had been around for a while, commenting on Russian life and politics without mercy. On February 29, 2008, five couples had sex in the Biology Museum and videotaped it. The action was called Fuck for the Heir Puppy Bear, a play on Dmitry Medvedev’s last name, which derives from the Russian word for bear. Medvedev, a tiny man who looked like a cross between a third grader and his favorite stuffed toy, had been anointed Putin’s successor; the day after the action, he was elected to the office of president so he could keep the chair warm for Putin for four years. The location for the action was chosen for its animal associations, while the form was meant to communicate that Russian political life was like pornography: the commercialized imitation of passion.

  In May, Voina staged The Humiliation of a Cop in His Home: pretending to be students delegated by local high schools, they entered police precincts and replaced portraits of Putin with ones of Medvedev. Policemen watched, mortified at having to witness what felt like an affront to the regime but unable to act because formally the “high school students” were doing the right thing: Medvedev was being inaugurated that very day.

  In June, Oleg Vorotnikov donned the long black robe of a Russian Orthodox priest and a police officer’s hat, entered a supermarket, and left with a full cart of groceries but without paying—to demonstrate that both priests and cops were robbers. This was called Cop in a Priest’s Cassock.

  In September, Voina staged one of its most loaded and confusing actions, which was also destined to be among its best remembered. Called In Memory of the Decembrists, the action referenced Russia’s nineteenth-century would-be revolutionaries in a decidedly obscure way. Five of the Decembrists had been hanged, so Voina staged the hanging of five men—three representing, in costume and makeup, migrant laborers and two representing homosexuals (one of whom was also Jewish in real life)—in the aisles of the Auchan hypermarket, which represented itself, unbridled consumerism, and a signature accomplishment of Moscow’s mayor, who was known for his xenophobic remarks. Auchan customers were handed “hunting licenses,” cards that purported to grant them the right to shoot migrant workers.

  In November, on the anniversary of the October Revolution (which also happened to be Nadya’s nineteenth birthday), they staged their Storming of the White House. Voina smuggled a powerful laser projector into the attic of the Ukraine Hotel (another Stalin skyscraper) and used it to project an enormous skull-and-crossbones across the Moscow River onto the White House, seat of the Russian government.

  They closed out the year on December 28 by welding shut the doors of Oprichnik, one of Moscow’s most ridiculously expensive restaurants, whose name referred to members of Ivan the Terrible’s shock troops. A message nailed to the door said: “For the security of our citizens the doors of the elite club Oprichnik have been reinforced.” Voina members had thought a New Year’s celebration was under way inside when they welded the club shut. In fact, Oprichnik was empty that night.

  ———

  THEY PROVED TO BE TALENTED RECRUITERS. They would attend shows at Moscow’s Rodchenko School of Photography and invite gifted students to come and play—this was how a short, boyish young woman who called herself Kat became a regular participant. They would go to established artists for counsel and involve them as well: Kulik joined them occasionally, and a writer named Alexei Plutser-Sarno became the group’s quasi-official blogger and the leading source of information on their actions. A filmmaker named Tasya Krugovykh came to them when she needed a consult on shoplifting for a film she was planning—and they came back to her with a request for scripting one of their actions. She agreed.

  Shoplifting was an essential part of the Voina ethos. They rejected consumption; more to the point, they had no money but liked to eat well and often—so they raised stealing food to an art form. They could hold forth for hours on the theory and practice of stealing to eat, including the finer details of stores’ unsuccessful shoplifting-prevention strategies.

  Petya, Nadya, Oleg, Natalia, and a shifting number of other Voina members formed what amounted to a commune. They generally lived together—in a two-room apartment Petya was able to rent for a while, in Kulik’s basement studio where Anton the Crazy One lived, in a squat, in a rehearsal space. They traveled together when they had shows. They talked all the time, usually about art and politics. Eventually they tired one another out. In late 2009, they split acrimoniously—Oleg and Natalia and their allies on the one hand and Petya and Nadya and theirs on the other. Both groups continued to call themselves Voina. Oleg’s claim appeared to have more credence: his Voina continued to generate remarkable actions, including the group’s simplest and wittiest one, the laconic opposite of their early excesses. In June 2010, they painted the giant outline of a penis on half of a drawbridge outside the regional secret police headquarters in St. Petersburg. When the bridge was raised, the penis erected itself right into headquarters windows. The action was called Fuck the FSB. From this, Oleg’s Voina graduated to damaging and destroying police vehicles, then to getting arrested briefly, and finally to fleeing the country. Oleg and Natalia went into hiding in 2011 and eventually reemerged in Venice, Italy.

  Nadya and Petya did not do anything as decisive or dramatic. They had had a baby: Gera happened to them much the way Nadya had happened to her own parents—Nadya was pregnant within months of meeting Petya. They scheduled a meeting with Andrei, Nadya’s father, in the Metro to tell him the news. He remembered sitting on a train pulling out of the station and realizing “there would be a baby and this character named Petya would now be a part of my life.” Once Nadya turned eighteen, she and Petya got a marriage license. Nadya was nine months pregnant when they “fucked for the heir puppy bear.” Gera was born four days later. The baby spent much of her time at Petya’s mother’s apartment while her parents were out making political art.

  But by the time Gera was two, her parents—aged twenty and twenty-three—were a bit like art-world retirees. Their best or at least most dramatic work appeared to be behind them. Petya took to referring to Voina’s 2008 actions as “classics.” It seemed they had been a part of creating something much bigger than they had realized—and much bigger than they themselves were. But the moment in which that work had been created was over. The outrage was gone. The Marches of the Disagreeable had devolved into small protests in one of Moscow’s central squares, held every other month. The 2008 financial crisis had tamed Moscow’s consumerist extravagance. Medvedev kept spouting somewhat believable liberal rhetoric. What had been black and white turned an indecisive shade of gray—a color not conducive to making radical art.

  Nadya studied. She looked for Russian translations of essential works of philosophy written during the last forty years; sometimes she found self-published or unpublished translations, and sometimes she found none at all and became a translator herself. Petya was restless.

  THREE

  Kat

  “MY CHILDHOOD WAS not particularly ordinary before it became ordinary.” Yekaterina Samutsevich had an indirect relationship to language; I had noticed this in spending time in her company even before we sat down for our first formal interview. She aimed to be precise, her word choice was always intentional, but she seemed unaware of images or associations that her words called forth in others, and as a result her speech often served to obscure rather than to illuminate. Now I had told her I wanted to hear her whole story from the beginning, and she started by saying her childhood had become ordinary after it had been extraordinary.

  “It was extraordinary at first because I was always in hospitals, in some sort of institut
ion, like an orphanage but actually a hospital. I must have had serious health problems of some sort, as I was told later. So when I was a child, I never saw my parents. I don’t remember how old I was when I first saw them—it’s hard to tell the age from the memory. I remember Mother and Father came. Mother was wearing a black fur coat—I remember that. I was told, ‘This woman and this man are your parents. They waited for you and now they have come to take you.’ And I remember that I had been in hospitals and also there were other women I didn’t know. I lived at a woman’s home once and she gave me treatment potions. I had been spending all my time with strangers. So the first time I was shown my mother and father, it made no impression on me: I didn’t care who they were. I was just sad I had to go to some strange place. And they took me to the apartment where I still live.”

  “Did you ever ask your parents what was wrong with you?”

  “Of course I did. They told me I was a biological child, I was not adopted, but I had been very seriously ill. I don’t know what it was—maybe there was something wrong with my heart. So they’d had to keep sending me away to make sure I could survive.”

  Here was the only central character in this story to whom I could have unfettered access, and we seemed to have encountered a fundamental problem at the very beginning of its telling. From everything I could see, she had told me a classic adoption story, and now she was telling me it was not what it seemed. We all deal in personal and family myths and legends, we conspire to exaggerate and obliterate, but usually we make adjustments to the stories to make them believable (indeed, often true stories must be systematically altered in order to actually be believed). Never before had I been told a story that appeared to represent one event and been instructed to take it on faith that it actually represented another. This was going to happen again and again in my conversations with Yekaterina and her father.

  Stanislav Samutsevich was a very tall man who looked younger than his seventy-four years. He also looked remarkably un-Russian: in a short-sleeved blue oxford shirt, gray belted slacks, and black loafers, he looked more like a retired American insurance salesman or midlevel IBM employee than a Russian engineer. We sat on a park bench in central Moscow; like many Russians his age, he had not adopted the Western habit of meeting in cafés.

  “She had a problem with her kidneys,” he said when I asked him about Yekaterina’s early childhood. “She was in working condition by the time she was five, so that was when we collected her. It was possible to take care of her, and now she is a physically healthy child.”

  He was talking about a thirty-year-old woman.

  “Sure, she is physically underdeveloped,” he continued.

  If I was able to stifle my reaction when Samutsevich called his grown daughter “a healthy child,” I must have failed now: he clearly noticed I had cringed at the word underdeveloped. Yekaterina was five feet tall and had broad hips that made her look stockier than she was. She had an angular way about her and could sometimes look awkward, but she was by no means “underdeveloped.”

  “It’s just that everyone in my family is large,” explained Stanislav Samutsevich.

  ———

  ONCE SHE WAS HOME, Yekaterina had an ordinary childhood. She was a lonely girl growing up in a lonely family of lonely people, a late-Soviet version of any American novel of suburban desolation. Her parents had an old-fashioned sort of mismatch: the father hailed from an educated and well-placed Moscow family, while the mother came from the Ukrainian countryside. He felt embarrassed by her and she felt oppressed by him. She spent her days teaching drawing at the school Yekaterina attended—a regular neighborhood school, like scores of other schools around Moscow—and her evenings and summers in the kitchen.

  “She was brought up conservatively—that the woman’s place was in the kitchen,” Yekaterina told me. “And my mother really did work at home her whole life. I mean, she worked around the house. Always cooking, cleaning. My father never did a thing, from what I understand. And she was always resenting him for that. She would say, ‘He is an intellectual, what are you going to do.’ In the summers we lived at the dacha, and I would see it: the summer, the heat, and she and my aunt are always cooking. Making preserves too, and other strange things. I didn’t understand what it was all for. But she told me, ‘Your life is going to be like this. You’ll spend it in the kitchen.’ I looked at it all in horror. And I view it negatively now.”

  Stanislav had other ideas for his only child: he steered Yekaterina toward his own field of computer programming. She graduated high school with a gold medal, given to straight-A students. “It was easy enough,” she told me. “I was surprised other people didn’t have gold medals.” She paused. “And then they started pressuring me to go to college.” The Moscow Institute of Power Engineering seemed as good a choice as any. It also took Yekaterina out of her dreary southeastern Moscow neighborhood for the first time since she landed there at the age of five; at least during the daytime hours she spent at the institute, she saw something other than the permanent traffic jam that had been the view from her apartment and school windows throughout her childhood.

  The summer after her first year of college, Yekaterina lived at the dacha with her mother; her father worked, splitting his time between Moscow and the countryside. One day her mother, who was standing at the stove as usual, collapsed with a massive heart attack. Yekaterina called her father and her aunt and an ambulance, but by the time anyone came, her mother was dead. Yekaterina tried not to go to the dacha after that.

  She spent six years at the institute, getting a master’s degree, and then left instead of pursuing a Ph.D. “I was disappointed to a certain extent. The department had outdated equipment, my adviser was ninety years old, and I didn’t think this was a very good sign. Naturally, he died soon, and there was no one left, literally, except for a single professor. The state just did not want to invest in attracting people to working in research. So I decided to get a job. And since I didn’t have any work experience, I just started going around from one research institute to another, looking for someplace willing to let a student in.” This was the mid-2000s; young Russians with Yekaterina’s credentials were getting jobs at Google, its hip Russian competitor Yandex, or any number of other high-tech firms that were actively recruiting engineers. But that was in a different, contemporary Moscow: Yekaterina was, like her father, still living in the Soviet city of her childhood, where engineers toiled at research institutes. Or rather, they usually worked at Ministry of Defense outfits behind the facades of research institutes—and that is exactly the kind of place where she found work.

  The Agat Institute was a God- and state-forsaken outfit inhabited by dead souls and a few disoriented live ones like Yekaterina, who was put to work developing software for the weapons-control system of a nuclear submarine. This particular submarine had been under construction in fits and starts since Yekaterina was nine years old and the USSR still in existence. Now, ten years past its original deadline, it was earmarked to be leased by the Indian navy—if and when it was ever completed.

  In 2007, construction of the submarine was largely finished and engineers were needed on site for the final adjustment and testing process, which was expected to last about a year and a half. Russian authorities were haggling with India—the price tag kept growing and the deadline kept getting pushed back—and the engineers were coming under pressure too. This was when Yekaterina quit.

  “I was completely disappointed there too,” she told me. “For all the same reasons: corruption, the state’s lack of desire to invest in quality military equipment. Programmers got very low pay, while project leaders, who weren’t doing anything, just watching the security clearances, got a hundred thousand rubles [about three thousand dollars] a month. And the people who never showed up but were making sixty thousand. And you went to work and you didn’t know who you reported to or what you were supposed to do.”

  What Yekaterina remembered as her first stern act of rebellion, her father r
emembered differently: “When she was supposed to go to the Far East for equipment testing, I wouldn’t let her go.”

  “What do you mean, you wouldn’t let her go?”

  “Well, would you have? She was twenty-five years old, a little girl—what kind of father would let a child go to the Far East for one and a half to two years? And I’ve served in the military myself. I have been to those parts—they are crawling with criminals. So I didn’t let her go. And a good thing I didn’t too.”

  Yekaterina quit the defense institute and started taking on freelance software-writing assignments, or so her father thought. Her actual first act of rebellion was responding to an ad for a new school of photography, named for the Constructivist artist Alexander Rodchenko. The ad was a message from the other Moscow, a modern, cosmopolitan city Yekaterina had barely suspected existed. She had been to a couple of photo exhibits, and once she had been struck by the work of Boris Mikhailov, a Ukrainian-born photographer living in Berlin, one of a handful of living, world-renowned artists who hail from the former Soviet Union. Yekaterina saw a couple of pictures from his famous Red series, over-the-top romantic images flooded with Communist red. “I liked them. I didn’t know why.”

  She had the summer to turn herself into a Rodchenko applicant. “I tried to make pictures that would be conceptual and not just pretty. I realized they were no good, they needed to be smarter. So I started studying books by photographers—I don’t remember who. And then, unexpectedly, I got in.” The school was free for those who were admitted on the basis of their portfolios, and Yekaterina decided not to tell her father about it. Every day she would slip out of the apartment and enter the world of contemporary art critics, curators, and photographers: the best of Moscow’s best taught at Rodchenko.