by Masha Gessen
In November 2008, the fire-extinguishing system on the nuclear submarine on which Yekaterina had worked malfunctioned while the vessel was en route to a weapons-testing exercise. Twenty people aboard died, including seventeen civilian engineers. Stanislav Samutsevich felt his instincts had been good and his strictness had been vindicated; it was a good thing his daughter was a freelancer now.
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WHEN YEKATERINA EVENTUALLY ADMITTED she was studying photography, Stanislav Samutsevich tried to be understanding and asked to see her work. “She was making pictures of abstract things, and I told her, ‘Take pictures of life around you and the way people live, and that way you will have psychology in your work.’ That went right over her head.”
In fact, she did take pictures of life around her. The class assignment for the 2007–2008 academic year was photographing elections. During the parliamentary election in December 2007, members of the class, armed with credentials issued by the mayor’s office, went to different polling stations—and got roughed up, detained, or chased away. At one point Yekaterina and her closest friend at the school, a tall, pale, skinny young woman named Natasha, decided to photograph Yekaterina voting at her own old school. Natasha shot her walking toward the building—and discovering that it was locked. “Then these people in civilian clothing showed up and said the election was over and the building was closed.” It was an hour before the polls were scheduled to close.
Yekaterina’s political education intensified in March, when she and Natasha set out to photograph the presidential election. Putin’s anointed successor, Dmitry Medvedev, was running essentially unopposed. From a list of polling stations, Yekaterina and Natasha picked an address that seemed odd to them. They found a psychiatric hospital—as it turned out, it was one of a number of ghost precincts created for the counting of dead-soul votes. They took pictures of themselves looking for a place to cast their votes inside a psychiatric ward—until they got kicked out.
That spring the Rodchenko School had a student show. When Yekaterina and Natasha arrived, someone told them a group of people was looking for Natasha—they had liked her video installation and asked to meet the artist. The two women found Petya, Nadya, Oleg, and Natalia standing by Natasha’s work. The visitors introduced themselves as Voina and were surprised to hear that Rodchenko students had discussed their work in class. They exchanged phone numbers. A month later, Voina called, and Natasha and Yekaterina joined. Yekaterina now called herself Kat. They took part in Humiliating a Cop in His Home and helped to prepare the Cop in a Priest’s Cassock, Storming the White House, and the hanging of the Decembrists in Auchon. More important, they became part of the fabric of Voina, the arguing, the organizing, and the endless purposeful hanging out. Toward the end of that year, the inherent tensions started getting the better of the group. Soon after Voina welded shut the empty Oprichnik restaurant, Natasha left in a huff. The remaining five people traveled to Kiev and broke up there.
Nadya, Petya, and Kat returned to Moscow intent on continuing Voina. This was when they called Tasya Krugovykh, the filmmaker they had instructed on shoplifting, and asked her to help them conceive and script an action. Tasya’s idea was, naturally, cinematic: she was fascinated with the idea of filming the stereotypes and fears resident in the collective unconscious. She scripted an action in which members of Voina hid out by the side of the highway where traffic policemen were stopping cars with the intention of extracting bribes. Once the cop had his potential victim with the window rolled down, Voina emerged from the shadows, impersonating the cop’s family. Kat would be wearing a housecoat and carrying a platter with a chicken on it (eight chickens had been shoplifted for the occasion). Nadya played a pouty teenager. All of them implored the cop to extract a larger amount. “Five hundred is not enough! Look at the number of mouths we have to feed! Get more!” The cops, mortified, would try to tell drivers that the group was not their real family.
It made a great roadside show—the visualization of a general stereotype and the well-known premise of many jokes, traffic cops extracting bribes in order to feed their large families and to keep their overbearing wives out of the workplace—and Voina staged it a number of times, But the resulting video clip, the ultimate product of their work, disappointed them. Their previous actions, captured on video, had been essentially one-liners. This one was a story, and it came across like a miniature movie, which lacked the Voina edge. It felt like they themselves lacked an edge now. The Moscow faction of Voina fizzled.
Kat and Nadya continued to spend a lot of time together. Natasha had gone home to Siberia, and Kat, who had found she was most comfortable next to someone more willful and driven than she was, became a sort of Sancho Panza to Nadya’s Don Quixote, who was obsessively trying to figure out how she was going to confront the world next.
“They were always in my apartment,” Stanislav Samutsevich complained on the park bench. “They were always in Yekaterina’s room. Doing girl stuff, I thought. I didn’t realize what they were up to until I got a phone call from the police.”
FOUR
Wee Wee Riot
ON DECEMBER 5, 2011, Violetta Volkova and Nikolai Polozov met up a bit before seven. They had never met in person before—they had been following each other on Twitter for a couple of months, since Volkova’s teenage daughter dragged her mother into the era of social media by starting an account for her. Polozov and Volkova had exchanged a few messages because they seemed to have a couple of things in common: they were both in their late thirties, they both worked as criminal defense attorneys, and they both held, as Volkova put it a year and a half later, “views not in favor of the authorities.” This was an awkward but surprisingly precise definition; in a country where there was no political opposition, either in parliament or in the street, a few people discovered their commonality online because they produced similarly disaffected 140-character comments on the Russian government.
As criminal defense lawyers, Volkova and Polozov did not enjoy the kind of social status an American might associate with this profession. The Russian court system, never a sterling example of justice, fairness, or competition, had regressed in the Putin years—and Volkova and Polozov were too young to remember anything else. With an acquittal rate of less than one percent and judges drawn largely from the courts’ secretarial pool, the courts had turned into an arena for technocratic bargaining at best and systematic bribery at worst. Volkova’s and Polozov’s more ambitious law school classmates had gone into corporate or tax law and had over time come to imitate the style of their City of London counterparts—and to make a lot more money than they did. Volkova and Polozov, on the other hand, wore polyester suits and held as low an opinion of their profession as anyone else did.
But it had occurred to Volkova that they could do something important, or at least something different. Another man she had followed on Twitter had posted about a protest planned for this evening. Volkova had never gone to a protest, or even seen one anywhere but on TV—and that had been the protests in Cairo; it had been years since anything of any magnitude had happened in Moscow. But for some reason she felt moved to Tweet a response to the virtual acquaintance who had posted about the protest. She said she would be willing to help if anyone got arrested. Someone suggested she take up a watch post somewhere near the protest site. She found a café with a good view out a second-floor window. She figured she would spend at least a couple of hours there straining to see anything in the wintery darkness outside. She messaged Polozov, suggesting he keep her company.
Whatever it was that brought Volkova and Polozov out that night had worked on thousands of other people as well. In a city where for years no protest had drawn more than a few hundred people—not pensioners coming out against drastic cuts in benefits, nor journalists coming out to mourn their slain colleague Anna Politkovskaya, nor the varied crowd who came out to protest the continued imprisonment of a pregnant woman who had worked for jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky—suddenly, almost w
ithout warning, between seven thousand and ten thousand people took to the streets to protest yet another rigged election.
Nadya and Petya and Kat and many others had been waiting for this day for a long time. For Nadya and Petya, the waiting had commenced years earlier, when they dreamed that the Marches of the Disagreeable might lead to change. Kat had been waiting for four years—since the time she and Natasha were roughed up when they tried to take pictures at a polling station. Many Russians had been surprised and inspired in the summer of 2010, when scores of people led by a young woman named Yevgeniya Chirikova waged a battle to save the forest in Khimki, just outside Moscow, where a new toll road was to be built. Many others began waiting for Russian protests six months earlier, when they watched the Arab Spring explode in hope. And hundreds of thousands felt they could wait no longer when, on September 24, 2011, they watched Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev appear together to announce they had decided to swap seats again, with the former retaking the office of president and the latter becoming prime minister again, in a sham presidential election to be held in half a year’s time. They had announced this and blithely begun preparations for an equally bogus parliamentary election that was held on December 4. And on December 5, the people finally came out.
Nadya and Kat and some of their friends, old and new, had been preparing for this. They were ready. Sort of. Maybe. Almost.
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IN THE COUPLE OF YEARS since Voina fizzled, they had occasionally tried to create actions. At one point Nadya and Kat asked Tasya Krugovykh, the filmmaker, to videotape them wrapping evidence tape around groups of trees; the imprint on the tape said STABILITY—the buzzword of the Putin years. Cinematically, however, the action once again turned out unimpressive and they never released it. After a while, they had another idea: they would kiss cops. They would kill them with kindness, smother them with love. The action was tied to another in a long line of President Medvedev’s symbolic but substanceless actions: he had ordered that the Russian police, which had since the early days of the Soviet Union been known as militsiya, or militia, be renamed politsiya, or police. As though that would magically render the police less corrupt and brutal, less likely to rape, pillage, and terrorize, and more likely to protect. As though it would magically make them human. To test this transformation, Nadya and assorted Rodchenko students they drafted would approach police officers and ask them for simple directions. If the officer responded helpfully, one of the actors would go into paroxysms of gratitude, culminating in a kiss—on the lips, when possible. The kisses, it was decided at the outset, should be same-sex. The reasoning behind this decision was, as often happened with Voina, opaque, but the organizing itself proved an interesting experiment: the men of Voina turned out to be no more capable of administering same-sex kisses than the men of militsiya/politsiya were of receiving them. They would abort the action a day or a few hours before it was planned, pleading exhaustion, ill health, or nothing at all. So it was by accident that Buss the Buzz became Voina’s first women-only action.
Or perhaps it was not entirely accidental. Nadya’s self-education course had taken her into feminist theory. During the production of Buss the Buzz, Nadya carried Julia Kristeva’s Revolt, She Said with her—to read on the Metro and, it turned out, to quote from when the unhappy object of an unwanted kiss searched her. “We are happy because we are revolting,” Nadya proclaimed, but the attempt to quote Kristeva fell flat, in part because the play on words was lost in translation, so it came out simply “rebelling,” or “rioting.”
Since Buss the Buzz had turned into a women-only action, it made sense to release the video clip on the eve of International Women’s Day, March 8, 2011. It went viral and was generally liked, though some people—I was among them—found the nonconsensual physical interaction disturbing. Two years later, Kat assured me there had been no force or coercion involved and only the choppy video editing had made it look like the women of Voina had forced themselves on unsuspecting cops. At the time of the action, though, Kat had sounded pretty aggressive: “A cop’s face is communal property, just like his or her nightstick or your personal belongings, of which he can conduct an illegal search,” she told a reporter. “A cop’s face, as long as he is wearing a uniform and a badge, is but a tool for communicating with citizens. He can use it to demand your documents and… to tell you to come to the precinct. And you have only one way of responding: ‘Yes, sir/ma’am, officer, I obey you and I am coming.’ We are proposing a new way of interacting with this tool, we are introducing variety into the relationship between the people and the police.”
Nadya’s message to the same reporter was simpler: “The decision to become a cop is a hugely serious decision, and it should be made responsibly… I say to her, ‘Madame Officer, have you heard your boss the mayor’s speech in which he said that ‘Moscow does not need gays’? No? That’s reason enough for me to suck your face.”
Queer theory and feminist theory was teaching Nadya, and Nadya was teaching Kat, that things should be done differently—not just differently from the way they were done in Russia but also differently from the way they had been done in Voina. It had been a group of men aided by their wives. It had also been a group in which the women had jealously watched their husbands. Both conditions now felt a bit embarrassing, as did the serious regard Voina accorded itself. The more Kat and Nadya and occasional others argued—this method of creating actions had remained unchanged—the more they agreed that their new strategy should not involve Art with a capital A; indeed, the fact that it was art should be concealed by a spirit of fun and mischief. Whatever they did should be easily understood, and if it was not, it should be simply explained. It should be as accessible as the Guerrilla Girls and as irreverent as Bikini Kill. If only Russia had something like these groups, or anything of Riot Grrrl culture, or, really, any legacy of twentieth-century feminism in its cultural background! But it did not. They had to make it up.
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THE LAST WEEKEND of September 2011, Nadya was invited to speak at a conference called in the hopes of uniting the many small and disjointed Russian opposition groups. The organizers, who had met Nadya during the 2010 Khimki Forest protests, did not have much of an idea who she was or what they wanted her to say, but Nadya knew exactly what she wanted to tell them: She wanted to spread what she had been learning. She wanted to use her ninety minutes to compensate for Russia’s lack of a feminist movement, a body of social theory, or a Riot Grrrl legacy. She put together a set of thirty-seven slides.
Nadya and Kat sat in one of the front rows, by the projector, with their backs to the mostly male audience.
“Since our schools and universities do not yet have gender studies departments, we lack the opportunity to offer a complete theory course,” Nadya began. “Our presentation today will be fragmentary; it will contain a number of separate clips; it will be, essentially, an advertisement.”
They began with Bikini Kill, sped through 1970s feminist activism in the United States and Europe, described separatism without saying the word, paused to summarize Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, transitioned to the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle’s visual critique of the view of women as consisting only of their reproductive organs, and jumped back over to contemporary Russia, where Vladimir Putin had responded to a female speaker at a conference of his United Russia party by saying, “Natasha, I have only one wish: please do not forget about fulfilling your obligations with regards to solving our demographic issues.”
This got them as far as the 1980s in the United States; they talked about the Guerrilla Girls as a way of getting into issues of race in feminist art; described the Guerrilla Girls breaking into art museums wearing gorilla masks and eating bananas—and pointed out that “today the banana remains a preferred racist tool for insulting people; take, for instance, repeated instances of Russian soccer fans throwing bananas at black players.” While bell hooks, they explained, had shown people
it was possible to be doubly oppressed, the Austrian artist Valie Export had demonstrated that the naked female body could not only please but also frighten and haunt. They showed a two-minute video about Valie Export’s work, including her 1968 Genital Panic, featuring her genitals and a machine gun in a Munich movie theater. This took them back to Russia, where a spokesman for the Russian Orthodox Church had suggested, recently and repeatedly, that a dress code be imposed on Russian women. They showed Cuban artist Ernesto Pujol’s The Nun, featuring a young man in a habit, and suggested a dress code for men might be in order. Over to French artist Orlan’s image Skai and Sky, featuring two crosses held by a woman wearing a black rubber habitlike dress, with her right breast exposed. Martha Rosler’s 1975 Semiotics of the Kitchen, a black-and-white send-up of cooking shows, followed. Cut to British artist Sarah Lucas in an armchair, denimed legs spread, a fried egg on each of her breasts. Her Get Off Your Horse and Drink Your Milk showed the (nearly prostrate) Russian men in the audience a naked man, for a change, holding between his legs a milk bottle in place of a penis and two cookies in place of testicles. But pictures of Russian artist Elena Kovylina were even more shocking: using hypodermic needles, she had affixed to her naked body pictures of girls cut out of magazines—and demanded that people attending the show in Moscow remove the pinups while she sat impassively until the last of the images was gone. And as though that were not enough, Nadya and Kat followed up with images from more of Kovylina’s works: Kovylina boxing, in red; Kovylina naked, lying immobile atop a grand piano interminably, symbolizing woman as we are used to seeing her in art.
