Clampdown new worry for artists

Midnight sun behind the Peter and Paul Fortess on the Neva River, St Petersburg. Photo / Jim Eagles

On a chilly Moscow morning last November, 10 plainclothes policemen broke into the Moscow apartment where Oleg Vorotnikov and Leonid Nikolayev were sleeping.

The officers handcuffed the men, pulled plastic bags over their heads and threw them into a police van. They drove north for 10 hours abusing the men, who have been held in a pre-trial detention centre in St Petersburg until this week.

But Vorotnikov and Nikolayev are not drug dealers or dangerous murderers on the run - they are artists.

They are part of Voina, a radical art collective that has infuriated the Russian authorities with a series of increasingly audacious stunts, and whose jailing has caused concern in Russia about a return to a Soviet-style censorship of the arts.

The group's installations and performances have included organising the mock execution of migrant workers in a Moscow supermarket, an impromptu expletive-filled punk rock performance in a courtroom and painting an enormous penis on a bridge in St Petersburg.

The group first came to prominence in February 2008, two days before the elections that brought President Dmitry Medvedev to power. About 12 activists entered the Biology Museum and staged an orgy. The group was charged with "disseminating pornography" and so began a life underground. Leader Alexei Plutser-Sarno, 48, has been on the run since the arrests.

He claims that he comes and goes from Russia by slipping across the border with Kazakhstan and that he rarely spends consecutive nights in the same place.

In Voina's final stunt before the arrests - "Palace Revolution" - members overturned seven police cars, some of them with officers inside, at St Petersburg's Palace Square.

Vorotnikov and Nikolayev have been charged with hooliganism, which carries a sentence of up to seven years' jail. This week, they were finally released on bail.

Olesya Turkina, a curator and research fellow at the Russian Museum in St Petersburg, said: "After perestroika we had 10 or 15 years of real artistic freedom, but now there are very worrying signs again."

- INDEPENDENT