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to break through a police cordon and march for about half a mile before the protest was broken up by police. To Petya and Nadya, who took part in some of these protests, it did not exactly feel like change was in the air but it was at least clear that they were not the only people in Russia who would speak out against the suffocating political uniformity, the overwhelming mediocrity, and the obsessive consumption of Putin’s Russia.
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    P ETYA’S BEST FRIEND, Oleg Vorotnikov, a philosophy department graduate, had been trying on the role of contemporary artist. Oleg’s wife, Natalia Sokol, was a physicist turned photographer, and in 2005 they had formed what they called an art collective, though it appears to have comprised only the two of them and it is not entirely clear what kind of art they did—or, really, whether they did any. Now the two couples, Oleg and Natalia plus Petya and Nadya, would form a new art group. By February 2007, they settled on a name: Voina, or “War.”
    There remained the question of what this art group was going to do. It was definitely not going to rebroadcast the message of the opposition, which was as stilted as any set of political clichés anywhere—it was a miracle this language had inspired anyone to come out into the streets. The small art scene hardly offered an alternative. The scene was dominated by commercial giants like AES+F, a four-person art group that represented Russia that year at the Venice Biennale with a video called “Last Riot,” in which planes collided without bursting into flames and gangs of staggeringly beautiful teens clashed without shedding blood. The art world’s emerging star was Victor Alimpiev, who created ethereal works that looked like traces of snow against a pleasantly gray sky and who emphasized that his work was in no way tied to current events or, more generally, to the place and time in which it was created. A group called the Blue Noses provided an alternative to the high gloss of the mainstream art scene; its work was all irony all the time, which basically meant it was a collection of caricatures.
    It was not the artists’ or the politicians’ fault, this desolate state of affairs. To a large extent, it was the Soviet Union’s fault. In all societies, public rhetoric involves some measure of lying, and history—political history and art history—is made when someone effectively confronts the lie. But in really scary societies
all
public conversation is an exercise in using words to mean their opposites—in describing the brave as
traitorous
, the weak as
frightening
, and the good as
bad—
and confronting these lies is the most scary and lonely thing a person can do. These are the societies of Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World
or Yevgeny Zamyatin’s
We
, which preceded it. In Zamyatin’s utopia, the guillotine was known as the Machine of the Benefactor, people were known as Numbers, and the power of words was well understood: “Whoever feels capable must consider it his duty to write treatises, poems, manifestos, odes, and other compositions on the greatness and beauty of the United State.” Zamyatin had based his dystopia on the Soviet state he witnessed being constructed. Half a century after his death, real words that corresponded to actual facts and feelings broke through in a sudden, catastrophic flood and brought down the Soviet Union. But that heady period of Russian history was winding down by the time Petya and Nadya were learning to talk. Voina faced a challenge that perhaps exceeded challenges faced by any other artist in history: they wanted to confront a language of lies that had once been effectively confronted but had since been reconstructed and reinforced, discrediting the language of confrontation itself. There were no words left.
    A few other artists were struggling with the same issues. Petya had spent some months helping the performance artist Oleg Kulik mount a large collaborative show called
I Believe.
The