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they were willing to think whatever Prigov thought. Ten days later, Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov, aged sixty-six, died in the hospital.
    Voina had a wake. Instead of ascending to the twenty-second floor, they descended into the Moscow Metro—another symbol of Soviet monumentalism and architectural gigantism. They boarded the circle line at the scarcely inhabited midnight hour and quickly set up red plastic picnic tables, which fit perfectly between the benches that run along each side of the subway car. They covered the tables with white tablecloths and rapidly distributed place settings, bottles of wine and vodka, and traditional Russian bitter and sweet wake fare. Anton the Crazy One approached other passengers to offer them food and drink (all declined). Oleg Vorotnikov recited an early Prigov poem:
    My ambition is serving as compost
    For the future, more rational sort,
    So a youth, full of merit and purpose,
    Grows tall in my fertilized dirt,
    So a youth, incorruptibly, proudly
    Has disdained shady foreigners’ pay,
    Realizes all madness around him,
    Yet declares “I love you,” come what may. *
    “It was a total installation,” Petya told me, using a term coined by the émigré Russian artist Ilya Kabakov to describe installations that represent segments of a larger narrative. “It was our first experience of working with public space, intended to bring life into it. The Conceptualists pushed the boundaries of language and we pushed the boundaries of public space.”
    The Wake
, or
The Feast
, as Voina named it, is my favorite among their actions because it was heartbreaking. There were about a dozen people at the picnic tables. They were very young and amped up, like kids who are having a party while their parents are out of the house. They looked shaken, small, and alone—exactly the way people feel when someone they love has died. They succeeded in capturing the very essence of a Russian wake, a party of maudlin abandon. Or rather, they captured the spirit of the post-Soviet wake, which, like most post-Soviet rituals, combined a memory of Russian traditions with bits of Soviet officialdom. It was a perfect tribute to Prigov. It was also a perfect preview of the future of Voina, which would become best known for making the private public.
    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.
----
    O NCE THEY RETURNED FROM K IEV, 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