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In the late 1970s in Leningrad, a group of young friends started experimenting with “irrational” events and provocations, some of them carried out among themselves, in private apartments and during outings to the countryside, and others in the public space of the city in front of unsuspecting witnesses. The lifestyle, interests, and collective practices of this group were not originally an artistic or political project. Evgenii Yufit (born 1961), the group's leader and now a well-known filmmaker, remembers: “In the beginning no one thought that our lifestyle might sooner or later turn into some professional artistic activity.” Vladimir Kustov, now a painter and installation artist, similarly claims: “We arrived at a certain nonstandard behavior and lifestyle quite spontaneously ... .At that time no one of us thought that this way of being, if packaged in a particular way, could become artistic practice .... This was simply our way of living and expressing ourselves.” Later, in the late 1980s, the crisis of the Soviet state turned these pranksters into “artists” and their provocations, paintings, and later films into successful “artistic” activity. However, here I am interested in the roots of the experimental living and public provocations that they developed early on, before they thought of themselves as artists and before art critics created discourse about them. 1
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