(no subject)
A VOINA activist in a police uniform covered by an Orthodox priest’s cassock with a massive cross performed robbery in a high-class supermarket in Moscow. Accompanied by the group,OLEG VOROTNIKOV carried outside, without paying, 5 large bags with delicatessen and elite alcohol. The crime was committed with the impunity enjoyed by priests and cops in today’s Russia.
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It bugs me how most of the English comments I read concerning Voina are of people calling them idiots. This couldn't be further from the truth. I've also noticed in my three days of research, that Russian translates terribly into English. The two languages are radically different. Since many of their protests are based on clever word play most of it gets lost on us Westerners and therefore Voina's actions come off as pointless acts of obscenity.
I am SO obsessed with this.
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Jan 6, 2012
http://en.free-voina.org/post/18010260337
What do you think or Russian politics today? And of Russian culture?
Vor* (the group’s ideologist Oleg Vorotnikov): There is no politics in Russia today. The so-called parliamentary opposition as a whole is entirely tame and controlled. The communists have long turned into prostitutes who whore themselves out to the regime. The non-parliamentary street opposition has been wiped from the streets, crushed, its activists thrown behind bars or physically exterminated by riot police and by the infamous police department ‘center E’, the anti-extremism department, which has assumed the role of secret police tasked with suppressing political dissent. The list of activists and journalists in Russia who have been killed, maimed or imprisoned is ever growing.
Then there are the so-called liberals, a bourgeois crowd, self-proclaimed as part of the opposition. All they do is hang out and organise festivals in their own honour, all sanctioned by the president’s administration. They enjoy themselves at country resorts where they hold their conferences, and they call it protest activity. They’re nothing more than trendy kids, clutching their iPhones as they discuss the revolution on twitter. They aren’t interesting to anyone but themselves yet for the regime they are very convenient. The underground protest movement is now on the rise. It is made up of activists who no longer see any promise in peaceful protest methods. They are extremely secretive and have serious ambitions. They are forming underground squads and groups that would oppose the regime by force. Peaceful protest has exhausted itself.
These are not the words of an idiot.
Voina in St. Petersburg
THE DICK OF THE MATTER
by Matthew Bown
It took members of Voina (pronounced va-ee-NA) 23 seconds to draw a very large, erect penis on the Liteiny Bridge in St Petersburg.
http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/reviews/brown/voina4-29-11.asp
What's in a name? The Russian word in the title, khui, is more offensive than “dick” and is used in Russian rather like “fuck” in English, ubiquitous and un-translatable at once. The philologist Aleksei Plutser-Sarno, co-activist of Voina, wrote a book of several hundred pages on the various uses of the word “khui.” Where we would say “fuck knows,” a Russian might say “khui knows;” where we would say “fuck off,” a Russian might say “go to khui,” and so on. It’s a word that is aggressive, anarchistic and nihilistic in its usages; there's scarcely any potential for tenderness in it; it isn't likely to be used between lovers in the way that “fuck” can be. And “Voina” itself simply means “war.” The Voina attitude, then, is pure Fuck You.
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*Vor, means "thief"