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MOSCOW, Jul 23 (Reuters) Carrying bags of stolen groceries, Oleg Vorotnikov takes out the batteries of his mobile phone before entering the secret headquarters of his underground art collective on the outskirts of Moscow.
''This is to prevent the cops from listening in,'' said Vorotnikov, a 29-year-old art graduate, who with other politically conscious artists co-founded the Voina, or War, collective in 2007.
''Once a drunk artist introduced us to bystanders as 'Russia's main radical group' -- that's when I understood that we have to do something together,'' Vorotnikov said.
In a country where traditional opposition to the government has been dulled by public apathy and a diet of pro-Kremlin television news, these artists take a different approach: they poke fun at the establishment, and the more absurd the better.
They hunch over laptops in their headquarters -- a garage -- editing video of their latest piece of guerrilla street theatre: an impromptu tea party in a police station.
For the lack of chairs they sit on chests of drawers and a TV set. Cameras, camcorders and books of poetry are scattered over the floor.
''We always do things that violate rules. We combine art and politics to achieve something new,'' said Kotyonok, a slightly built young woman who teaches physics at a Moscow university and only gave her nickname, which means kitten.
''People watch us and are simply shocked.'' Voina became a household name in the Russian blogger scene with a stunt intended as a wry commentary on the handover of power -- decried by opponents as undemocratic -- from former President Vladimir Putin to his successor, Dmitry Medvedev.
A day before the presidential election that Medvedev won by a landslide, five couples, including one heavily pregnant woman who gave birth four days later, secretly undressed in Moscow's Biological Museum.
With video cameras rolling, they had sex in front of a banner calling for copulation in support of ''the bear cub-successor'' - a pun on Medvedev's family name, which is derived from the Russian word for bear.
EVICTED Blogs carrying photos and videos of the event shot to number one in Russian internet rankings within 24 hours.
Some users called the participants ''freaks'', ''shiteaters'' or ''animals''. One blogger suggested they should be shot. When the mother of the pregnant woman saw her having sex on television, she threw her out of home.
Voina said they had to leave their old headquarters under pressure from the authorities but few members have yet to face the full weight of the law for their activities.
The group is most vulnerable to the catch-all ''hooliganism'' charge that could lead to a short prison term, but only one member is currently facing prosecution for throwing cats during one performance.
Voina's actionist art draws on Moscow Conceptualism, a movement that started in the 1970 with performances subverting socialist ideology. Given the repressive nature of the Soviet state, these happenings had to take place secretly.
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