Issue #1 of “Radek”, 1994

The first issue of “Radek” represented the formation of a new actionist group called “Netsezudik”. The group involved Alexander Brener, Oleg Mavromati, Anatoly Osmolovsky, Alexander Revizorov,Vasilli Shugalei, and Alexei Zabarzhuk, taking its name from the word for “extra” or “excess” from the 19th-century constructed language Volapük. Netsezudik’s first action took place on October 20th, 1993, and was entitled The Shame of October 7th. In the action, the four participants (Osmalovsky, Brener, Mvaromati and Shugalei) exposed their genitalia in front of the burned facade of the White House, still showing the scars of the constitutional crisis.

According to Osmolovsky, the participants wore black t-shirts to match the burned top floors, while the white bottom floors were represented by their denuded bodies. The word “shame” in the title refers to both the participants’ lack of pants and (according to Osmolovsky) the shame of Yeltsin bombarding the White House. It is not clear why October 7th was marked by the action’s title, as the White House was burned on the 4th, and the action took place on the 20th of the same month. The actions’ documentation appeared on the cover of “Radek”, which offered several interpretations of recent political upheavals in essays by Osmolovsky, Dmitrii Pimenov, Brener and others, including an interview with the artists Komar and Melamid, and a translated conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.

Multiple actions and performances followed for Netsezudik, including several gallery exhibits” The War Continues in 1993 and Audacious, unfeeling, ignorant, paranoid, untrustworthy, animals, addicts, weird, poor, ideologically worked-on, career-oriented, naive, fashionable, cruel, unreal, unfriendly, mad, stubborn in 1994. The group dissolved in 1995, however, under the oversight of Osmolovsky, Radek would go on to have two more issues: one in 1996 and one in 1998. A digital variant and website entitled “mailradek” was created by Osmolovsky in 1995, and turned to an epistolary format utilizing email in 1997.