The Non-governmental Control Committee, Barricade, Bolshaia Nikitinskaia street, 1998

The protest action was organized by Anatoly Osmolovsky and Avdei Ter-Oganyan, seemingly as the culmination of (and perhaps break with) Osmolovsky’s prior work with the Gleb Pavlovsky, Marat Guelman and Maksim Meyer’s “Effective Politics Fund” between 1995 and 1996. Osmolovsky’s involvement with the Effective Politics Fund resulted in his forming the “Non-governmental Control Committee”, ostensibly as a kind of political vector for artists to directly address the state, and to convince members of the public to cast their vote “against everyone”. On May 23rd, 1998, the NGCC created a barricade out of cardboard and artworks across Bolshaia Nikitinskaia street, about 150 meters from the Kremlin, statedly to commemorate the barricades of the student uprisings at the Sorbonne in 1968, but also to experiment with non-traditional political and media strategies. According to the description published in the 1998 issue of Radek commenting on the action, the initial demands were for a monthly stipend, the total legalization of all drugs, and state-sponsored travel in perpetuity for all involved in the actions, but other demands were quickly added by people joining the protest. Multiple artists donated works to the barricade, including Avdei Ter-Oganyan and Dmitri Vrubel. Approximately 300 people were involved, according to organizers, and the barricade made direct allusions to the Sorbonne uprising through the re-use of Situationist International slogans associated with the original revolt, some in the original French (e.g. Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible, “Be realistic, demand the impossible”), as well as other provocative banners in an anti-capitalist vein, such as “Nique ta mere” and “There is no money”. According to the description published in Radek in 1998, the Barricade was forcibly broken soon after the participants began marching towards the Kremlin shouting “We won!” Almost immediately, the hitherto inactive police violently attacked the protest, beating and arresting participants. Despite police violence and legal consequences for the organizers, the NGCC and critics sympathetic to it, described the action as a success in their public comments. In a June 2nd, 1998 essay, critic Alexander Panov, writing under the pen-name “Fedor Romor” calls it as a “deconstruction of Power, without violence, carnivalesque and artistic, and perhaps a bit too effective as a result. The streams of artists and students broke the dam of riot police and art historians in civilian clothes. They broke through, although street cleaners disassembled the barricade and six members of the action (including Osmolovsky and Ter-Oganyan) spent two days under arrest”.