How did the resurgence of authoritarian statehood lead to the development of Vojna and Pussy Riot's 'art activism'? How did Limonov's National Bolshevik Party aestheticist project become a protest movement that aestheticizes politics and expresses social marginality? Despite the repressive conditions in Putin's Russia, how did left-wing institutional experiments such as the artist group Chto Delat come about? By examining the careers of individual actors, Matthias Meindl gets to the bottom of 'the political' in Russian art and literature since the 1990s.