Born of disgust, audacious art mocks Moscow’s elite.

KIEV, Ukraine - It has become difficult to locate Aleksei Plutser- Sarno.

As a police dragnet closed around Voina, the radical Russian art collective that he belongs to, Mr. Plutser-Sarno stopped using cellphones , resorting to Skype and, sometimes, letters hand-delivered by intermediaries.

He tries not to spend two consecutive nights at the same place, and he concocts elaborate diversions - once he gave interviews saying he was in Estonia while posting blog entries from Tel Aviv, another place where he was not.

For three years, Voina, which means war, has been playing cat-and-mouse with Russian law enforcement, staging street actions that ranged from the obscure (throwing live cats at McDonald’s cashiers) to the monumental (a 64-meter penis painted on a St. Petersburg drawbridge, so that it rose up pointing at the offices of the F.S.B., the security service).

In September, Voina “Palace Revolution,” which involved running up to police cars and flipping them over - a commentary, the group explained, on police corruption. Russian authorities have lodged new charges aimed at shutting the group down. Two of its leaders are in detention, facing sentences of up to seven years; a third fears losing custody of her son. That leaves Mr. Plutser-Sarno . At 48, he has spent much of his career in the spotlight ; he is the author of a multivolume dictionary of

Russian obscenities, and he hosted a raucous televised talk show . But that life has ended. He said investigators have threatened to charge him with organizing a criminal gang, which could bring a sentence of up to 20 years. David Riff, a Moscow art critic, said the arrests permanently damaged a group of artists whose chief appeal lay in repeated, and sometimes daring, escapes. When asked whether the clandestine lifestyle had come to weigh on him, Mr. Plutser-Sarno smiled . He likes it very much.

It was disgust that spawned Voina, he said. By the middle of the last decade, radical expression had all but vanished from public life. Opposition rallies were marginal. Artists earned a comfortable income in galleries underwritten by government- connected billionaires. “

These are people who constantly travel to the West, get grants, take part in conferences, read reports about revolution and Marxism and the difficult conditions of the working class in Russia,” Mr. Plutser-Sarno said.

He joined with Oleg Vorotnikov, Voina’s founder, who has since been detained. The group staged an orgy in the State Museum of Biology, casting it as a commentary on the campaign that brought Dmitri A. Medvedev to power. The Moscow art world responded coldly.

But YouTube, LiveJournal and Twitter gave Voina access to young Russians who shared the group’s sense of humor and rage . But the game was over January 14, when a judge in St. Petersburg extended pre-trial detention for Mr. Vorotnikov and Leonid Nikolayev, another Voina leader. As for Mr. Plutser-Sarno, he was nowhere to be found.


By ELLEN BARRY