Satisfaction (Benny Benassi song)

2018 Russian protest parodies

In late 2017, cadets at Russia's Ulyanovsk Institute of Civil Aviation marked the end of their term by making a parody of the video that drew on a similar parody four years earlier by British soldiers.^[8] Wearing just their uniform caps and ties, belts worn around their shoulders, underwear (with the crotches stuffed) and black boots, the cadets twerked, gyrated suggestively, performed maintenance tasks and cleanup in a fashion similar to the video as the cameraman moved from one to the other in their dormitory. The video, which soon went viral, had strong homoerotic elements and suggestions of BDSM culture.^[9]

Officials at the institute, described as the oldest and most prestigious pilot training school in Russia, were furious, particularly since the cadets had used school property and worn their uniform caps. "If they had joked like that at home, nobody would have batted an eyelid" said Sergey Krasov, the institute's director.^[10] Shortly after the video became a subject of national discussion,^[11] the Federal Air Transport Agency convened a commission to investigate the video and identify the cadets, believed to be in their first year at the institute, who had made it. "Frivolous dances in underwear with the uniform cap of the Institute covering the face on the grounds of the aviation university are unacceptable" the agency said. Any cadets it found to be involved could face expulsion.^[12]

While some prominent Russian commentators expressed similar outrage on government-run television channels, many more sympathized with the cadets, and made videos of their own in support of them. Most were from other groups of students at trade schools for farmers, construction workers and emergency services, but the Russian women's biathlon team also made one. A Ukrainian swim club filmed part of its video underwater, and a group of retired women living in a St. Petersburg communal apartment contributed their own. Russian American journalist Masha Gessen wrote in The New Yorker that the videos were an unexpected and widespread protest against the state's anti-LGBT policies. "Each clip is at once a show of solidarity with a group of young strangers and a show of ordinary people’s ability to organize and act together—an ability that the state would seem to have stamped out."^[11]