If you want to sift for clues as to what the cultural fallout of the United States’ current meltdown might look like, you could do worse than to look to Russia in the 1990s — the other Cold War superpower that self-destructed. In art, the movement that characterizes that time is Moscow Actionism.

You may already know some latter-day “actionists.” The late aughts saw international press for the art group Voina, which performed guerrilla stunts that involved group sex in a museum as an anti-government protest (Fuck for the Heir Puppy Bear!, 2008), drawing the outline of a huge cock and balls on a drawbridge facing Saint Petersburg’s secret police headquarters (Dick Captured by the FSB, 2010), and overturning a cop car as performance art (Palace Coup, 2010). The latter earned two members hooliganism charges.

The anarcha-feminist art collective Pussy Riot sprang from the side of a Voina splinter group. They became an international cause célèbre in 2011 after members were arrested for their chaotic Punk Prayer performance at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, protesting the Orthodox Church’s support for Vladimir Putin. A Pussy Riot solidarity action by another artist, Petr Pavlensky, made its own headlines when he sutured his mouth shut outside Kazan Cathedral in 2012. He became more famous still — and the subject of many jokes — when he nailed his scrotum to the pavement in front of Lenin’s tomb to protest political apathy in 2013.