Gyrating Russian trainee pilots spark ‘civil resistance’

MOSCOW: Dancing in their underwear and caps to the tune of the Benny Benassi hit “Satisfaction”, the air cadets had little idea their video would prompt outrage from authorities and then a wave of solidarity across Russia. In the clip that went viral, 14 teenage students at the Ulyanovsk Civil Aviation Institute gyrate, suggestively suck bananas and smack their behinds to the tune of the 2003 pop smash.

The video racked up more than two million hits after it appeared on social networking sites last week, provoking the wrath of the head of the institute, who said the “immoral parody” had “humiliated the profession”. “They will never find work,” Sergei Krasnov promised in the media in the region 550 miles to the east of Moscow.

But the clip has generated dozens of other parodies featuring nurses, grandmothers and even cats-becoming a symbol of resistance against a Russian state that promotes itself as a champion of traditional values in the face of Western decadence. The Federal Air Transport Agency released a statement demanding the “strictest disciplinary measures” against the cadets, calling for them to undergo psychological examination. Sergei Morozov, governor of the Ulyanovsk region, called the clip an “insult” and formed a commission to investigate possible infractions of civil aviation regulations.

Thrusting in solidarity Stunned by the severity of the punishment facing the trainees, some Russians decided to show their support for the adolescents by filming themselves dancing to “Satisfaction” in the same stripped down attire and with the same suggestive choreography. In less than a week, 50 similar videos appeared online, where they have been widely shared. From Saint Petersburg to the island of Sakhalin off Russia’s far east, electricians, jockeys, emergency services staff, television stars and students have been thrusting in solidarity.

Almost one in two Russians have seen the original video, according to a survey published by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center on Thursday, with 35 percent of those believing it to be a symptom of moral decline but 43 percent seeing it as a harmless joke. “This is an example of civil resistance” when faced with a state which seeks to control private behavior, said political commentator Andrei Kolesnikov in the liberal New Times. And he predicted the cadets would get off lightly ahead of a presidential election in March: “Nobody needs such a spicy scandal during Vladimir Putin’s triumphal march to the renewal of his powers.”

‘Homoerotic subtext’ Sociologist Victor Vakhshtain compared the “moral panic” sparked by the video to the outrage following Pussy Riot’s anti-Putin “punk prayer” in a Moscow cathedral in 2012, which saw members of the female protest group sentenced to prison. Only in the case of the Ulyanovsk teens, there was no political message. “They just wanted to bring a bit of fun into their very regimented lives as air cadets,” he said. For Natalia Zorkaya, an analyst at the independent pollster Levada, the reaction from the authorities was connected to the “homoerotic subtext” they saw in the video. “Homophobia is very present in the spheres of politics and media in Russia and this powerful ideological discourse also influences local authorities,” she told AFP.

“(But) young people already live in another reality and they won’t accept the imposition of traditional Russian values, a religious vision of morality.” She said young people were “less afraid than their elders,” pointing to the thousands of adolescents who took to the streets when called by Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny last year. —AFP