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Cast as the ‘savage, ugly’ part in the Popular Mechanics live show, Necrorealists were radical artists in their own right, practicing film, painting, photography and performance They were exclusively young men who appeared to be suffering from a collective breakdown Their public drunkenness, brawling and unchannelled energies invited chaos Dressed in medical smocks, army issue long johns and earflap caps (the outfit of the provincial surplus store) Necrorealists differed from ordinary citizens, not in breaking the rules of socialist living, but in following those rules according to their own obtuse interpretations Under the dismal fog of Leningrad’s northern marsh, this unstable rabble of loiterers, boiler-room attendants, medical orderlies and technical students pursued a grotesque existence which led them first into idiocy and then into a kind of absurd death   Necrorealism was never a large-scale movement, but it greatly puzzled the Komsomol and other institutions responsible for youth welfare Necrorealists were dysfunctional and asocial, but they could not be accused of promoting Western lifestyles like the earlier Bitniki and Stilyagi subcultures Nor did they seem capable of organising conspiratorial activities Their disinterest in political matters was unwavering, and it was not easy to distinguish a ‘real’ Necro-performance from the general eccentricity spreading amongst the urban populus in the aftermath of Brezhnev’s leadership Even the Necro ideologue, Evgeny Yufit, admitted that he was engaged in several years of ‘wild and pointless’ activity before realising that it constituted a bona fide worldview   This formative period of clown-like hooliganism took place in the courtyards and hallways of communal apartments, on suburban trains and in the fetid swamps and forests beyond Leningrad’s industrial sprawl Here, the Necrorealists would churn up the rotten soil in frenzied battle charges and mass fist fights The participants at these events were at first barely acquainted with each other, coming together for the sole purpose of expending their pent-up energy   To the public, these formative Necro-performances must have raised disturbing questions about the young men involved In a 1989 television broadcast on Leningrad’s The Fifth Wheel, the same programme that would host the Lenin-Mushroom lecture two years later, a team of psychiatrists