What Russia's reaction to the spoof naked air cadets video tells us about the country's attitude to sexuality and protest

Clip released last week is the country's most talked about topic

A young man wearing underwear, a bondage belt and pilot’s cap appears on camera. He gyrates his hips and buttocks to the sound of Benny Benassi’s “Satisfaction” before thrusting along the corridors of a student dormitory.

He dips in and out of rooms, finding scantily-clad students performing tasks to the Satisfaction rhythm – some ironing, some cleaning, others drilling holes in the wall provocatively.

The video, made by first-year students of the Ulyanovsk Aviation Institute, and released last week, quickly became the most talked about topic in Russia.

In fact, it was a remake of a clip made by British army soldiers two years ago. But such details were lost in a predictable and furious response by Russia’s neo-conservative wing.

Within a day of its publication, the National Air Transport Agency (Rosaviatsiya) announced it would open an investigation into “this ugly case”.

Under pressure from the regional governor, the rector of the Ulyanovsk Institute of Civil Aviation, Sergei Krasnov, likened the cadets’ situation to Pussy Riot.

After such an “unforgivable” disgrace to veterans, he said, they could be expelled, perhaps, even, tried under Russia’s controversial anti-homosexual laws. Much of the initial coverage of state TV was negative.

Then something remarkable happened. All over the country, groups began producing their own provocative satisfaction videos in support of the students. They posted them on social media under the hashtag #satisfactionchallenge. It was the start of an impromptu protest that surprised many in its scale and ingenuity.

First to show solidarity were students at the nearby Ryazan Agricultural College. Then students at the Urals Firefighting Academy joined in. Then students at a construction college, and military cadets.

A “group of mothers” also responded. Before long, the challenge was reaching the highest of aesthetic forms and production values. There was a video from a group of young equestrians. Then this from students of a performing arts academy.

Half-naked male cadets from Ulyanovsk Civil Aviation Institute dance to the music (Screengrab/Ulyanovsk Aviation Institute)

Arguably the most creative version was this, shot in a swimming pool. The weirdest version, without doubt, was this masterpiece shot by pensioners in a St Petersburg communal apartment.

Traditional Russia was, for a moment, silenced. Then came a backtracking of the official position. State prosecutors made a statement to say there was nothing illegal in what the students did.

State television softened its rhetoric and, live on air, asked Rector Krasnov to soften his. The once moralistic elder relented. There would probably be no expulsions, he conceded, “though each case would be dealt with on an individual basis”. (It was unclear how each student's behaviour differed, of course: all were wearing pretty much the same underwear and/or kinky accessories.)

“You have to remember they were all looking for a signal from above and were trying to guess what Putin would think,” says Marinna Murayeva, a sociologist at the Higher School of Economics. “And they found out that, in reality, few Russians were bothered.”

Russians have an ambiguous approach to sex and sexuality, reflecting in part the changing values of the state. For much of the Soviet Union, sex was a private affair, not for the public space. Famously, in 1986, a Soviet woman on a TV talk show between audiences in the US and USSR declared there to be “no sex in the USSR”. The woman later insisted she had meant there was love instead, but the phrase stuck.

Puritanical values lost out in the new, post-Soviet Russia. But in recent years, conservative and religious wings have led a campaign to bring moralism back to the mainstream. In part, the plan has been co-opted by the Kremlin. In 2013, for example, there was a much-derided clampdown on the LGBT community with an amendment against the so-called “propaganda of non-traditional relationships”.

Last year, online porn was targeted, with several x-rated sites blocked; only some have been re-registered. But it is also true to say the attitudes of state regulators have appeared out of sync with Russian sensibilities, let alone that of its metropolitan youth.

“All of the officials – rector, governor and so on – have been talking about proper and improper behaviour,” says Alexandra ​Arkhipova, an anthropologist at the Russian Presidential Academy. "The problem is that no one knows what they mean. They seem to have been referring to an unwritten code of conduct, but no one can tell you what it is."

It was no accident that the rector referred to Pussy Riot, she says. Their protest inside the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow was a watermark event for Russian morality, she says. It was the moment everything changed: “Everyone knew that from now on you would not be allowed to dance freely, in a church, or in a student dormitory.”

The career of prominent journalist Tutta Larsen has, to a certain degree, reflected moralistic trends in the country at large.

Known to many youngish Russians as the free-talking host of Potselyi Navylet, a racy Russian version of Blind Date, these days she is more likely to be found hosting a show on Russian Orthodox radio. (Larsen insists her show on MTV was misunderstood. “It was a game of jokes and humour, rather than open sexuality,” she told The Independent).

Still, she thinks the reaction to the Ulyanovsk video was “excessive” as no-one broke the law or was hurt and the authorities should have stayed out of the argument.

“For 70 years we had no sex, and now we lead the planet in the number of abortions, abandoned children, domestic violence and AIDS infections," she says. "I think the gatekeepers of morality should get on to more serious affairs than boys dancing in their underpants.”

Several prominent Russian liberals have taken to social media to declare the apparent flashmob victory as a “protest awakening”. Some publications have even talked about beginning of a revolution – sexual or otherwise.

For sociologist Murayeva, such claims are exaggerated. “I’m from a military family and have taught in similar military academies,” she says. “These places are often hypersexualised, and pranks are common. The flashmob reaction was more about part of Russia sticking up for the young kids; it might have been different had they been older.”

The fathers and sons dilemma is, however, alive and well in Russia, says Arkhipova. The difference today is that it is the parents quarrelling with their children, rather than vice-versa.

“The young generation knows that it is living in a prefigurative, digital culture. By that, I mean knowledge is passed from children to their parents,” says Arkhipova. Russia's older generations want to stay in their own world and teach their skills and values to their children: "This is the source of the tensions, the moralistic wave and of the senseless number programmes aimed at morally educating young Russians.”

For Arkhipova, it is only a matter of time before the more open values of the younger generation win through. “No one has cancelled the laws of evolution,” she says.