This is the kind of cockamamie (sorry) prank that reeks (sorry) of Nashi, the pro-Kremlin youth group founded after Ukraine's Orange Revolution in 2005. It was the Kremlin's way to engage the youth in politics by paying and brainwashing them to be their blunt instrument of revenge. These kids, often from poor families, have strange imaginations that center almost always on the scatalogical and the sexual. (They once used one prostitute named "Mumu" to lure various male opposition figures into bed in the same bugged apartment.) They manage to pull off these kinds of pranks by having the resources of the state at their disposal.

So, for example, putting a giant penis on an opposition member's car can be kind of tricky: how do you figure out where they live and which car is theirs? And this is the part that makes it a bit menacing, too. Until the previous night, the Kermlins had been at a conference in France and the car was parked in the airport parking lot. They got in late, drove the car home, went to bed, and boom! Wooden cock. Someone was obviously scoping them.

But those thoughts would come later. Katya and Arseny spent the whole day trying to get a cop to make up a police report, though most were laughing too hard to get their act together. Same with the witnesses needed to sign the report. All day people photographed the phallus—solo, or with a friend standing next to it. Katya shot videos of a diplomatic car slowing down as it passed. Some cars actually backed up to verify that they were actually seeing this. At some point, Katya and Arseny went to have dinner with a friend who is a ritzy magazine editor who had taken them to an equally ritzy restaurant for an omakase menu. Through all 15 courses, Katya said, "all we talked about was cock."

Eventually, Katya and Arseny called for a tow truck. They weren't going to tow anything, of course; they just needed the crane. A couple of friends came to help them lug it up to their aparment and puzzled over what to do with the thing. Charity auction? Wood chipper? One man had gotten in touch with them, offering to buy the wooden cock and take it off their hands at his own expense.