A few weeks ago, fourteen Russian first-year air-transport cadets made a parody of a fifteen-year-old music clip, and now it’s all a lot of Russians can talk about. This is a story of spontaneous solidarity, self-organization, and, ultimately, just possibly, the triumph of freedom over bureaucracy.

The original clip, set to the 2002 track “Satisfaction,” by the Italian d.j. Benny Benassi, is itself a parody: of music videos, erotica, and advertising. It features a series of scantily clad young women working with tools, starting with a hammer and graduating to a masonry drill, a belt sander, and an angle grinder. The screen features names and technical descriptions of the tools while the women pose with their bodies contorted and their mouths open, as though they were in a Victoria’s Secret catalogue. In their parody, the air-transport cadets used an all-male cast, the interior of a well-worn student dorm, and the kinds of tools that are found there: a broom, a clothes iron, a spray jar of glass cleaner. Mostly, though, they used their own very young bodies, dressed in underwear, with belts, neckties, and military caps arranged in apparent homage to Tom of Finland.

It appears that the cadets didn’t intend to distribute their video publicly. But, in mid-January, the clip was posted online, to swift official reaction. The air-travel ministry announced that it was forming a commission to “investigate all circumstances and causes of this outrageous incident.” The prosecutor’s office launched its own investigation but swiftly wrapped it up, stating that no laws were violated. The head of the air-transport academy publicly compared the cadets to Pussy Riot, the protest group whose members were sentenced to two years in jail for attempting to dance in a cathedral. The local governor issued a statement calling for the cadets to be “punished” but not expelled from the academy.

State television covered the clip on talk shows and news programs, rebroadcasting it to millions of their viewers each time. “I see clear expressions of homosexuality,” a woman introduced as a sexologist told a reporter on the twenty-four-hour state news channel, which broadcast the video in its entirety. “It’s a provocation,” her sister, also a sexologist, added. The sisters were dressed in identical brown pants suits and white blouses.

And then the Russian Internet was flooded with clips shot to support the air-transport cadets, often hashtagged #Satisfaction. (I highly recommend that the reader watch all of the following videos, in the order in which they are provided.) There were the trade schools—construction, agricultural—and emergency services. Then there were the jockeys and the stable boys, the theatre troupe, the nurses, and the members of the Russian women’s biathlon team. Most clips contained a message of support and some identifying information—“Medical students in support of the air-transport cadets,” for example—and many of the participants made a point of wearing uniforms, if they had them. A Ukrainian swim team shot part of its clip underwater; another group filmed outside in the snow; a rare mixed-gender group shot in a sauna; self-identified retired women of St. Petersburg filmed in the squalor of a communal apartment.

The clips keep coming. They are so numerous, so exuberant, and come from such different corners of Russian society—from eighteen-year-old cadets to middle-aged middle-class sauna enthusiasts to the elderly communal-apartment dwellers—that they serve as the best proof yet that Russia is not nearly as conservative as the Kremlin has claimed in recent years. Sociologists have known this all along: even as Putin has positioned Russia as the center of an imagined “traditional-values civilization,” independent opinion surveys have shown that, to take two examples, Russians overwhelmingly support the right to abortion and are more tolerant of adultery than most nations outside of France. At the same time, a majority of Russians identify as Russian Orthodox and express virulently homophobic attitudes—most likely because the Church and queer-baiting are two pillars of the Kremlin’s ideology, and Russians are constantly reminded what kinds of opinions they are expected to express on these topics.

Given Russia’s official and highly politicized homophobia, these parodies are pure protest, raunchy and playful. They demonstrate that Russians can still form horizontal connections, despite the state’s monopoly on the public sphere, and despite the threat of harsh penalties for protest in general and “propaganda of homosexuality” in particular. Each clip is at once a show of solidarity with a group of young strangers and a show of ordinary people’s ability to organize and act together—an ability that the state would seem to have stamped out. Many of the videos involve a fair amount of staging, choreographing, and shared risk; most culminate with a scene in which a dozen or so young men dance together, whether in the laundry room of a student dormitory or underwater.

As the videos continue to replicate, they become, generally, less sexy and more funny. But in most cases the last scene is still pointedly homoerotic. This is remarkable in a country that’s not only deeply homophobic but has also been in the grip of an anti-gay campaign for some six years. Performing homoeroticism is, as it turns out, the real power tool when it comes to sticking it to the authorities.