Pavlensky carried out the stunt outside Lenin’s Mausoleum on the day Russia marked its Police Day national holiday. He received medical treatment before being taken into custody over the incident, which he said was a protest against Russia's "police state".
A naked artist, looking at his balls nailed to the Kremlin pavement, is a metaphor for the apathy, political indifference, and fatalism of contemporary Russian society.
After the jailing of two members of Pussy Riot he sewed his lips together, and once wrapped his naked body in barbed wire outside a government building in St. Petersburg.