A Russian performance artist was hospitalised Sunday after stripping naked and nailing his testicles to a Red Square cobblestone in protest against the Kremlin's crackdown on political rights.

A video of the graphic action, available on Russian websites, showed artist Pyotr Pavlensky sitting naked outside Lenin's Mausoleum being covered with a blanket by police officers while horrified passersby looked on.

The state-run RIA Novosti news agency said Pavlensky was taken to a police station after being treated in a central Moscow clinic.

The Saint Petersburg-based artist said in a statement posted on the Grani.ru website that he was trying to draw attention to Russian society's inaction in the face of the development of a "police state".

Russia marked its annual Police Day holiday on Sunday.

It is not the first time the 29-year-old has resorted to eye-watering methods of protest.

He has previously sewn his lips together to demonstrate against the jailing of two female members of the Pussy Riot punk band who staged an anti-Kremlin performance inside Moscow's main cathedral in 2011.

He was also arrested after wrapping his naked body in barbed wire outside a Saint Petersburg government building in May.

 In Russia today, a Moscow political performance artist was arrested after he drove a large nail through his testicles into a cobblestone street in Red Square to protest Vladimir Putin‘s crackdown on civil rights — and the Russian people’s own apathy.

Pyotr Pavlensky can be seen in the video below sitting naked in front of the Lenin’s Mausoleum and nailed to the street.

Later, a police officer comes to arrest him. He reportedly could get 15 days in jail. Pavlensky says his “action can be seen as a metaphor of apathy and political indifference and fatalism of the modern Russian society,” according to a Google translation of what he wrote on the Russian website, Grani.ru.