I was shocked and sorry when I read that captured members of Pussy Riot had apologized in court. I was worried for them. Apologies made by captives are as suspect as confessions from prisoners covered with bruises. Then I read the apology.
The look is not matchy-matchy.
Pussy Riot is a Russian political protest group which stages punk rock performances. It’s composed of a shifting number of women who wear short bright dresses, tights, and balaclavas. Balaclavas prevent onlookers from being distracted by faces, and preserve anonymity.
Up to a point.
They stand for feminism, LGBT rights, and opposition to the corruption and policies of Vladimir Putin’s governance. Pussy Riot grew out of a short-lived group called Pisya Riot. In her excellent book, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot, Masha Gessen says pisya is “a kids’ word for genitals of either sex… most like wee-wee or pee-pee.”
If you didn’t catch their debut song, “Kill the Sexist,” maybe you hummed along to “Release the Cobblestones,” which suggested throwing cobbles to protest rigged elections. No? Maybe you danced to “Kropotkin Vodka,” rocked “Death to Prison, Freedom to Protests” at karaoke night, or arranged to walk down the aisle to the strains of “Putin Has Pissed Himself”? Really, no?
A wall in Wenceslas Square, Prague, during the 2012 “Week of Freedom.”
Pussy Riot performances happen in public places, without permits. On scaffolding outside a Metro station, on top of a bus, or on a Red Square platform once used by Ivan the Terrible. They did “Death to Prison, Freedom to Protests” on a garage roof next to Special Detention Center Number One, and when they shouted “Death to Prison!” detained protesters shouted out the windows, “Freedom to Protests!”
They burst into expensive boutiques and filmed there. They crashed a fashion show and accidentally started a fire. Everyone ran. The organizer chased Pussy Riot. “You just burned us down!”
Gessen reports: “’We are sorry,’ Pussy Riot said.” (Not the apology I’m going to talk about.)
Pussy Riot in Red Square. 2012-01-20
They often got arrested once they started performing. They’d give fake names, and would be released fairly quickly. Sometimes they claimed to be making an audition film for theater school.
Because of the arrest factor, Pussy Riot would film beforehand on makeshift sets, and edit that together with whatever they could shoot during the actual performances. Thus, for the one that got them in big trouble, “Punk Prayer: Mother of God, Chase Putin Away,” which they planned to set in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, they recorded the song, and did B-roll filming at the less high-profile Cathedral of the Apparition.
On February 21, 2012, five Pussy Rioters entered the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. It was not during services, since they’d decided that would be disrespectful. In their view, the cathedral was pre-desecrated by activities like a 24-hour “luxury car wash” on the premises.
Easter service, Cathedral of Christ the Savior, Moscow. I think the raised area on the left is the soleas. From www.kremlin.ru
(Luxury car wash? The Russian Orthodox Church’s leadership is closely affiliated with the Putin government, and is luxe-positive. It does a $1 billion+ business in duty-free cigarettes. In a notorious incident, Patriarch Kirill was criticized for wearing a $30,000 Breguet watch. He denied it, but photos turned up on the official website. In fact, one photo showed him seated at a table with no watch on his wrist – but in the reflection in the table’s glossy top the watch was on his wrist. They’d airbrushed the watch out, but not its reflection. So yeah. Also dry cleaning.)
Pussy Riot swung into the punk prayer.
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, chase Putin out
Chase Putin out, Chase Putin out
…The song alluded to Kirill’s alleged KGB affiliation.
Gay pride sent to Siberia in a chain gang
Head of the KGB, their chief saint,
Leads protesters to jail under guard
So as not to offend the deity…
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, become a feminist,
Become a feminist, become a feminist
The Church sings the praises of rotten dictators
Black limousines form the procession of the Cross
Like that. There was high kicking and there was genuflecting.
They got ejected quickly, and fled. They were dissatisfied with the video, but released it anyway. Soon the authorities managed to find and arrest three of them: Maria (Masha) Alyokhina, Nadezhda (Nadya) Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina (Kat) Samutsevich. They were charged with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.”
Maria Alyokhina in court, sans balaclava
They were sent to jail, where they were separated and treated badly. (Gessen’s book has detail.)
At their trial, they were unrepentant. Nine witnesses testified to the hooliganism.
A church employee described as a “candle lady” testified that she was transfixed with pain when she saw Pussy Rioters step up the soleas (a platform in front of the icons in some Orthodox churches). She wanted to stop them but couldn’t, because women are forbidden to go on the soleas. (Later the cleaning lady testified that she went on the soleas to clean. Which is obviously different.)
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, in court, sans balaclava
She was upset by their vulgar clothing. “I quickly thought, ‘Oh my God, make it so they don’t strip!’” (Patriarch Kirill is not just a watch-flaunter. He has proposed that Russian women should be subject to a dress code.) Worse, she was appalled by their “devilish jerkings.” She agreed that Pussy Riot “caused huge moral damage to me. The pain will not go away.”
Yekaterina Samutsevich in court, sans balaclava.
A Russian Orthodox nationalist activist who had gone to the Cathedral’s gift shop to buy a ring, and who had helped drag Masha out, testified that the performance made him cry. He said the phrase “Mother of God, become a feminist” was unacceptable disparagement of Jesus. An altar man testified that Pussy Riot had acted as if they were possessed. A security guard said it had been so traumatic he couldn’t go back to work.
The members of Pussy Riot wrote long eloquent statements about their views, which were read out by their lawyers.
Where balaclavas come from.
There were a few apologies in those statements.
Samutsevich apologized to believers, saying, “If we unwillingly hurt any of the believers by our actions, then we apologize for that. But the idea of our action was political, and not religious. In our previous actions, as in this one too, we have been protesting against the power of the current president, against the church as the institute merging with the state authorities, against political statements by the patriarch.”
She also said “We didn’t want to offend anyone. And if we did, we said we are sorry. But a punk prayer is not a crime.”
Tolokonnikova’s statement said, “The song… reflected the reaction of many of our fellow citizens to the patriarch’s call for believers to vote for Putin… Our action was not motivated by hatred for Russian Orthodoxy, which prizes the same qualities we do: charity, mercy, forgiveness…. If our performance appeared offensive to anyone, we regret that very much… We believe we may have fallen victim to a misunderstanding.”
“We made a mistake by taking the genre we have been developing, that of a sudden political punk performance, into the cathedral…. If anyone was offended… I am prepared to admit that we made an ethical mistake. But a mistake it was, we had no intent to offend …And I apologize for that mistake…. I shudder every time I read in the charges… that we came to the cathedral out of hatred and disdain for… believers…. We did not have… [hatred and enmity] in our heart…. We have repeatedly been told by investigators that if we admitted our guilt, we would be released, and yet we have refused to tell that lie about ourselves.”
Alyokhina said she is Russian Orthodox, and, “Dear believers, we did not want to insult you. We have never had such intentions. We went to the cathedral to voice our protest, our desperate protest against the merging of the religious elites and the political elites of our country.”
Those apologies have many aspects that I would normally consider terrible. They’re filled with sorry-ifs. (If anyone was hurt, if anyone was offended.) There’s evasion of responsibility. (They had no intent to offend, it was a misunderstanding.) There’s a lot of making it about them.
But the women are defending themselves against twisted charges. I believe them when they say they weren’t “motivated by religious hatred.”
They’re trying to apologize to people who were upset by their obvious disrespect – and at the same time, make the distinction between what they believe is genuine in religion and what they see as outrageously corrupt in the church.
They’re right to evade responsibility for things like the security guard feeling unable to work.
And it is about them – they’re the ones in jail awaiting sentencing.
Mainly I was relieved they didn’t knuckle under. Glad they didn’t say they were wrong and should have shown respect for the church and the government. Glad they didn’t promise not to do it again.
I guess I’m praising bad apologies here. They have to be judged by different standards under the circumstances. No regrets, Pussy Riot!
Except maybe for misjudging the situation and not realizing how badly regular believers – as opposed to the ecclesiastical top brass – would react.
Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova were convicted. The lawyers argued that while Samutsevich was present, she did not perform. She had been ousted by a security guard before she could get on the soleas with her guitar. Her sentence was suspended.
Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova were sent to penal colonies. They ended up spending 660 days behind bars for about 40 seconds of lip-syncing. They were released a little early as part of a general amnesty. Pressure from international human rights groups may have had something to do with it, as may Putin’s wish to make nice before the Sochi Winter Olympics.
In the meantime, other Pussy Rioters released another video, “Like in a Red Prison,” attacking Putin and the chairman of Rosneft, the state oil firm. “Homophobic reptile, get out of history!”
Great lyric, but I would just like to say that I don’t know of any actual homophobic reptiles. REPTILES ARE BETTER THAN THAT.
Wearing a balaclava correctly is not as easy as one might think.
After release, Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova came to the US, spoke at a concert for Amnesty International, and went on The Colbert Report. They are starting a prisoners’ rights movement, and announced plans to visit prisons in the US. Having lost their anonymity, they’ve jettisoned the balaclavas.
The Pussy Riot website issued a release saying that Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova are no longer part of the group. They didn’t like it that the Amnesty International concert charged admission, and that the poster had an image of a man in a balaclava playing guitar. “Unfortunately for us, they became so carried away with the problems in Russian prisons that they completely forgot about the aspirations and ideals of our group.”
“We have lost two friends, two ideological teammates, but the world has acquired two brave human rights defenders — fighters for the rights of Russian prisoners.”
(I just hope this isn’t about Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova telling Stephen Colbert he could join Pussy Riot.)
Despite the international fame of Pussy Riot, they were not invited to perform at – What’s that word to use when you don’t want to say a project is riddled with corruption, draconian security doubling as oppression, savage environmental destruction, and gratuitous homophobia? Oh yeah, “troubled.”) We didn’t get to see Pussy Riot perform at the opening ceremonies of the troubled Winter Olympics in Sochi.
Maybe the closing ceremony?
