Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich–all arrested in early and mid-March–were hoping that they might be released after their pre-trial hearing on April 19th in Moscow. There is little evidence connecting the three women with feminist punk rock collective Pussy Riot, or the group’s “punk prayer” flash-gig at Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral urging the Virgin Mary to “chase Putin out.”
Instead, the judge ordered that Tolokonnikova, Alyokhina and Samutsevich be detained for at least two more months. No trial date has been set as of this writing. The women face up to seven years in prison, all for the offense of playing music supportive of Russia’s burgeoning democracy movement.
An estimated sixty supporters gathered outside the courthouse the day of the hearing, many facing down hard nationalist thugs defending Putin. Thirteen were arrested. All were asking the same obvious question: how the hell can music be a crime?
Even Moscow police, the very same repressive force that rounded up the “Pussy Riot Three,” have had to admit after conducting their investigation that the “punk prayer” did not constitute a criminal action. At most, the performance “could have caused offence to believers,” punishable in Russia by an average fine of around 1,000 rubles–roughly the equivalent of thirty-five dollars. Many of Pussy Riot’s previous flash performances–including “Rebellion In Russia,” the song that landed first landed them in international consciousness–have also resulted in arrest. But in all those cases, the “offenders” were released with little more than a fine.
Despite the Russian Interfaith Council’s condemnation of Pussy Riot for “blasphemy” and “inciting religious hatred,” the group’s supporters include a great many who identify as Russian Orthodox. Among them is none other than Alla Pugyachova, known as “Russia’s pop queen,” who shot to fame during the days of the Soviet Union and is now calling for the women’s release.
This while Patriarch Kirill–he of the forty-thousand dollar Breguet watches, who called Putin’s rule over Russia “a miracle of God”–remains steadfast in demanding that the three women face the maximum sentence.
So once again, with so much high-profile sympathy for the three women, how is it that music can be a crime? How is it that one can face seven years of jail for performing a song? And what is it about Pussy Riot that has caused the Russian establishment to dig in its heels so vociferously?
Part of it must simply be how different Russia looks now compared to a year ago. Even with anger against Putin obviously growing, nobody was able to say that his iron grip on power faced a credible threat. Last winter’s elections changed all that. Allegations of fraud were so widespread and flagrant that tens of thousands poured onto the streets demanding an end to Putin’s rule, austerity and political corruption.
It is worth pointing out that until relatively recently, much of the Russian artistic community–including sections of the avant-garde–were either hamstrung by the Russian elite. According to Kirill Kobrin, managing editor of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the country’s contemporary art scene remained, if not supportive of Putin, unwilling to take him on:
In the beginning of the ‘noughties,’ there was a kind of common idea that Putin’s regime was about modernization, it was about reforms… This idea was very strong until Beslan [referring to the 2004 crisis where Chechen rebels took over a school in the North Ossetian town of Beslan, which Putin’s ruling party used to strictly consolidate the Kremlin’s power -AB]… But then, two things happened. First of all, the regime showed itself not as a modernizing one. And secondly, you have to understand the nature of contemporary art. Contemporary art is about radical politics, it’s about radical gender relationships…
Recent years have seen the Russian avant-garde’s natural propensity for political mischief blossom and thrive. Voina, an anarchist art collective, has gained infamy for its public stunts staging mock executions in grocery stores, and painting a giant penis on a drawbridge outside the St. Petersburg headquarters of the Federal Security Service. Now, the winter’s mobilizations have made what once seemed merely shocking appear dangerous and subversive.
Hand-in-hand with this is the international profile that this case has received. Amnesty International has called Tolokonnikova, Alyokhina and Samutsevich “prisoners of conscience.” April 21st, an international day of solidarity called by Pussy Riot’s supporters, saw actions from Mexico to the Czech Republic to Australia.
In my own city, at a march of a thousand people organized by Occupy Chicago on April 7th, I was randomly handed a button that read “Free Pussy Riot!” The button had been designed and made by local activist who I had never met before. Something is in the air with this case. And when something is in the air, it can travel across oceans.
This is, it bears remembering, a collective of punks whose songs have urged listeners to “do Tahrir in Red Square!” In the age of indignados and occupiers, language like this is bound to strike a chord (so to speak) well beyond national borders. Pussy Riot may have only been talking about “their own” head of state when they screamed “Putin’s pissed himself.” But having watched dictators in North Africa fall and governments in Europe collapse, plenty of rulers likely feel a bit more, shall we say, on notice.
Just as austerity and repression have become world-wide themes, so has the war on women. Band members’ insistence that “the revolution should be done by women” can’t possibly fall on deaf ears with marches like Slut Walk still fresh in young people’s minds. Here in the US too, where states are passing laws making women liable for a fetus’ health two weeks before conception, where young women are forced by school districts to apologize to their rapists, the attacks necessitate a fightback.
In a recent column in The Washington Post, writer Suzi Parker asked:
Wouldn’t it be refreshing to have an American version of Pussy Riot to lead the soundtrack on this country’s war on women? They could protest at Ted Nugent concerts, write lyrics about Rush Limbaugh and Bill Maher and call out politicians on both sides, or the Secret Service, when they insulted women. And with the protection of free speech. Pussy Riot would love to have that freedom.
Parker is chauvanistically naive to say that real protection of free speech exists in the United States–ask anyone evicted this past fall from the nation’s supposedly public parks and they’ll give you a very different answer. So does the stranglehold of the market severely limit the space for daring, avant-garde music to really grow and flourish. And certainly, the whole point of the renewed attack on women’s rights is to get them to “learn their place” and keep their mouths shut.<
For these same reasons, though, Parker is right when she says America could gain a lot from having a Pussy Riot of our own on this side of the pond. The look on Limbaugh’s face alone might be enough to make such a prospect worthwhile!
In fact, what’s striking about this entire twisted tale isn’t how alien it seems to the west, but how much our own stories hold in common. Garazhda, one of Pussy Riot’s pseudonymous members told the Guardian in January that “There’s a deep tradition in Russia of gender and revolution–we’ve had amazing women revolutionaries.” The same can be said of America, from Mother Jones and the “rebel girl” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn to Angela Davis and Elaine Brown.
So too has the US seen, more recently, the machismo of punk rock turned on its head by acts like Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney, Bratmobile and the rest of the riot grrrl generation. Though most of that incredible movement have disbanded or moved on, there can be little doubt that its aesthetic has had a massive impact on Pussy Riot’s own actions. Plenty of reporters have similarly commented on the connection.
That sense of commonality is what’s in the air right now. And with it is the notion that your fight is mine and mine is yours, that we each have something to learn from each other in fighting the same power.
Just as Pussy Riot’s own actions were inspired by an amalgam of Egyptian protest, western riot grrrl and their own rich traditions of resistance, so do we have something to learn from them. Namely, that “protest music” isn’t merely the stuff of history books or passive hippies. It can be brash, it can be in your face and on the streets. It can be a battering ram, widening the cracks in the edifice for all to see. Putin and others like him have every reason to be nervous about that. We too would do well to pay attention.