Pussy Riot! A Punk Prayer for Freedom
October 10 is the one-year anniversary of Pussy Riot member, Yekateria Samutsevich (aka. Katya) having her sentence overturned and being released on probation.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, Pussy Riot is an anonymous, activist female punk band that performs unannounced in public places in Russia like the subway. The number of members and the date of their formation vary in reports, but it seems to be in the teens and in the fall of 2011, in response to President Vladimir Putin announcing he would pursue a third term in office. Five members participated in a controversial 40-second performance in the priests-only section of an Orthodox church, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow on February 21, 2012. After being chased away, two fled the country for their safety; they have kept the conversation going, visiting feminist venues like New York’s Bluestockings bookstore this past June. Katya, Maria Alyokhina (Masha), and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (Nadya) were caught and they eventually confessed to imploring the Virgin Mary through a ‘punk prayer’ to become a feminist and remove President Vladimir Putin from power. Had they pleaded guilty to the charge of felony hooliganism motivated by religious hatred (or arguably, had they agreed to join a convent like one witness suggested), it is believed that they would have been released. They refused, and Masha and Nadya remain behind bars, serving a two-year sentence in a penal colony. During that time, the band was shortlisted for the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. To my knowledge, there have been no public performances since the arrest, but their lyrics continue to resonate with international news: one song mentions a violent day in Egypt and the anti-Putin song refers to gay pride being exiled to Siberia.
Supporters range from Madonna to Amnesty International. Another advocate is the Feminist Press at the City University of New York. Within a month of the verdict, they released an e-book, Pussy Riot! A Punk Prayer for Freedom (2012) and in 2013, they published it as a paperback. It’s billed as a historical document and contains translated lyrics, letters, and poems by the detained band members as well as translated excerpts from the court transcripts, legal statements from the defense attorneys and the defendants, and—new to the paperback edition—statements from the appeal. It’s also presented as a call to action, with contributions from artists, musicians, and writers (Yoko Ono, Justin Vivian Bond, Johanna Fateman, Eileen Myles, Karen Finley, JD Samson, and Laurie Weeks are in the original edition and are joined by Peaches and Simonne Jones, Bianca Jagger, Tobi Vail, Barbara Browning, and Vivien Goldman in the paperback edition). Proceeds go towards the band’s legal fees and related expenses.
Rather than being portrayed primarily as a band, Pussy Riot is seen as more of an arts collective, an association arguably strengthened by their choice of an art gallery as one of their venues. Performance art, action art, protest art, art attacks, and sacred art are terms used throughout the book by their supporters, yet the prosecution overlooks these possibilities with the slight, “so-called contemporary art.” In response, Masha recasts the experience as a so-called trial in a so-called court.
As the book demonstrates, it’s not the three women who come out looking badly, but the Russian judicial system. In the five months leading up to the trial, Katya, Masha, and Nadya were kept cold, underfed, and sleep deprived. The injustices were many: only one of the three defense attorneys was allowed to confer with the defendants; documents were forged to say the defendants had access to all of the material evidence; the non-disclosure statement was signed late; the public and the media were unwelcome at the trial; and experts’ questions were based on judicial requirements and addressed motive directly. It’s no wonder defense attorney Mark Feygin commented, “Lawlessness reigns supreme in Russia.” Perhaps the most disturbing element is that excerpts from the court proceedings read like the Salem witch trials. Consider the witness accounts: a candle seller describes Pussy Riot’s dancing as “the devil’s twitchings” and the church electrician called their performance “a witches ritual”.
Barbara Browning says that Pussy Riot’s real intervention is their unrelenting feminism. In their vividly coloured A-line and shift dresses, they are undeniably female, but with balaclavas masking their faces, as one anonymous band member says, they eschew ideals of beauty. How disappointing that in jail, one band member kept hearing that it must be men who were the brains of their operation. How frustrating that in court, Nadya’s question to a witness, “Is feminism a swear word?” was met with, “It is if it is said in church.”
There are a few gaps in the book. Although the band professes their tolerance of and respect for religion, nowhere is a critical refrain from the anti-Putin song addressed. Unless the apostrophe in, “Sh*t, sh*t, the Lord’s sh*t!” denotes possession (i.e., that Putin is a child of the Lord and that Putin is sh*t), rather than contracting ‘is,’ it is a reasonable trigger for the accusation of religious hatred. The book quotes Masha as saying that the intervention was prompted by political concerns, not religious concerns, but that’s a confusing explanation since their specific concern is the close ties between church and state. Also, Katya’s release is mentioned in the introduction but no explanation is given. No mention is made of Katya severing ties with the band’s shared defense attorneys and hiring someone for herself who is regarded as having ties to the Kremlin. Nor does the book specify that she was cleared on the basis of having been blocked by security from entering the altar and performing with her comrades. The complication with this defense, as Julia Ioffe writes (1), is that it implies that the women who did reach the altar and perform actually committed a crime. Also excluded is the fact that Feygin was allegedly fired by all three women over a disputed contract that trademarks the group through his wife’s company, touching on the group’s resistance of commercialism (2), something they’ve had to deal with as awards have rolled in for a documentary and opera released in their honour. The only hint of these developments is the final word given to Pussy Riot in the book: without context, Katya says, “There is no split in Pussy Riot.” Perhaps these details weren’t raised because it would imply a split, but in the spirit of historical documentation, stating if not analyzing them seems prudent.
All in all, though, this slender tome is recommended. The texts are articulate and inspiring, so much so that Johanna Fateman calls them gifts and regards Pussy Riot as “scholars of Putinist repression.”
(1) “Is Pussy Riot Breaking Up?,” New Republic, October 10, 2012.
(2) Benjamin Bidder and Matthias Schepp, “Manipulating Pussy Riot: Letters Show Division in Punk Group,” Der Spiegel, Feb. 20, 2013, transl. Christopher Sultan.
