Pussy Riot and the (Long) Struggle Against Despotism in Russia

Armando Chaguaceda

HAVANA TIMES — The “chronicle of a disgrace foretold” has just been recorded in Moscow. Russian judges have sentenced members of political punk-rock group “Pussy Riot” to two years in prison.

Following their performance at the Christ the Savior Cathedral this past March, three women from the group were arrested, accused of hooliganism and disrespect for religion, and prosecuted in a meteoric trial devoid of full legal guarantees.

Their convictions come despite calls from dozens of artists and thousands of people from around the world who alerted the public about the injustice that was brewing.

Authorities ignored the anguish of several members of the Orthodox hierarchy who are concerned about the conversion of these young women into icons of social activism.

This has occurred despite the calculated ruse of President Putin of asking for clemency — as if his will was not reflected, from the very beginning, in the contours of this verdict — as he advised, like a scolding parent, that the young women should learn their lesson.

This event adds to a long chain of events — the harassment of NGOs, attacks on social activists and on human rights defenders, and crude official opportunism in the last general elections — that is turning Russia into a hybrid system (neither totalitarian nor democratic) where respect and the exercise of civil liberties is harassed daily by the power of an imperial presidency.

This is a presidency that is drawing on the darkest legacy of the Soviet security apparatus and corruption of the neoliberal (mis)governments of the post-communist transition. It thrives on its own notion of “security, stability and progress” for the noble Russian people.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich and Maria Alyokhina are not hoodlums or rebels without a cause, as the Putinist smear campaign presents them to be. Nor are they renegades of Russian culture and identity.

They are college students, struggling feminists, and supporters of environmentalism and LGBT rights. They are part of a generation that has shaken off the burdens of disappointment and conformism seeded by two decades of Mafioso-style capitalism.

Word of them is coming out today onto the streets and into cyberspace to raise awareness among much of Russian society that remains sleepy and conservative – that same society that today looks with surprise and rejection at these three young women who are fighting for freedom for everyone.

The global struggle for democracy, justice and freedom possesses in these women an example of consequence, creativity and conviction.

They are worthy heirs of Herzen and the Decembrists, of Maria Spiridonova and the socialist revolutionaries, of Sakharov and the members of the Helsinki Committee.

Serving as a badge of courage was the declaration made by one of them, Yekaterina Samutsevich, who spoke a few days ago before the court that issued its verdict.

Her statement* reads as follows:

In the closing statement, the defendant is expected to repent, express regret for their deeds or enumerate attenuating circumstances. In my case, as in the case of my colleagues in the group, this is completely unnecessary. Instead, I want to voice my thoughts about the reasons behind what has happened to us.

That Christ the Savior Cathedral had become a significant symbol in the political strategy of the authorities was clear to many thinking people when Vladimir Putin’s former [KGB] colleague Kirill Gundyayev took over as leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. After this happened, Christ the Savior Cathedral began to be openly used as a flashy backdrop for the politics of the security forces, which are the main source of power [in Russia].

Why did Putin feel the need to exploit the Orthodox religion and its aesthetic? After all, he could have employed his own, far more secular tools of power—for example, the state-controlled corporations, or his menacing police system, or his obedient judiciary system. It may be that the harsh, failed policies of Putin’s government, the incident with the submarine Kursk, bombings of civilians in broad daylight, and other unpleasant moments in his political career forced him to ponder the fact that it was high time to resign; that otherwise, the citizens of Russia would help him do this. Apparently, it was then that he felt the need for more persuasive, transcendental guarantees of his long tenure at the pinnacle of power. It was then that it became necessary to make use of the aesthetic of the Orthodox religion, which is historically associated with the heyday of Imperial Russia, where power came not from earthly manifestations such as democratic elections and civil society, but from God Himself.

How did he succeed in doing this? After all, we still have a secular state, and any intersection of the religious and political spheres should be dealt with severely by our vigilant and critically minded society, shouldn’t it? Here, apparently, the authorities took advantage of a certain deficit of the Orthodox aesthetic in Soviet times, when the Orthodox religion had an aura of lost history, of something that had been crushed and damaged by the Soviet totalitarian regime, and was thus an opposition culture. The authorities decided to appropriate this historical effect of loss and present a new political project to restore Russia’s lost spiritual values, a project that has little to do with a genuine concern for the preservation of Russian Orthodoxy’s history and culture.

It was also fairly logical that the Russian Orthodox Church, given its long mystical ties to power, emerged as the project’s principal exponent in the media. It was decided that, unlike in the Soviet era, when the church opposed, above all, the brutality of the authorities towards history itself, the Russian Orthodox Church should now confront all pernicious manifestations of contemporary mass culture with its concept of diversity and tolerance.

Implementing this thoroughly interesting political project has required considerable quantities of professional lighting and video equipment, air time on national TV channels for hours-long live broadcasts, and numerous background shoots for morally and ethically edifying news stories, where the Patriarch’s well-constructed speeches would in fact be presented, thus helping the faithful make the correct political choice during the difficult time for Putin preceding the election. Moreover, the filming must be continuous; the necessary images must be burned into the memory and constantly updated; they must create the impression of something natural, constant and compulsory.

Our sudden musical appearance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior with the song “Mother of God, Drive Putin Out” violated the integrity of the media image that the authorities had spent such a long time generating and maintaining, and revealed its falsity. In our performance we dared, without the Patriarch’s blessing, to unite the visual imagery of Orthodox culture and that of protest culture, thus suggesting to smart people that Orthodox culture belongs not only to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Patriarch and Putin, that it could also ally itself with civic rebellion and the spirit of protest in Russia.

Perhaps the unpleasant, far-reaching effect from our media intrusion into the cathedral was a surprise to the authorities themselves. At first, they tried to present our performance as a prank pulled by heartless, militant atheists. This was a serious blunder on their part, because by then we were already known as an anti-Putin feminist punk band that carried out their media assaults on the country’s major political symbols.

In the end, considering all the irreversible political and symbolic losses caused by our innocent creativity, the authorities decided to protect the public from us and our nonconformist thinking. Thus ended our complicated punk adventure in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.

I now have mixed feelings about this trial. On the one hand, we expect a guilty verdict. Compared to the judicial machine, we are nobodies, and we have lost. On the other hand, we have won. The whole world now sees that the criminal case against us has been fabricated. The system cannot conceal the repressive nature of this trial. Once again, the world sees Russia differently from the way Putin tries to present it at his daily international meetings. Clearly, none of the steps Putin promised to take toward instituting the rule of law have been taken. And his statement that this court will be objective and hand down a fair verdict is yet another deception of the entire country and the international community. That is all. Thank you.

* Reprinted from Chtodelat News