Activist band stood up to Putin
Book offers a larger story about today’s Russia
Through the trial of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot, Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen tells a larger story about Vladimir Putin’s Russia, with its state-controlled media, pervasive corruption, pliant judiciary and penal system in need of reform.
The three young women arrested for a 40-second song performed in a vacant Moscow cathedral received disproportionate two-year sentences. The song’s punch line, “Mother of God, chase Putin out” was not even played in court. The charge — hooliganism motivated by religious hatred — concealed that the women were tried for their political beliefs. It was, however, the only version broadcast to the Russian public.
“We are punk performers, activists, artists and citizens,” wrote Nadya Tolokonnikova, the leader of the feminist band, from her pretrial detention centre. Since September 2011, when they became Pussy Riot, the women in colourful balaclavas performed in public venues and in Red Square.
They were not musicians, rather social activists who protested corruption and Russia’s rigged elections; they demanded equal rights for LGBT and supported environmental causes. Their lyrics called for freedom and civil society, which they believed was being destroyed in Russia.
In 2011, when Putin announced his intention to run for a third presidential term, he faced a sizable opposition for the first time. In December, unprecedented mass demonstrations spilled onto the streets, chanting: “Russia without Putin!” Moscow’s courts and detention centres were choking with arrests.
When, in February 2012, Russian Orthodox Church leader Patriarch Kirill called on believers to vote for Putin, describing him as “God’s miracle” on television, Tolokonnikova knew where to stage their major protest. More than a century ago, Tolstoy accused the Orthodox Church of alliance with the dictatorial state.
A philosophy student who read Tolstoy’s non-fiction, Tolokonnikova wanted to illuminate “the relationship between the Church and Putin.” They would protest at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the official church attended by Putin’s government.
Gessen’s book, Words Will Break Cement, opens with her journey to Tolokonnikova’s prison colony in Mordovia, with the world’s largest concentration of inmates. The book’s title is inspired by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s lines, which Tolokonnikova quoted during her trial: “I believe in the end that words will break cement.”
The author of the Putin biography Man Without a Face, Gessen is the only journalist who managed to interview Tolokonnikova in prison.
Her book amasses trial transcripts, along with correspondence and interviews with two other Pussy Riot members, environmental activist Maria Alyokhina and engineer Katya Samutsevich.