Locked in jail, Pussy Riot still make Putin quail
Three feminist provocateurs are still in prison over their punk protest against Vladimir Putin in February. But as Tony Halpin reports from Moscow, they are a real and growing threat to the returned president’s power.
ON THE list of serious threats to his authority as Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin is unlikely to have included a bunch of feminist pranksters in DayGlo balaclavas called Pussy Riot.
He was mistaken. The group’s incendiary performance of a ‘‘punk prayer’’ against him inside Moscow’s Christ the Saviour cathedral has become one of those moments that crystallise a society’s discontents. They were 51 seconds that rocked Russia.
What might have been dismissed as ill-judged high-jinks has become Putin’s Pussy Riot problem, a confrontation between repression and freedom that is forcing many Russians to decide what sort of country they want to live in. The Kremlin appears bent on making martyrs out of three members of the punk-rock collective as Putin’s third presidential term begins with unprecedented popular unrest over his rule.
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 23, Maria Alyokhina, 24, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 19, have already spent more than four months in detention. They will be sent for trial this week by a Moscow court, charged with hooliganism, and face up to seven years in jail if convicted.
Putin versus Pussy Riot has all the elements of dramatic absurdity that would have delighted Gogol or Bulgakov in other times. It is a story of corrupt autocracy and belief in the cleansing power of art, mixed with religious controversy over the state of the Russian soul.
It pitches a macho authoritarian who poses topless for publicity stunts against girl-power provocateurs who wear masks as feminist statements against sex- ism. The dour former KGB spy whose mantra is ‘‘stability’’ confronts anarchic musicians who scream ‘‘riot, riot’’ outside the Kremlin gates.
‘‘Nobody has any doubt that Putin personally is going to decide their sentence,’’ Pyotr Verzilov, Tolokonnikova’s husband, told me. Their daughter Gera, 4, has not seen her mother since Tolokonnikova was arrested on the street at gunpoint by 30 officers from the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the Soviet KGB, on March 3.
‘‘I explain it to her like a fairytale, with bad guys locking up the princess in their castle and the battle to rescue her. When people ask Gera, she replies that Putin has locked Mama in a cage and we have to free her,’’ said Verzilov, who has been refused visits to see his wife five times by prison authorities, even though it is his right under Russian law.
Alyokhina has a son, Philip, aged 5. Russian courts normally place mothers of small children on bail during criminal investigations, but judges have rejected all pleas to free Pussy Riot. Police have built a staggering 2800-page case file against them.
The women’s detention has been extended repeatedly. They have been brought to court each time in the sort of security operation reserved for terrorist suspects, emerging tightly handcuffed from separate custody vans and under armed guard to appear individually before the judge.
Back in prison they are kept isolated from each other, placed under constant video surveillance and subjected to ‘‘informal’’ talks with FSB agents who demand that they confess their guilt.
The harassment has
trans- formed Pussy Riot from marginal irritant to international cultural phenomenon, a band whose name has launched a thousand quips and created awkward moments for TV and radio commentators.
Every court appearance has been met by a chaotic media scrum and a swelling crowd of protesters, angered by the evident overkill of the state’s treatment of three slight young women. Mounting disquiet prompted 120 leading Russian cultural figures to pen an open letter calling for their release.
‘‘The criminal case against Pussy Riot compromises the Russian judicial system and undermines trust in the authorities,’’ they wrote in a letter signed by actors, writers, musicians, ballet dancers and film and theatre directors.
‘‘While the participants in the action have been held under arrest, an atmosphere of intolerance has grown in society which will cause division and radicalism ... We believe that the actions of Pussy Riot are not criminal. The girls killed no one, stole from nobody, carried out no violence.’’
Signatories included prominent Putin critics such as rock singer Yuri Shevchuk and novelist Boris Akunin, but also people who had campaigned for his election victory, such as the acclaimed actress Chulpan Khamatova and film director Fyodor Bondarchuk.
A copy of the letter on the web- site of the independent Ekho Moskvy radio has been signed by 40,000 people.
Calls to ‘‘free Pussy Riot’’ have gone global. Amnesty International declared them prisoners of conscience, while protests have been held outside Russian diplomatic missions in London, Berlin, New York, San Francisco and Sydney.
Pussy Riot have provoked powerful forces, however, chief among them Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Three weeks after their arrest, Kirill delivered a sermon denouncing the ‘‘blasphemous’’ protest and those in the church who were urging him to support clemency for the women.
Declaring that ‘‘the Devil laughed at us’’ during the cathedral performance, the patriarch (chief bishop) said: ‘‘There are those who would justify and minimise this sacrilege . . . It makes my heart bleed with sorrow that among these people there are those who call themselves Orthodox Christians.’’
Many Orthodox believers were appalled by the stunt, but also have grown uncomfortable at the apparent absence of Christian forgiveness in the church hierarchy.
That unease deepened when the church’s spokesman, Vsevolod Chaplin, claimed last month to have received a divine revelation that the group’s ‘‘sin will be punished in this life and the next’’.
‘‘God revealed this to me just like he revealed the gospels to the church,’’ Chaplin said.
Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri Rogozin, who has a powerful following among Russian nationalists, accused the women of holding a coven in a holy place, adding a spectre of witchcraft to the controversy.
Similar language crept into the announcement by the office of the prosecutor-general that the case was being sent for trial, saying that Pussy Riot had ‘‘caused significant damage to the sacred values of the church . . . and in a blasphemous manner disgraced the ancient foundations of the Russian Orthodox Church’’.
Video of the ‘‘punk prayer’’ has been seen 1.4 million times on YouTube, with added footage of the group playing guitar. It shows four masked women dancing on the pulpit then kneeling and crossing themselves as startled nuns and security guards attempt to drag them away.
The detainees admit to being members of the Pussy Riot collective but deny being present in the cathedral, and a fourth person has never been arrested.
Their raid on Red Square in January to sing Putin’s Pissed Himself embodied the spirit of rebellion in the air weeks after 100,000 people had frightened the authorities with the largest antigovernment demonstration for 20 years. Here was the heart of the regime, one of the most tightly guarded places in Russia, and Pussy Riot were at the Kremlin walls, calling for revolution.
‘‘A rioting march is approaching the Kremlin; windows are exploding in FSB offices; the bitches got scared behind those red walls,’’ they sang as they waved smoke flares in front of stunned police. ‘‘Attack at sunrise, I won’t be against it; for our freedom – punish with a whip; the Holy Madonna will teach us to fight.
‘‘Rebellion in Russia, the charisma of protest. Rebellion in Russia, Putin pissed himself. Rebellion in Russia, we exist. Rebellion in Russia – riot, riot!’’