Pussy Riot - activists, not pin-ups

Clever, committed and courageous, Pussy Riot are the perfect activists. They have used their year in the spotlight to expose injustice

Depending on how you define it, the most important performance by a rock band in 2012 lasted either less than two minutes or a full nine days. Pussy Riot’s guerrilla rendition of Punk Prayer: Mother of God Drive Putin Away in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, Moscow, on February 21st was brief even by punk standards, and less striking and significant to non-Russian eyes than the band’s rooftop appearance in Red Square a month earlier.

But the vindictive trial that ensued was a major international media event which revealed both the depth of the defendants’ courage and intelligence and the power of popular music to illuminate a political situation. At a recent House of Commons event organised by Kerry McCarthy MP, who attended the trial, the musician and critic John Robb suggested that the church gig was merely the soundcheck and the trial was the real show.

Contrary to Putin’s sneering remark that “they got what they asked for”, Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich didn’t set out to get prosecuted. Their fame has not eclipsed other injustices in Russia but highlighted them, in the tradition of opposition movements strategically promoting charismatic individuals, from Nelson Mandela to Ai Weiwei, as synecdoches for an entire cause. For newly curious observers outside Russia, Pussy Riot have lifted the curtain on the regime’s intolerance.

We are used to musicians making inspiring protest songs then fumbling the follow-up as they try to paper over the gaps in their knowledge with stirring simplifications. Not Pussy Riot. They sprang, in October 2011, from the anarchist art collective Voina (meaning “war“), with an arsenal of political theory. The scope of their concerns is broad, from education and healthcare to feminism, LGBT rights and Russia’s culture of conformity.

The prosecution depicted them as Satanic hooligans and their defence team, complained Samutsevich, “made us look like teenage girls that went against Putin without even understanding why [we were] . . . doing it”. But the trio proved themselves to be calm, courageous, impeccably well-informed women, whose eloquent statements to the court quoted Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky.

“Compared to the judicial machine, we are nobodies, and we have lost,” said Samutsevich.

“On the other hand, we have won. The system cannot conceal the repressive nature of this trial. Once again, the world sees Russia differently than the way Putin tries to present it at his daily international meetings.”

‘Laughing stock’

Even some members of Putin’s United Russia party agreed, with one publicly complaining the indictment “makes the country the laughing stock of the entire world”.

It is only when you pan back from the courtroom and consider the overseas Free Pussy Riot campaign that the picture becomes more complicated. It quickly became the celebrity cause du jour.

Yoko Ono gave Pussy Riot the Lennon Ono Grant for Peace award. Paul McCartney wrote them an open letter. Bjork and Patti Smith dedicated songs to them. Peaches released a song called Free Pussy Riot with a video crammed with celebrity supporters.