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.

The band were coolly grateful for all support, and their lawyers acknowledged that the international outcry helped to secure relatively lenient jail terms and free Samutsevich on appeal, but the circus of western celebrity sits uneasily with Pussy Riot’s stern rejection of fame and capitalism.

“We’re flattered that Madonna and Bjork have offered to perform with us,” a member using the pseudonym Orange told Radio Free Europe. “But the only performances we’ll participate in are illegal ones. We refuse to perform as part of the capitalist system, at concerts where they sell tickets.”

This is a band for whom “selling out”, an increasingly archaic concept in the west, is unimaginable. They are currently at odds with their former lawyers over the fate of the Pussy Riot brand – wanting to keep it out of the hands of unscrupulous merchandisers. They have also criticised copycat protests outside Russia and chastised young women hoping to follow their example without doing the intellectual spadework.

“They don’t know about feminism or art,” said Samutsevich.

“They say we are against Putin and that’s it. I can’t prohibit it, but I don’t approve of it. Any person can put on a balaclava, it’s all very good, but it’s important that the ideas are not warped.”

Outlaw frisson

Certainly the international frenzy around Pussy Riot involves an uncomfortably voyeuristic fascination with a situation in which punk can land you a prison sentence rather than a Converse advert – a nostalgia for the outlaw frisson music once possessed in the west. And slogans such as “We Are All Pussy Riot” downplay how abrasively radical their ideas and methods would be, even in London or New York.

But any threat of Pussy Riot becoming cuddly icons is dispelled whenever the women themselves speak, with a distinctly Russian severity and blade-like clarity of purpose. When Der Spiegel interviewed Tolokonnikova in the penal colony, she regretted nothing: “If you’re afraid of wolves, you shouldn’t go into the forest. I’m not afraid of wolves.”

Pussy Riot have vowed to continue although their future is uncertain. The remaining members are in hiding. The Russian government has labelled their videos “extremist” and thus illegal.

Samutsevich and Tolokonnikova’s husband, Pyotr Verzilov, have separately been accused of being Kremlin agents.

For their sympathisers the challenge is to neither forget nor romanticise them. They are not our cute punk pin-ups but unflinching hardline activists whose work demands a response on two fronts. Their supporters need to keep agitating on behalf of the jailed women and their less well-known fellow dissidents. And musicians and artists who live under less wolfish regimes should use Pussy Riot’s inspirational example as a spur to action.

As Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna wrote during the trial, “This could be the start of a whole new thing, a whole new motivating source for a globally connected unapologetic punk feminist art and music scene. A catalyst, no matter what it gets called. Anything is possible. If anything, this band has reminded us of that.”

– (Guardian service)