Pussy Riot Returns for Some Global Face-Time

It’s been a while since Pussy Riot were making headlines, and nearly six years since Curmie wrote about them except in passing. Curmie watched the documentary “Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer” a while back, but had otherwise all but forgotten their existence. Well, they never went away, and they just made headlines again, although the linkage between group and event came rather after the fact.

The best moment of the World Cup?  Just maybe.

Those of us who watched the World Cup final between France and Croatia also saw Pussy Riot at work, although most of us didn’t know it. The group has claimed responsibility for the pitch invasion early in the second half of the match. 

Television cameras cut away from the events on the field and the announcers muttered about the intrusion into the game (Curmie will hope it was only because they assumed the four people who ran onto the pitch were quotidian attention-seekers), especially as Croatia was mounting a counter-attack which just might have turned into a scoring opportunity. (And given that both of France’s first-half goals in a 4-2 victory were at least arguably the product of bad refereeing, that lost opportunity must have been especially galling for the Croats.) Olga Kurachyova, one of the protesters, apologized for interrupting the game: “It is a pity that we disrupted the sportsmen,” she said, but added that “FIFA is involved in unfair games unfortunately. FIFA is a friend of heads of states who carry out repression, who violate human rights.”

Indeed, two things need to be noted here. First, FIFA (the Fédération Internationale de Football Association) may be the only organization in the world as corrupt as the Russian government. Second, coverage of the Cup, at least in the several games Curmie saw, mentioned nary a word about how repressive the Russian régime really is, but there was plenty of ooh-ing and aah-ing about what a great tournament this was and how magnificent the facilities are. Coupled with President Trump’s clinging to his bromance with Putin despite increasing evidence that Russia did indeed meddle in the last US Presidential election, this whitewashed view of a country, or rather of a political machine run by a former KGB apparatchik, is more than a little disturbing.

Of course, few if any spectators knew that the pitch invaders were actually political protesters until after the fact. The four protestors didn’t fit with our (or at least with Curmie’s) presuppositions about Pussy Riot. Contrary to what Curmie had come to expect, they weren’t masked, they were wearing costumes (police uniforms), and there was a man included in the quartet of pitch-invaders. Turns out he’s Pyotr Verzilov, described by ABC (that’s the Australian Broadcasting Corporation) as “one of the group’s most prominent members,” not least because he is the husband of Nadya Tolokonnikova, one of the three Pussy Riot members sentenced to two years in prison for the protest at the Moscow Cathedral in 2012 (she was released after serving about 17 months).

On the other hand, the World Cup final is always one of the world’s most-watched events. Curmie can’t yet find final viewership numbers, but recent history suggests that once you add everyone watching at home and everyone watching in a bar or a watch party, close to a billion people are likely to be watching at any given moment. And whereas some television networks cut away as soon as the disturbance was noticed, others apparently did not. Moreover, Pussy Riot’s claim of responsibility seems to have made headlines around the world (well, not so much in the US, which cares little about soccer and less about how foreign governments treat their citizens).

Lest there be any question about what Pussy Riot was up to, here is the video released by the group upon announcing their responsibility. Since they (or someone) was kind enough to supply subtitles, Curmie will transcribe their commentary:

Dear friend! Perhaps you know that there is no rule of law in Russia, and any policeman may easily break into your life for no reason. FIFA World Cup demonstrated really well how good Russian policemen may behave. But what will happen once it ends?

The conclusion and the solution is the only one—you should fight for preventing fabrication of criminal accusations and arresting people for no reason. In order for this to happen you need one thing called political competition. A possibility to participate in your own country’s life and be elected—for everyone. All of these are very simple things. But you should decide for yourself what you personally can do, so that *your* Russia would become much more beautiful. 

And one more thing. Today is 11 years since the death of the poet Prigov. And he became part of Russian Culture with a cycle of poems about a policeman. Read about him.

Well, our guys are waiting for us on the football match, where we should tell everyone about the heavenly policeman and about the earthly policeman. And also a couple of important demands that you will see at the end of this video. Something about these two policemen is written in this video’s description below. [You can see the translated text of this statement here.]. Well, see you later, my friend. [Curmie has regularized some of the punctuation, but tried to keep everything else unchanged.]

This is the first half or so of the whole video. It is very strange, indeed. The three speakers, presumably the three women who stormed the field, are wearing police uniforms and sitting in an apartment with stuffed animals in the background; all three talk, but they’re all reading from a prepared script. One wears a balaclava; a second puts one on in the middle of the message; the third spends a good deal of time preening for the camera. Color Curmie confused by all of this, but what they say shouldn’t get lost in the clutter of other images.

The video then moves on to an extended clip of the group’s on-pitch activities, including a double high-five (high ten?) between Pussy Riot’s Veronika Nikulshina and French striker Kylian Mbappe (more on this later) before she was literally dragged off the field by security personnel.

Finally, an animated cat (get it? pussy?) appears on the screen with Pussy Riot’s demands:

When the earthly policeman enters the game, we demand to:

1. Let all political prisoners free.

2. Not imprison for “likes.”

3. Stop illegal arrests on rallies.

4. Allow political competition in the country.

5. Not fabricate criminal accusations and not keep people in jail for no reason.

6. Turn the earthly policeman into the heavenly policeman.

These objectives are, as might be expected, simultaneously noble, idealistic, romantic, and naïve. More importantly, they are chilling. Far too many of the problems these goals seek to remedy are creeping into American life. OK, I’d like to think we have few if any political prisoners. But whereas liking a Facebook post might not get you arrested, it could get you fired (and have that firing be upheld by the courts) or suspended from school; these would seem to be first cousins of actual arrest.

“Illegal arrests at rallies” is a loaded term, but I suspect that a lot of objective people would say that something very akin to that has happened not infrequently—Curmie is thinking of the #Occupy movement of a few years ago; those on the other side of the political fence would no doubt cite other, no less relevant, examples.

As for political competition… The Electoral College has gone in a different direction than the popular vote in two of the last three Presidential elections that didn’t involve an incumbent. California has one electoral vote per roughly 720,000 inhabitants; Wyoming one per roughly 190,000. Of course, if you don’t live in one of the dozen or so states which legitimately could go either way in a Presidential election, you have no real say at all. N.B., this is not to suggest that the elections of Presidents G. W. Bush or Trump were tainted; their opponents knew the rules. The Electoral College may be anachronistic and ultimately undemocratic, but it is the way of the world, and candidates need to plan and campaign accordingly. Both Al Gore and Hillary Clinton were bad candidates who ran bad campaigns; they, and the party bosses who ensured their nominations, bear full responsibility for their defeats.

Gerrymandering is endemic, to the point where in 2012 Democrats got 1,400,000 more votes than the Republicans for the House of Representatives but still had a 21 vote deficit in actual elected reps. Competitive elections still happen, but the odds are often stacked, and the results aren’t necessarily an accurate representation of the electorate’s wishes.

We in this country are seldom jailed “for no reason,” but you’re likely to be jailed longer for the same crime if you happen to be poor or black or Latinx or Muslim. Meanwhile, lying little shits like the Brock Turners of the world whine about how abused they are. We’re not Russia, but we’re closer than we should be.

Pussy Riot’s complaints are real, and they served as a useful reminder that Russia is a much uglier place than their government, or FIFA, or indeed Fox Sports, would have us believe. As Masha Gessen writes in The New Yorker,

… Pussy Riot became the only people to make a meaningful statement about Russian politics during the World Cup—and it came on the eve of Vladimir Putin’s triumphant meeting with Donald Trump. They also created, on one of the biggest stages in the world, an image of unjust and arbitrary authority, the sort with which a hundred and forty-five million Russians live day to day.

Before we close, though: the moment that several have called the highlight of the Cup. During the charge onto the field, protester Veronika Nikulshina swerved and headed towards French star Kylian Mbappe. Mbappe was named the tournament’s best young player after becoming the first teenager since Pele 60 years ago to score in a World Cup final. He is widely believed to be the sport’s next global superstar.

But while most of the players on both sides ignored the interruption and Croatian defender Dejan Lovren actively assisted in apprehending the protesters, Mbappe made eye contact. Was Mbappe curious? apprehensive? foolish? Did the fact that Ms. Nikulshina is a very attractive young woman matter? Did she know she was approaching a budding international celebrity? Did he know she was a protester rather than a garden variety hooligan? Or did they both somehow sense that they were granted a huge opportunity to help each other out? Curmie has no answers. But he does know this: that moment, the one you see in the photo at the top of this piece, will remain an enduring part of this World Cup. Fans loved it, and Mbappe was widely cheered for his actions. He was already a hero in more ways than one—both for his heroics on the field and for donating his entire World Cup earnings—over half a million dollars—to charity because he doesn’t think he should be paid to represent his country. His double high-five with Nikulshina was the icing on his good-guy cake.

Meanwhile, the interaction with Mbappe got Nikulshina and her colleagues a lot more publicity than the pitch invasion per se ever would have on its own. There was another benefit: the increased publicity made it difficult for the Russian authorities to come down as hard on the protesters as they might otherwise have done. Seriously, check out the grin on Nikulshina’s face when she hears her sentence (it’s at about the 30 second mark in the top video): 15 days imprisonment and a ban from attending sporting events for three years. Given the sentence Pussy Riot members received for the event at Moscow Cathedral, it certainly could have been worse. She also notes that Mbappe was “fantastic,” and that she thinks the interaction “brought luck to his team.” Well, the French side did score two very quick insurance goals, one by Mbappe himself, in very short order after the encounter. Just sayin’.

It would require a flight of fancy to believe that Mbappe was thinking about anything but football when he sent a right-footed shot screaming into the back of the net only 10 minutes or so after high-fiving Nikulshina, and there was no suggestion that “this goal is for Veronika,” or anything like that. Still, whatever we may think of Pussy Riot’s tactics, their cause is just and their valor is unquestioned. And young Mr. Mbappe seems to be an exceptional person as well as an exceptional athlete. Perhaps a little karma just might have been involved. If so, here’s hoping that it continues.

UPDATE: In other Pussy Riot news today, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia was wrong to jail the three Pussy Riot women from the 2012 protest at the Moscow Cathedral, and ordered Russia to pay some $57,000 in damages to Maria Alyokhina, Nadya Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina Samutsevich.

Putin and the Pussy Rioters

The American media loves its “rising star” narratives. They loved Barack Obama; they love Paul Ryan. And, in the late 1990s, they loved Vladimir Putin. Here, they trumpeted, is a serious-minded politician, not an unsteady, often inebriated buffoon like Boris Yeltsin. I remember talking with my friend and mentor Masha Kipp, who had grown up in what was then called Leningrad. Somehow the conversation turned to contemporary Russian politics in general and to Putin in particular. Her comment was succinct and cogent: “once KGB, always KGB.” She was right, of course. Masha is like that.

I encountered an online petition (you’re more than welcome to sign it, by the way) a day or two ago that linked together three discrete events which nonetheless all link to Putin and his Machiavellian antics: the inane decision to outlaw Pride marches in Moscow for 100 years (upheld by the city court this week), the $10 million lawsuit against Madonna for “moral damage suffered by St. Petersburg residents” (i.e., suggesting that gay people are, indeed, people), and the conviction and two-year penal colony sentence for three members of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.”

The linkage is apt: all suggest a manifestation of Putin’s power to influence decisions that are technically but not pragmatically out of his purview. And Putin is certainly both a repressive homophobe and an amoral tactician. But this sentence also hints at fairly profound differences between the two gay rights-related events and the Pussy Riot fiasco. First off, whereas the silliness—or, rather, what would be silliness if not for the profound consequences to civil liberties—of the Pride march ban and the Madonna lawsuit are clearly a threat to free expression, they may at least grounded in an apparently honest if misguided homophobia. Moreover, while Putin’s political clout is considerable, and he undoubtedly created a climate wherein barbarities can occur in the name of law and order, he cannot be linked directly to the autocratic imbecility of the Moscow city government, nor to the mercenary acquisitiveness of a gaggle of Petersburgian shysters and their falsely pious clients.

The Pussy Riot case is different. For one thing, homosexuality is actually legal in Russia: it’s just talking about it that has somehow become criminalized. The kind of protest mounted by Pussy Riot, however, was intended to cause turmoil. Perhaps the three women involved did not go to Moscow Christ the Savior Cathedral with the intention of being arrested, but surely they’re not stupid enough not to have considered the possibility, perhaps even likelihood, of such an eventuality. There is a level at which arrests generate publicity, and that is often precisely what they seek. We see this phenomenon manifested in the band’s own YouTube release, which joins what was actually essentially a mime show at the cathedral with a musical overlay to make the event seem more disruptive than it actually was (and which, of course, required a videographer who knew what was going to happen). What caught the interest of the Western world was not the arrest per se, although that certainly caused ripples, but the frankly ridiculous nature of the specific charge. Had they been charged with simple trespass, or some variation on the theme, it is extremely unlikely that you and I, Gentle Reader, would ever have heard of the case.

Of course, what Pussy Riot (or, rather, some of them—there are a dozen or so members) did is completely in line with what musicians and other artists have been doing for a very long time. John Lennon. Pete Seeger. Joan Baez. Woody Guthrie. Johnny Clegg. Or, in my field, the Living Theatre, Athol Fugard, Václav Havel, and a host of others dating all the way back to Euripides (at least). Using art to make a point, risking or even encouraging arrest: this is in a very real sense what it is to be engaged in the life of a society, which is, after all, a reasonable prerequisite to making art about it.

This would be a good time, too, to rebut the drivel by one Vadim Nikitin, published by the New York Times. Nikitin’s argument seems to be that we shouldn’t support Pussy Riot’s anti-Putin display if we aren’t equally willing to support their “incendiary anarchism, extreme sexual provocations, deliberate obscenity and hard-left politics”: to do otherwise is “pure opportunism” that “is not only hypocritical but also does a great disservice to their cause.” After all, these women are “not liberals looking for self-expression. They are self-confessed [!] descendants of the surrealists and the Russian futurists, determined to radically, even violently, change society.” Doesn’t that sound erudite? Too bad it’s crap. Nikitin would have us believe that a self-consciously feminist organization is the demon spawn of two artistic/cultural movements very much in opposition to each other, both of which were misogynistic, one of them virulently so. See how that works? Neither do I.

Nikitin’s argument is utter nonsense for a variety of reasons, not least of which being that it is entirely reasonable to support the notion of free speech without supporting the content of that speech. Indeed, it is the only reasonable application of the principle. In other words, I don’t support Pussy Riot per se; I support their right to protest without being charged with a crime they clearly didn’t commit. It is not opportunism to say so, even if we dislike Vladimir Putin, nor is it incumbent on me or anyone else to qualify our antagonism for the verdict in their case with diffident mumbles about how Pussy Riot really is, you know, kind of unladylike. It doesn’t matter whether they are or not.

I don’t care if they’re liberals or anarchists or suburban Republicans. They were convicted of “religious hatred” when they clearly hold no grudge against the religious belief system of the Orthodox Church itself or its parishioners. What they object to is the unholy alliance between Putin and the Church hierarchy, as manifested by Putin’s government throwing two billion rubles (about $100 million) at the Church while seeking also to restrict activities by evangelical Christians. In return, not to say as quid pro quo (necessarily), Orthodox Patriarch Kirill described the twelve years of Putin’s reign as “a miracle of God.” There is no question that the Church’s areligious promotion of Putin as both man and politician has been and continues to be central to his political success.

This conflation of Church and state under the leadership of a man who once sought to enforce the very atheism that now so repels him may be hypocritical in ethical terms, but it absolutely understandable pragmatically: Putin is nothing if not pragmatic. Pussy Riot’s antagonism to this linkage is, in short, completely comprehensible. They claim that they meant no disrespect to practitioners, only to the elites of Church and State. I have no reason to doubt their sincerity in this regard. Neither did the judge at their trial, who nonetheless sentenced them to a couple of years in Siberia, basically because Putin said to.

Or at least that’s the charge being leveled by a lot of people who know more about the Russian judicial system than you or I do, Gentle Reader. Here are four such statements:

Here’s Alexey Kudrin, a former finance minister who, according to Miriam Elder of The Guardian remains a close ally of Putin:

The verdict in the case against the Pussy Riot punk band isn't only a fact in the lives of three young women; it is also yet another blow to the justice system and, above all, Russian citizens' belief in it.

Here’s Nikolay Petrov, a former Soviet government analyst in the 1990s who is now chair of the Carnegie Moscow Center's Society and Regions Program:

It looks like [Putin] feels personally humiliated and personally involved and the rumour is that it was his personal order to put them in jail…. There's only one and the same branch of power in Russia; it's executive power led by Putin.

Here’s Boris Akunin, a popular Russian author:

Putin has doomed himself to another year and a half of international shame and humiliation. The whole thing is bad because it's yet another step toward the escalation of tensions within society. And the government is absolutely to blame.

.And finally, here’s Michelle Ringuette, chief of campaigns and programs for Amnesty International USA:

The decision to find guilty Maria [Alekhina], Ekaterina [Samutsevich] and Nadezhda [Tolokonnikova] amid global outrage shows that the Russian authorities will stop at no end to suppress dissent and stifle civil society…. From the initial unjustified arrest, to the questionable trial, to this outrageous verdict and sentencing, each step in the case has been an affront to human rights…. It's a bitter blow to freedom in Russia. Amnesty International will not allow these women to be silenced. They will not be forgotten…. President Putin took office in May as hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens demanded an open and participatory society. Rather than heed their call, Putin has further entrenched his already tight fist on freedom of expression.

What is interesting here is the unanimity of opinion that seems to point in a single direction: that righteous indignation about attacks on the Orthodox Church masks the real source of the outrage, namely criticism of Putin.

Musicians and other artists around the world have also rallied to the cause. Some, like Vratislav Brabenec of The Plastic People of the Universe, Mark Knopfler, Yoko Ono, and Patti Smith might be considered predictable. But I personally wouldn’t have expected Paul McCartney, Sting, or Pete Townshend. Maybe that’s my blind spot.

It’s important to remember two things, however. First, the events that precipitated this contretemps were planned by the people who now are cast in the role of victims. Their actions would have resulted in arrest anywhere in the world. It’s the over-reaction of the authorities, not their legitimate desire to maintain law and order, that is in question here. Secondly, PR (Pussy Riot) has good PR (public relations). These women are important not because they’re special, but because they’re not.

They’re not fighting solitary and lonely battles for the sake of a higher mission. They’re exploiting their notoriety. The result is that we, especially those of us in the West, who don’t necessarily understand the cultural differences between our perceived universe and theirs, risk missing the forest for the trees. That is, as Joshua Foust of The Atlantic argues, what happened to the Pussy Riot trio is not what happens to female punk bands. It’s what happens to those who make Vladimir Putin look bad. We need to remember that there are many other dissidents whose plights are no less harrowing and whose deeds are no less heroic for the fact that we haven’t heard about them.

While the Democracy Index now describes Russia as an “authoritarian regime,” ranking it below the likes of Nicaragua, Mozambique, and Haiti, all of which are classified as “hybrid regimes” (the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Mongolia are all a step higher still, “flawed democracies”), Vladimir Putin nonetheless retains considerable popularity in his homeland, based in large part on nothing but personal charisma. He cynically embraces the largest religious denomination in his country although he feels no real affinity for it. He sees oil wealth and nuclear energy as the path forward. He brutally suppresses dissent. He cultivates an image as a macho badass. The WikiLeaks documents reveal, in the words of Luke Harding of The Guardian, that “Russia is a corrupt, autocratic kleptocracy centred on the leadership of Vladimir Putin, in which officials, oligarchs and organised crime are bound together to create a “virtual mafia state.”

That’s what this is all about. If Pussy Riot are the good guys in this case, it’s primarily because they’re presented in contradistinction to Vladimir Putin. Their right to protest would remain whether they were “right” or not, but it does really matter that absurd and probably flagitious sentence imposed on them has as much to do with the object of their attention as with the manner and location of their demonstration. They were convicted of showing too little respect for one half of the perverse symbiosis between the Orthodox Church and the Putin administration. The truth is, though, it was the other half of the equation that really mattered.