Pussy Riot and the political protest movement in Russia

René Does

The 4th of March 2014. This is the day when two of the members of Pussy Riot, Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, will be realeased from the women labour camps in Perm oblast and the republic of Mordovia. Perm and Mordovia are notorious places of labour camps in Russia because of their political connotation. The third prosecuted member of the group, Yekaterina Samutsevich, was released by a higher appeal court in Moscow, bescuase she did not perform on the altar of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior on the 21th of February.

In this presentation I will discuss the case of Pussy Riot as part of the new political protest movement in Russia. At first I will give a short sociological and geographical portrait of the protest movement. After that, I will deal with the place of Pussy Riot within this movement. Finally, I will outline the political forces that are critical or supportive on the prosecution and trial of the Pussy Riot members and make some concluding remarks.

A lot of sociological research on the composition of the new protest movement has been done. For example, research among the more than 100,000 demonstrators on Bog Square (Bolotnaya Square) in Moscow on the 11th of December showed that 37 percent of the participants had voted for the left-liberal party Yabloko and only 3 percent for United Russia; that 59 percent judged his or her material position as ´average´ and 26 percent as ´good´; and that 56 percent had followed or was following higher education.

The average age of the protesters is about 30 years. The overwhelming majority has travelled to the West. 65 percent of protesters find their information about protests and rallies on the internet. The participants find it often difficult to say exactly for what they are protesting. It is for more or less amorphous values as the rule of law, citizenship and honesty.

So, the members of the protest movement have political and moral motives to participate. It is not about economic questions, not about money and perks. The protest movement is shortly characterized as ´the educated class´ or ´the angry citizens´.

It is also possible to make a geographical characterization of the protest movement. This has been done by Natalia Zubarevich, the director of the regional program of the Independent Institute of Social Policy in Moscow. It is always said that Russia is composed of 84 regions. But organised by population, Zubarevich distinguishes four regions in Russia.

1. The first Russia consists of post-industrial cities, that means cities with a big student population, other intelligentsia and modern economic sectors. Of course cities in this part of Russia are Moscow and St. Petersburg, but also cities like Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Tyumen, Tomsk, Krasnodar, Rostov and Saransk. In these cities the supporters of the protest movement are living. More than 30 percent of the population lives in this Russia number one with cities over 500,000 inhabitants. Here you can find the ´angry citizens´.
2. The second Russia consists of middle sized or smaller company towns. Economically, these cities are dependent on help from the state. Here you can find the staunchest supporters of the Putin regime. Cities such as Nizhny Tagil in the Urals or Togliatti on the border of the Wolga. More than 25 percent of the Russians lives in this Russia number two. So, when the popualtion of these cities is becoming angry because of social-economic complaints, the regime of Putin will be in real danger.
3. The third Russia is that of the rural and semi-urban populations. The potential protest power of this Russia seems to be minimal. Approximately 33 percent of the population is located here.
4. The fourth Russia is underdeveloped Russia in the North Caucasus and some regions in southern Siberia. Here six percent of the population lives. The problems for the authorities in these areas are religious extremism and seperatism.

So, the first Russia, that is critical about the Putin regime, is still a minority of the Russians, but the share of this Russia is growing. ´Sooner or later "first Russia" will shift the balance,´ concludes Zubarevich.

The arrest and prosecution of the Pussy Riot girls is an affair which symbolizes and intensifies the divison of the Russian society between the supporters and the opponents of the Putin regime. Furthermore, the Pussy Riot girls are both initiators and victims of this division.

Pussy Riot is a radical and anarchistic part of the new protest movement. This ventilates itself in the name of the band, the kind of music they are playing - punk - , in their motley dresses and in their concrete actions, like making sex in public by Tolokonnikova and their punk performance in the Cathedral. But also in their words. Referring to the Arab Spring and the overthrowing of the Mubarak regime in Egypt, Pussy Riot posed on the 6th of December: ´We think that we need a Tahrir on Red Square.´

With this call up, they responded to the greatest fear of the authorities, namely a popular revolution like the Arab Spring or the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004. Because of their radical deeds and statements they provoked a harsh reaction by the Putin regime.

Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova were arrested on the 3th of March, a day before the presidential elections. Most likely, the authorities wanted with their arrest to divert the attention of the protest movement and the society in general from discussions about the honesty of the elections. This also because among a part of the supporters of the protest movement the performance in the cathedral was likewise critisized because of its extremism against orthodox believers.

How unique was the perfomance of Pussy Riot in the cathedral? Not totally unique. On the 9th of December, five days after the parliamentary elections, the topless girls of the Ukrainian feminist action group Femen staged an action next to the cathedral under the title ´God, chase away the tsar.´ This action was overlooked by the Russian press.

Furthermore, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior is not only a place of religious worshipping, but also a commercial enterprise. A space in the cathedral can be hired for conferences, symposiums, gatherings, art exhibitions and celebrations. A part of this provision of services is a professional sound system that can be hired. So, playing electronic music in the cathedral is not by definition blasphemy. A cynical joke in Russia goes that the girls of Pussy Riot were arrested beacuse they didn´t pay a rent fort their performance.

The prosecution of the Pussy Riot members was at first encouraged by church leaders. Later, also the political authorities started to support the criminal punishment of the arrested Pussy Riot members, among them president Putin. Because of this, the tighter relationship between the state and the church is becoming more and more a topic in Russian society and politics.

The Russian Orthodox Church made itself a participant in the political battles in Putins Russia, and explicitly on the side of the state. As the historian Sergei Lukashevsky, director of the Sakharov Museum, stated: ´Awareness of a conflict between the religious and public spaces began only after the Pussy Riot affair.´

After their arrest the prosecution and sentencing of the Pussy Riot members became one of the focal points in the battle between the Putin regime and the new political opposition movement. From the side of the opposition this was done by actions such as:

• During all the court meetings leaders of the opposition movement attended and demonstrated outside the court buildings, among them Alexei Navalny, Garry Kasparov, Sergei Udaltsov, Yevgenia Chirikova and Ilya Yashin.
• Support for Pussy Riot was given by the art and the gay communities of Moscow. On the 31st of March a ´Bus Exhibition´, a riding exhibition of pieces of art dedicated to Pussy Riot, was organised by the Moscow art community. The most outstanding art works are the sketches of Viktoria Lomasko, who attended all the court meetings to make timely sketches.
• Public support - ´Free Pussy Riot!´ - is made by graffiti and prints on t-shirts.
• The girls of Pussy Riot received a wave of support from the West, by the most famous western pop artists and by western politicians and political organisations, who stated that the reaction of the regime was disproportianate and part of the campaign of stiffling the new opposition movement and democratization in Russia. The British art journal ArtReview put Pussy Riot on the first place of the most influential art persons in Russia. Pussy Riot was by the European Parliament nominated for the Sakharov Prize for the freedom of speech, although they dit not win the prize. Recently, they were nominated by the journal Time for the titel ´Person of the year´.

The authorities and their supporters had their own actions against Pussy Riot and its supporters, among them the following:

• A critcial three part documentary of Pussy Riot was made and broadcasted on central televison: Provocateurs. The director of the documentary, Arkadi Mamontov, calls the supporters of Pussy Riot ´liberal fascists´.
• On the 7th of October Vladimir Putin commented on the Pussy Riot verdict on central televison and stated to the presentator: ´Do you know how the name of the group must be translated into Russian? You do not dare to say this. You see, these girls are talented. They forced the whole world to pronounce this word.´
• On the 4th of October the workers collective of a chemical fertiliser factory in Togliatti invited the Pussy Riot members after the court sentence to be re-educated by them in the ´traditonial Russian values of religion, family bonds and morals´.
• In a meeting with Angela Merkel on the 16th of November Vladimir Putin accused the Pussy Riot members of anti-semitism after Merkel made critical remarks about the sentence of two years labour camp. Putin was talking about a year old action by Pussy Riot, when they used a puppet depicted as a Jew, as to say that their recent action in the Moscow cathedral by western standards should also have been condemned as a criminal act.

On the day of their conviction and sentence to two years in prison, the 17th of August, the writer Boris Akunin commented on the whole Pussy Riot affair: ´I am worried by the impression that there are two trains heading towards each other. The most worried I am is that this game is being promoted from above, supported by the authorities and by Putin. I do not know how this situation in which one part of society is stirred up againts the other - and this is Russia - will end.´

Some questions about Pussy Riot and the protest movement in Russia are:

• Will Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova be released earlier in higher appeal at the European Court of Human Rights or maybe by the authorities themselves?
• Will the Pussy Riot affair stay a focal point in the battle between the Putin regime and the opposition?
• How will the Russian population react? At the moment half of the Russians think that the prosecution of Pussy Riot was carried out objectively. Will this change in favour of the regime or the opposition?
• What will be the next event in the battle between the regime and the opposition?