Just before taking off for Sochi and Vladimir Putin’s Olympiad, I stayed up late reading a remarkable new book that begins with a shiver: “Here is what I was trying to figure out: how a miracle happens. A great work of art—something that makes people pay attention, return to the work again and again, and reëxamine their assumptions, something that infuriates, hurts, and confronts—a great work of art is always a miracle.”
The author is Masha Gessen, one of the most important activists and journalists Russia has known in a generation, and the work of art she is referring to is a “punk prayer,” a fleeting political performance piece that took place on February 21, 2012, when five young women, dressed in colorful shifts, tights, and balaclavas entered the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, in Moscow, and began singing—no less frenetically than Patti Smith or Johnny Rotten in their time—“Virgin Mary, Mother of God, chase Putin out/Chase Putin out, chase Putin out.” They sang their protest against Kirill, the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, calling him a suka, or bitch, and sang the refrain “Holy *****” as a way of denouncing the closeness of the Putin government and the Church. The urgent, breakneck tune, the women of Pussy Riot said, was based on Rachmaninoff’s version of “Ave Maria.” The Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church soon declared the performance “blasphemy”—“The Devil has laughed at all of us!” he said—and, after a flagrantly unjust trial, three members of the group, Nadezhda (Nadya) Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina (Katya) Samutsevich, and Maria (Masha) Alekhina, were convicted and imprisoned. Putin, for his part, declared that Pussy Riot had “undermined the moral foundations” of Russia.
After finishing Gessen’s disquieting, moving, and closely reported book, “Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot,” I got in touch with Tolokonnikova and Alekhina, who were just released from Russian prison colonies after nearly two years—part of Putin’s pre-Olympic amnesties, which are clearly intended to tamp down criticism from human-rights organizations and foreign governments. They will appear onstage at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, on February 5th, with Madonna, the Flaming Lips, Imagine Dragons, and Lauryn Hill, at a benefit concert for Amnesty International. They will not perform their music, but they will have things to say.
“For Putin, the Olympic Games are an attempt to inflate the inflatable duck of a national idea, as he sees it,” Tolokonnikova told me. “In Russia today, there are no real politics, no real discussion of views, and meanwhile the government tries to substitute for this with hollow forms of a national idea—with the Church, with sports and the Olympics.”
“These Olympic Games are central to the meaning of his life—they are as important to him as anything he has done,” Alekhina said. “For us, it is important from an entirely different point of view. People need to note the corruption involved in building Sochi for the Games; they should notice the demolitions of buildings.”
Tolokonnikova and Alekhina said they thought that Putin, despite managing to suppress the wave of anti-government protests that erupted in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia two years ago, is weaker than he seems to the outside world. Even though they are now traveling in Europe and the United States, they said that they had no intention of emigrating or backing off; they plan to remain in Russia and concentrate their efforts on human-rights issues, particularly the plight of prisoners in Russian jails and prison colonies.
Gessen, a longtime spokesperson for L.G.B.T issues in Russia, spent many days with members of Pussy Riot to report her book, and some of the passages concentrate on Tolokonnikova and Alekhina’s prison experiences. In interviews and long e-mail exchanges, the Pussy Riot prisoners described the puny dimensions of their cells, their hunger strikes, the abuse, the cold (“the windows are caulked with bread crumbs”), the disgusting food, the invasive medical checkups. “In Soviet times, political prisoners were usually kept together in special cells or camps, but that is no longer the case,” Alekhina told me. “We were with women who were convicted for common criminal cases, selling drugs or murdering partners or husbands who had beaten them for many years in a row.”
Tolokonnikova and Alekhina, who are in their mid-twenties, quote and live by a vast library of musical, literary, and political influences: punk bands like Bikini Kill, Cockney Rejects, and Sham 69; the Riot Grrrl movement; the performance artist Karen Finley; feminist theorists such as Judith Butler, Kate Millet, and Shulamith Firestone; and the entire parade of Soviet-era dissidents: Vladimir Bukovsky, Andrei Sinyavsky, Joseph Brodsky, Irina Ratushinskaya, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. One of their performance-protests took place at Lobnoye Mesto—a platform on Red Square where Ivan the Terrible was said to speak in the fifteen-thirties, and where a handful of dissidents appeared, in 1968, to unfurl a banner in protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The members of Pussy Riot, compared to the mature intellectual voices of the Soviet dissident movement, are, at times, an inconsistent blend of fury, leftist rhetoric, and academic quotations, but that does nothing to diminish their astonishing courage, their poised endurance, and their refusal to withdraw and go silent.
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