Punks who protested Putin: The importance of Pussy Riot to music and the left →
Three members of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in a prison colony on August 17. They were convicted of hooliganism and religious discrimination, but their real crime was to protest Russia’s iron-fisted ruler President Vladimir Putin. Belfast Telegraph columnist wrote this article on the eve of the sentencing.
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PUSSY RIOT have been accused of blasphemy, but may have saved the soul of music and even rediscovered revolution for Russia.
Feminist punks Maria Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova will tomorrow show a defiant face to the might of church and state in Moscow, and in the process, reclaim the ethic that once made punk a force for freedom.
The trial of the three women arises from the wave of protests earlier this year against the dubious re-election of Vladimir Putin as Russian president.
Pussy Riot’s distinctive intervention came on February 21 when they stepped onto the altar of the Orthodox Cathedral of Christ Savior, bowed, blessed themselves and offered a “punk prayer” in the form of a song begging the Virgin Mary to “drive Putin out” and denouncing Patriarch Kirill as someone who believed more in preferment under Putin than in the grace of God.
They have been charged with “premeditated hooliganism…motivated by religious hatred.”
Pussy Riot have widely been presented as madcap activists out to provoke, which is true enough, but far from the full story. Maria (24) is a student and a member of Greenpeace, with a young son. Yekaterina (30) is a computer programmer and gay rights campaigner. Nadezhda (22) is a student at Moscow University, married with a four-year-old daughter.
It is not certain these are the three who pranced across the altar. There’s around a dozen women in Pussy Riot. They wear balaclavas and give interviews under interchangeable interesting nicknames—“Seraphim,” “The Cat,” “Terminator,” “Blondie,” “Dagwood,” “Schumacher,” etc.
The band was involved last year in painting a huge male organ on a drawbridge across the Neva in St. Petersburg so that when the bridge was lifted, the nearby offices of the political police saw a five-meter member majestically rise.
