Posted on August 18, 2012 - by Venik
Pussy Riot: It took a bunch of bright, sassy women in colourful balaclavas to blow the lid off Putin’s Russia
What Pussy Riot have done is show up the machinery of the state for what it is: scary, violent, punitive and male
There aren’t many revolutions that have been started by wearing colourful dresses and playing loud music, but Pussy Riot are not most revolutionaries.
For a start, they’re women. Or devushki, as the Russians call them – “girls”. And for seconds, they’re not hardened activists or Machiavellian politicos; they’re just a bunch of highly-educated, articulate young women who possess perhaps the greatest political weapon of all: the uncorrupted idealism of youth.
Three weeks ago, I met three (unimprisoned) members of the group on the eve of the trial opening. While they talked interestingly about all sorts of things – the church, the state, feminism, art – what struck me above and beyond anything else was simply how funny they were, how charming, how – I can’t think of any other way of saying this – how nice they were.
It’s a terrible word, “nice”, particularly when used about women, and most especially when used about women with strong, committed ideals on a mission to provoke political change, but it’s also a self-evident and inescapable fact about them. The three I met – Squirrel, Sparrow and Balaclava – were lovely, sweet-natured, bright young things who just didn’t see why they shouldn’t have a voice. Or say what they thought. Or engage the authorities in a debate.
They didn’t have any beef with religion. They simply didn’t think the church should be telling people how to vote. They came across as natural democrats who believed in decency and fair play and the right to free expression, who just happened to find themselves living in a one-party state where none of those things applies.
But then that’s the thing about Moscow. It looks like a western, European city. It has Starbucks and Ikea and Cosmo and GQ. And for the last two decades its citizens have played along with the idea that it is.
But what Pussy Riot has done, so brilliantly and intuitively, is to expose that as a lie. In the end, it wasn’t a politician who stood up to Putin and exposed the great moral bankruptcy at the heart of his regime; it was a bunch of young women in bright dresses and colourful balaclavas.
What they have done so brilliantly is to show up the machinery of the Russian state for what it is: scary, violent, punitive and male.
Pussy Riot – or the “uprising of the vagina”, as it’s sometimes translated into Russian – has blown this apart, not with bombs or AK47s but with playfulness, humour and colour-coordinated outfits.
There’s an undeniably female sensibility to their brand of direct action. Their balaclavas aren’t the type the FSB wear when rounding up Chechen rebels; they’re the type that look like they’ve been knitted by their grannies. Sparrow told me at length how “kindness” was a very important part of their work.
Pussy Riot are currently the coolest band on the planet. They’ve achieved the kind of shock and awe that the Sex Pistols could only dream of.
But don’t underestimate their bravery. The members of Pussy Riot whom I met, who put their balaclavas and colourful dresses in their bags when they go out to work or university, “like Batman”, were aware that bad things happen to people who dare to stand out in Putin’s Russia. Journalists die. Opposition politicians are beaten up. It’s no coincidence that Tolokonnikova, Alekhina, Samutsevich – Nadia, Masha and Katia – laughed and joked as they were sentenced on Friday. The trial was a joke.
They’re now going to pay the price. Russian women’s prisons are even harsher than the male ones. The women have been depicted on state television as evil satanists and their lawyers fear for their safety. It’s unlikely they’ll stay in Moscow; like Khodorkovsky, they’ll probably be shipped off to a far-off prison in Siberia away from family and friends, from their young children. It’s not a joke. It’s a brutal, nasty place, Putin’s Russia. And because of Pussy Riot, we all now know that now.
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