Posted on August 18, 2012 - by Venik
Pussy Riot trial gives Russia ‘the image of a medieval dictatorship’
Even some of Putin’s supporters are aghast at the penal term handed out to the feminist punks. Amid a global storm of protest, signs have emerged that they might be released early – but a deep national rift remains
A storm of criticism against Russia was unleashed in western capitals and by human rights groups following the harsh sentencing of three members of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot for protesting against the government in a Moscow cathedral.
The US state department said it was concerned by the ruling and urged the Kremlin to review the case. Alastair Burt, a British junior foreign minister, said the verdict “calls into question Russia’s commitment to protect… fundamental rights and freedoms”.
Three members of the punk collective – Maria Alyokhina, 24, Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22 – were sentenced to serve two years in a penal colony on Friday after being found guilty of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”. A Moscow judge rejected the defence’s argument that the band’s performance of an anti-Vladimir Putin “punk prayer” was a form of political protest and found that it was motivated by hatred for Russian Orthodoxy.
Amnesty International called the verdict a “travesty”. “[It] shows that the Russian authorities will stop at no end to suppress dissent and stifle civil society,” Michelle Ringuette, of Amnesty, said in a statement.
“Each step in the case has been an affront to human rights,” she said, calling the verdict “a bitter blow to freedom in Russia”.
Criticism inside Russia was also widespread. Alexey Kudrin, a former finance minister who remains a close ally of Putin, said: “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.”
Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, another member of the country’s minority liberal elite, also attacked the verdict, calling it a “strategic error that terribly damages the authority of the justice system”. He voiced the widespread belief that the court case was politically orchestrated: “We don’t know who took the final decision – the Kremlin, the patriarch? Probably not the court itself.”
Opposition activists have accused Putin of orchestrating the campaign against Pussy Riot. The trio were arrested after a brief performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour of a song calling for the Virgin Mary to “chase Putin out”. The band formed in response to Putin’s decision to return to the presidency, and have gone from being a radical fringe group to becoming the figureheads of a protest movement numbering tens of thousands.
The case against Pussy Riot was widely seen as serving as a warning to other protesters, as well as a means of appealing to Putin’s deeply conservative base. A poll released on Friday by the Levada Centre, an independent pollster, found that 44% of Russians believed the case against the band was conducted in a just manner. Most of those polled also believed the case was initiated by groups linked to the Russian Orthodox church.
In a sign that the women might be released early in a bid to ease tensions and boost Russia’s international image, the church released a statement late on Friday calling on the authorities to show mercy.
“Without putting the correctness of the court’s decision into any doubt, we call on the state authorities to show mercy to the convicts, within the framework of the law, in the hope that they will refrain from repeating blasphemous actions,” the statement said.
Andrei Isayev, a high-ranking member of the ruling United Russia party, also spoke out against the verdict. “The verdict is harsh. The president still might take a decision. But nonetheless this verdict which, probably, will be taken negatively by some of our liberal intelligentsia, will be taken as just by a significant number of people.”
Lawyers for the Pussy Riot trio have said they will appeal. A request for a pardon would require an admission of guilt, which the women have said they will not give.
Even some of Putin’s loudest supporters called the verdict a mistake. Tina Kandelaki, a prominent media personality and Putin cheerleader, called the verdict and sentence “information suicide” and “wrong at its very roots”.
“For some reason, from the very beginning, Putin’s advisers gave the president a new ‘Khodorkovsky’,” she said, referring to jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose arrest in 2003 signalled Putin’s willingness to jail political critics, say critics.
“The millions of dollars of taxpayer money spent in the last few years on fixing the image of our country abroad have been thrown to the wind,” she said. “Our image in the eyes of the world is getting closer to a medieval dictatorship, although in reality we are not that.”
The Pussy Riot case became a global phenomenon after stars including Madonna, Björk, Stephen Fry and Sir Paul McCartney spoke out in support of the women.
The case has deepened the rift that emerged in Russian society following the unexpected appearance of a mass protest movement against Putin’s return to the presidency. Some in the opposition movement gave dire predictions of what lay ahead.
Referring to the performance art collective Voina (“War”), from which Pussy Riot emerged, opposition Duma deputy Dmitry Gudkov tweeted after the verdict: “So, there was the art group War, and now there will be real war. Idiots.”
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