Posted on August 18, 2012 - by Venik
Russia: Putin must show clemency to Pussy Riot | Observer editorial
The Russian president will appear a tyrant if he persists in the persecution of free speech
To understand the nature of what really occurred when three young women were sentenced to two years in a penal colony for “hooliganism” after performing an anti-Putin song in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour cathedral, one need only examine the verdict. For the very language of authoritarian regimes, twisted to political ends, is often one of the best clues.
If it were not for the fact that what took place in Moscow on Friday shames Russia internationally, condemning three artists to a labour camp for a 40-second performance, the shouted-out sentencing statement would be darkly comic.
Judge Marina Syrova declared in monotone how Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Ekaterina Samutsevich and Maria Alyokhina, two of them mothers, conspired to wear clothing that was an offence against church rules, “colluded” to produce a guitar and amplifier and “demonstratively and cynically” defied “the Orthodox world… devaluing centuries of revered and protected dogmas”. In all this, the world learned from the judge, the women’s “religious hatred” was motivated “by way of them being feminists who consider men and women to be equal”.
Perhaps most ridiculous of all was the cod psychology deployed to damn the women, asserting that the defendants “suffered from mixed personality disorder displayed by their active position in life”.
While it is entirely possible that some members of the Orthodox church were offended by Pussy Riot’s Punk Prayer, and indeed it does seem to be the case that approval for their actions has been low in wider Russian society, the principle of free speech is not about offence or public approval.
It is defined by the notion, as Evelyn Beatrice Hall framed it in her biography of Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
The reality is that, under 13 years of Vladimir Putin, free speech has gradually been eroded.
While some criticism of officialdom is permitted, Putin and his circle have cracked down on attacks aimed at him directly or over allegations of corruption and criminality among those close to him.
Others who have dared to offer criticism, as Padraig Reidy of Index on Censorship pointed out in the immediate aftermath of the verdict, have found themselves similarly pursued, among them the former business magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky, currently serving a long jail sentence for tax fraud.
Journalists, too, have been threatened, dismissed from their jobs and sometimes killed. Next up to be given the treatment is Alexei Navalny, a blogger and opposition figure, who faces charges of embezzlement.
Despite this policy of persecuting critics, the pursuit of the three members of Pussy Riot, who absurdly spent five months in custody even before the trial, is more than usually worrying, not least because of the strong evidence that shows how Putin, judiciary and church have formed an alliance to ensure the women’s conviction.
Indeed, after the performance in the cathedral, it was Putin himself who poured petrol on the flames by calling for action against their blasphemy.
If all of this is has the potential to damage Putin in the long run, it is because his autocratic state has been taunted into a gross overreaction that has made the president in particular look fearful and foolish. This is a man, lest we forget, who has made much of his macho credentials, being photographed bare-chested on horseback with a rifle, riding a motorbike flying a Russian flag at a biker festival and darting a tiger.
Indeed, the first evidence that Putin and the church might already be wavering emerged yesterday as two top clerics in the Orthodox church appeared on TV to say the church had forgiven the group. One of the clerics, Tikhon Shevkunov, is widely believed to be Putin’s spiritual counsellor.
The persecution of Pussy Riot, however clumsy and ridiculous, is sinister because it represents simply the latest assault by Putin and his cronies on a Russian state he has all but stolen through a series of transparent moves.
Not least among those was the cynical presidential job swap he arranged with his prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, to keep the seat warm for him until he could run again in elections marked, say the opposition, by widespread fraud.
And as Oleg Kashin, a journalist on Kommersant argued in yesterday’s Guardian, the Pussy Riot prosecution has not been an aberration but part of a very calculated policy of setting the “simple people”, who Putin believes support him, against the “creative class” who he believes have supplied most of the protesters who took to the streets in December demanding free and fair elections.
It has been part and parcel of a longer-term campaign by Putin and those close to him to undermine democracy at all levels and expand control by the government over ever-larger parts of Russian life.
Inevitably, perhaps, given the anger provoked in the west by Russia’s contribution to the worsening bloodshed in Syria through its support of the Assad dictatorship, governments have seized on the Pussy Riot verdict as yet another example of Russia’s trajectory under Putin towards a harsh and uncompromising place where dissenting views increasingly are punished.
If Putin has miscalculated in this case it is because, unlike in his pursuit of Khodorkovsky, an ambiguous figure, the issues around Pussy Riot are so clear cut. Even before the verdict, he was challenged about the case, in meetings with other leaders, including David Cameron, during the London Olympics. That pressure is only likely to grow, becoming a source of irritation for a man who likes to see himself as “handshakeable” when he meets fellow leaders.
Which means that Putin has a simple option – to show clemency and issue a pardon – which is what natural justice demands. Inaction would confirm, as Malcolm Rifkind, former British foreign secretary, told this paper yesterday, that Russia is in danger of becoming a “neanderthal” state.
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