Pussy Riot – Political Affect and Religious Feelings, Part 1 (Vasilina Orlova)
The following is the first of a two-part series.
On February 21, 2012 the Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot staged a performance in the Christ the Savior Cathedral, Moscow, 2012. Three members of the group were arrested, accused of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred, and sentenced to two years in prison. One member was released on probation, the others were granted amnesty after they served nearly the full sentence. The relative harmlessness of the crime in comparison to the severity of the punishment was striking.
Looking at the feminist activist group Pussy Riot and their most famous performance, I examine in this essay how political and civic activism can be read, interpreted, and practiced in the neoliberal context. I suggest that Pussy Riot is a telling story revealing the nature of Putinism as a Russian multicultural neoliberal project. By exercising state power over the female bodies of Pussy Riot protesters, the political imaginary of the Putin Modern strives not only to discipline the bodies of political activists, but also to perpetuate a patriarchal oligarchic regime maintaining a status of the second-class citizenship for women and sanctioning and condoning the genderization of those whom it deems fit.
I argue that the reason Pussy Riot’s performance generated a political affect was that they, consciously or not, worked with Russian “cultural memory.” A spiritual practice and a tradition of the Orthodox sanctity called jurodstvo underpinned their actions in the given cultural context.
The trial, in turn, evoked a specter of the show trials conducted by the Soviet state. The power dynamics at play during the performance followed by the trial, made many people co-participate by interpreting the events, articulating positions, and changing sides. The “meaning” of the action was, and still is, intensely contested.
Pussy Riot Performance and Its Political Context
On February 12, 2012, five young women masked in colorful balaclavas, short dresses and bright leggings jumped on to the ambon – an extension of the altar accessible to view for those who are present in the church – in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, Moscow. A balaclava is a mask with the holes for eyes and mouth—could be used for protection from the elements, and it is a headgear worn by military, police, race drivers, and firefighters in different countries.
Evidently it does not only protect but also conceals identity and might be used by those who perform illegal activities. Pussy Riot proclaimed anonymity as one of the principles to which they adhere. One of the Pussy Riot members had a nickname Balaclava, and colorful masks became a signature of the group image.
Turning their back to the sanctuary — the wall of icons and the golden Holy Gates — they kneeled, crossing themselves in an exaggerated gesture, and sang their “punk sermon,” which was, as told by Bernstein, “a mix of punk-rock riffs and traditional Orthodox chant.” Within less than a minute, the church security officials approached them and interrupted the performance. According to one report, says Nemtsova, Yekaterina Samitsevich “was just unpacking her guitar when security forces grabbed her and carted her away.”
That same day, Pussy Riot uploaded a video clip “Punk Sermon: Mother of God, Chase Putin Away” to YouTube (this video has since been taken down for “hate speech”). They combined the footage from their two performances: one from the Bogoyavlensky Cathedral in Yelokhovo, and the other from the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.
The performance and its video representation received significant attention. The state officials took notice and charged the group with hooliganism. Two of the Pussy Riot members, Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, were arrested on March 3, 2012. A third member, Nadezhda Samutsevich, was arrested on March 16. Two other members who participated in the performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior reportedly fled Russia in response to the charges.
The three members arrested spent six months in custody, and then received a two-year sentence. Samutsevich was freed on probation. In his customary lapidary manner, the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin commented that “the court socked them with twosie” (“sud zalepil im dvushechku”) – “twosie” being slang for “two.”
The performance, its representation, thetrial, and the sentence, sparked heated debates concerning activism and feminism. Is it blasphemy to hold a protest in a church? Was it an act of intentional sacrilege? What is parody, profanation, and satire? How secular is the secular state? What are religious feelings and political affect? Where does art end and politics begin?
Pussy Riot’s performance and incarceration presents discrepancies between the relative harmlessness of the “crime” versus the inexplicable severity of the “punishment.” Whereas the performance was considered and framed by the court as an action motivated by religious hatred, it was political.
In the political context of Russia at the time, the Pussy Riot trial was symbolic of the systematic suppression of the opposition movement. In the eyes of many representatives of the state and Orthodox officials, Pussy Riot embodied all the unruliness connected to a stream of mass protest against the fraudulent Parliamentary election and the uncontested Presidential election. These protests took place during the cold winter of 2011-2012 on the streets and squares of Moscow and several major Russian cities. Thousands of people were out for hours in below freezing temperatures.
The discontent was propelled by the Presidential elections, in which several independent candidates were not allowed to participate. They claimed that they had fulfilled all the demands of the government electoral commission, and even some of their political opponents agreed with that perspective. According to a survey, many people felt that there was no better candidate for Russian presidency than Putin.
It was not clear why the Parliamentary (Gosudarstvennaya Duma) elections caused such anger at this time, where previously they had not. According to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the previous Duma elections in 2007 were similarly unfair. Nevertheless, these previous elections did not ignite protest on such a scale.
These crowds, this movement, were surprising for many, and in response government representatives questioned it with an air of affront. The participants of the movement and its activists were largely middle-class and “bourgeois” – white-collar office workers, artists, writers, members of the intelligentsia. Activists came from different social strata – employed and unemployed, rich and homeless, unknown and famous alike. They consisted of National Bolsheviks, nationalists, anarchists and communists on one side, and representatives of labor unions, greens, liberals, libertarians, and LGBT communities on the other. These far-right and far-left wing groups normally would not form coalitions, however now they were protesting side by side as the fractions of the united opposition front in 2011-2012.
In addition, and contrary to common sense expectations, the majority of protesters were employed and “well-fed,” and allowed to voice opinions through social media. What was the source of the commotion? As anthropologists note, many observers found it spontaneous and difficult to fathom. Indeed, many social theorists struggle to explain how a social contract breaks down and discontent becomes visible enough for throngs to emerge on the streets. It is as if some kind of societal fatigue makes the “grotesque injustice” intolerable.
Lenin’s notion of “revolutionary situation” is used in Russian and Western historiography by many theorists describing the tumultuous states in a society that potentially lead to major changes in the form of government. Drawing from Lenin’s work “‘Left-Wing’ Communism,” Churchward identifies four conditions of the revolutionary situation (40):
- All classes hostile to the revolution have become fully confused and weakened through internal struggle, and the ruling classes cannot continue to rule in the old way.
- “All the vacillating, wavering, unstable, intermediate elements (the petty bourgeois democrats)” have sufficiently exposed themselves before the people and discredited themselves.
- Among the proletariat “a mass mood in favor of supporting the most determined, unreservedly bold revolutionary action against the bourgeoisie has arisen and is growing.
- The armed forces of the bourgeois regime are in an advanced stage of revolt and distintegration.
The Moscow tumult of 2011-2012 satisfied none of these conditions, and at most the situation suggested the potential for bourgeois revolution, although at the time this was not evident. Winter protests were the largest since 1990s, and people uniformly stood in solidarity against the political hegemony of the “United Russia” (i.e. the ruling party “Edinaya Rossia”). Moscow saw at least 13 major gatherings over the course of 2011-2012, and three additional protests in 2013. A number of rallies happened simultaneously in multiple cities.
On each occasion, both the organizers and police tracked the number of participants, but their final counts varied greatly. The biggest discrepancy in numbers occurred on February 4, 2012, in Moscow: Whereas the meeting’s organizers estimated the number of participants as 160,000, the police suggested that there were 36,000 people.
Social media was flooded with images of demonstrators, in small and large groups and in huge masses, and I am proud and sad to mention that the majority of my Russian friends who were active on Facebook, participated in the protests. They were out in freezing temperatures, and the unity and solidarity lived in this moment was evident in the celebratory portraits. While these protesters knew each other as friends, colleagues, coworkers, and partners, they had never met in this context, facing the unknown — the tension between calm and chaos. No one knew what was going on, at any moment a shot could be fired spilling blood, causing panic and riot.
On June 12 of that year, I participated as an observer in the peaceful rally on Pushkin Square. My friends, representatives of an oppositionist movement, and I, were late to the main gathering — all the streets were blocked by police. Red Square was closed. Trucks with police stood all the way along the trajectory of the march. Helicopters circled the crowd.
Volunteers, who had red bandages with golden letters reading “Druzhinnik” (“Vigilante”) on their sleeve, were helping the police to keep metal barriers in place. All these men along with the armed policemen exuded the feeling of calmness. They were smiling, making eye contact, talking, some of them were eating their rations (sukhpayok).
By contrast, the feeling among my friends and those who had gathered not for the first time for such a meeting, was hopelessness. The majority of virulent protests had already taken place, and there was a growing understanding that demands were not going to be met with a positive response from the government and the majority of people, and would not lead to constructive changes. By this time, the government already knew how to tackle the protests.
One of the tactics used was paradoxical and, in a sense, brilliant. They organized a series of competing “anti-Orange” and pro-Putin meetings and rallies of equal numbers. Some state workers, who participated in these rallies, were reportedly threatened with termination of their work contracts by their employees if they did not attend. It was also reported that those who did not submit to threats were indeed fired.
On June 12th, my friends and I waited in line to cross through metal detectors while the police searched protesters for guns and drugs. Women, separated from the men, went through the frame as they were searched by a young policewoman, her hair dyed black.
What immediately caught my attention were the facial expressions. Many of the protesters seemed disoriented. Their brows furrowed, eyes searched — most likely many were looking for an acquaintance in the crowd. I photographed a woman with a white ribbon in her hair — white ribbons were among the symbols of the protests.
The slogans of the gathering were non-telling and inexpressive. I did not see any “funny placards” that the protests of the winter were so famous for. Some of the slogans seemed somewhat ridiculous: “Russian means sober,” “Healthy way of living” written in an old Slavic font. “Rudeness and groveling advance. Let us stop them!” Among red communist flags and the flags of nationalists, there was a flag with Facebook’s logo. A slogan, “For the third time one is not a President” alluded to the “collective memory” (Flores, 2002), and evoked the Russian slang proverb, “If it’s only one time, one is not a faggot.”
Not everyone was moving, many remained in a static position; a girl was sitting on the parapet in a pose of Durer’s Melancholia.
“I dare you to cry out “I am pro-Putin” right now,” said my friend, Andrey, to another, Serguei. “It’s easy. I am pro-Putin!” – Serguei bellowed. “Long live the vertical! All the power to the vertical!”
People started looking at us. “Are you really pro-Putin?” a young man asked.
“I am for the vertical. I am against the horizontal,” explained Serguei.
“Well, at least someone is pro-Putin,” the young man said softly.
This exchange referenced the skepticism in certain circles of Russian society, where no one was voting for Putin. Some young people claimed on Facebook that they knew no one who was voting for Putin, and yet Putin collected the majority of votes; it was beyond explanation. In fact, the majority in Russia has never stopped supporting Putin, and Putin was methodically banning and censoring the opposition so that he would have no resistance and no serious opponent in the political arena.
Some of the protesters were very creative using their own bodies as sites for demonstration. A woman in a striped dress — suggesting the jail robe — covered her mouth with a patch. She had a painting on her elbow: a sunrise over the sea.
Poetess Alina Vitukhnovskaya joined us. She told me that she had a moment of hesitation, trying to decide whether she should go on the right side of the boulevard, where people chanted: “Putin, go away! Putin, go away!” or on the left side, where people yelled: “Russian means sober, Russian means sober.” She opted for going straight through the lawn.
She said: “They stopped yelling and started crying jointly: ‘Do not step on the lawn! Do not step on the lawn!’” This phrase was itself a remnant of Soviet times, when it was prohibited to walk the lawns (gazony) and many lawns were adorned with forbidding signage. The fact that “Do not step on the lawn!” united different political movements was sad and ironic. At this point, there was very little hope for a constructive outcome to the protest, for a positive change.
Many activists were arrested. My acquaintance Leonid Razvozshaev reported torture from prison. Two months later, on August 17th, three members of Pussy Riot were convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.” Samutsevich appealed her sentence and she was freed on probation, but Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova were sent to different prisons in October.
“Women Ought to Give Birth and to Love”
The answer to the question “Why has the Pussy Riot performance attracted so much attention?” is threefold. First, the performance was bright and simple. It used the expressive language of punk rock music, which is easily relatable and very vivid. Second, it addressed some of the most delicate and difficult contradictions in Russian society. Third, the prosecution and eventual punishment of the two members of the band was unequal to their transgressions and exposed major flaws in the political system.
The performance caused substantial indignation from believers. It worked with the “political unconscious.” The court tasked with evaluating the event in legal terms, appointed experts to compose a document analyzing the performance and its meaning. It proved difficult to frame the Pussy Riot performance in a comprehensive language; the emotions were rooted in the realm of the ineffable.
The song that Pussy Riot performed, starts with a phrase that is musically rendered to sound like the Orthodox chant and appeals to the Holy Virgin: “Mother of God, Holy Virgin, chase Putin away!” Then it goes as follows: “Black cassock, golden shoulder straps / All the parishioners crawl to bow / A phantom of the freedom is in heaven / Gay parade in shackles sent away to Siberia / Their main saint is the head of KGB / He leads protesters to a guarded prison / In order not to insult the Most Holy <Patriarch–V.O.> / Women ought to give birth and to love.”
The relationship of church officials and government has long been a painful theme for the church. The early Soviet years were marked by severe persecution of the believers of all religions. Priests were crucified on the doors of their churches, churches destroyed, properties seized, icons, relics, and shrines obliterated at great rate.
However, later there was a turn towards something of a collaboration between the Soviet government and the Orthodox church which is usually connected with the name of Sergius Stragorodsky, who was an Acting Patriarchal Locum Tenens (Zamestitel Patriarshego Mestoblustitelya) since 1927 and, seeking to loosen the pressure on the church and to lower the intensity of persecution, issued a Message (Poslanie), also known as Declaration, professing the loyalty of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) to the Soviet state.
Critics claim that it was against church laws “to serve” the illegitimate government. Believers of many denominations ended up in psychiatric wards as late as the 1970s.
By the end of the Soviet rule, in 1988, the one-thousand-year anniversary of the baptizing of Russia was widely celebrated. After many decades of state-sanctioned atheism, religions started to reclaim their positions, quickly growing out of the marginalized spaces. In the 1990s, the number of self-proclaimed believers increased dramatically. People believed in all kinds of things, and a lot of new-age movements of different sorts flourished across the public and private spaces.
The public figures, yesterday’s atheists, the members of Communist party included, were broadcast on TV holding candles in churches. The powerful television media, which was the primal means of propaganda which demanded from its viewers a non-critical acceptance, started showing the séances of magic healings led by charismatic leaders, religious and quasi-scientific newly anointed ‘authorities.’
The most famous of them were Anatoly Kashpirovsky and Allan Chumak, the prophets of Gorbachev’s perestroika. These two were filmed “charging water,” remedying maladies, repairing watches, raising the bedridden to their feet, and restoring the sight to blind. Families gathered around the TV-set and faithfully watched the gloomy face of Kashpirovsky, who, in a low and a very convincing voice promised miracles and performed them before your eyes. The spiritual renaissance (dukhovnoye vozrozhdenie) in Russia had begun.
The ROC played its special role in the spiritual renaissance. It took the status of a privileged, truly Russian, national, especially important and supremely authentic institution. It reluctantly acknowledged the place of Islam and Buddhism in Russia, but all other kinds of faith, such as Hinduism, for example, are largely deemed as sectarian satanical delusions.
One of my friends, a young mystic and an avid reader of Daniil Andreev and Blavatskaya, told me in horror: “I came once to the church in my neighborhood, and I saw all these books there, in a book kiosk (knizhnaya lavka), and one of them had Krishna on the cover, but the title was something along the lines: “The Net of Satan” (“Set’ Satany”). So, I turned on my heels and as long as I live I would never cross the threshold of church.”
Many church officials maintain that there has never been cooperation between priests and NKVD or KGB officials. Others believe that Soviet priests had to summarize the confessions to assigned supervisors. The attempts of the Church representatives to distance themselves from the accusations were criticized by many – former priests included – for condoning the dark moments of the past in Church affairs.
The main attitude of the ROC towards women is classically patriarchal. In a situation where the Church becomes politically important, it becomes another tool to discipline women and to affirm what Veena Das calls “gendered belonging to the nation-state.” In the ROC, it is forbidden for women to receive communion, and even, according to some priests, to enter churches and touch holy relics during menstruation.
Remarkably, despite the ROC view that child-bearing (within wedlock) plays a central role in a woman’s life and establishes her status of respectable matron and active and humble member of a parish, the child delivery nevertheless requires a ritual of purification. A woman cannot enter a church for forty days after delivering a child. After those forty days, a special permitting prayer must be pronounced over a woman in order for her to rejoin the community. These practices perpetuate the view that women are unclean, cause dirtiness, and have suspicious bodily functions that require cleansing.
The majority of the ROC parishioners are women, who assert that this is because “(men) work more than women, are more involved in work – especially, men of intellectual labor – and do not have enough time for church.” (See an interview conducted by Yakovleva).
“Shit, shit, shit of the Lord,” (sran’ Gospodnya) Pussy Riot sings. “Mother of God, Holy Virgin, become a feminist.” It goes as follows: “The Church’s praise of rotten leaders / A procession of black limousines / A preacher goes to your school / Go to the classroom – bring him money! / Patriarch Gunday believes in Putin / Might as well, bitch, believe in God / The Virgin’s Belt is no substitute for rallies – / Virgin Mary protests with us!”
The line “go to the classroom— bring him money” refers to a relatively recent introduction of the obligatory “religious enlightenment” classes in secular schools. Without doubt, to address a masculine figure in power as “bitch” is extremely potent, because within the patriarchal society there are no insults like the ones which feminize and thus doubly humiliate male subjects.
The vocabulary and the harsh rhetoric are not unusual for punk music, but the Pussy Riot music itself belongs to cross-genre experimentation. Sometimes a particular genre of music becomes a vehicle for certain ideas, encoding a powerful political message, as in the case of Sepultura in post-dictatorial Brazil, and becomes committed to “narratives organized aroundtropes of radicalization (associated with operations on volume, tempo and pitch as well as with darkened iconography, stripped-down performance and anguished, aggressive or apocalyptic lyrics) and tropes of negation” (332).
Pussy Riot’s music does possess all of these features, which are characteristics of heavy metal, but instead it has a powerful positive charge, and is full of hope. Clark writes that they share the punk movement’s commitment to “anarchist, egalitarian principles that celebrate and practice an antihierarchical social order including one that prohibits a hierarchy of gender” (22-23). The very title of the band alludes to the “Riot grrrl” feminist movement within punk subculture, the representatives of which associate themselves with third-wave feminism and address rape, social inequality, patriarchy, and gender problems in their creative work.
The music of Pussy Riot is experimental, intentionally noisy. It also reminds one of the semi-underground music of the late Soviet–early post-Soviet period: Yegor Letov, Yanka Dyagileva, and others. Often, their songs bear the features of wild agitation, recorded occasionally, with a noticeable amount of noise, addressing social tensions. Their lyrics are nihilistic and desperate, a call for change.
The juxtaposition of Orthodox themes and punk-rock tradition in Pussy Riot’s video and action has an ironic tint. For several decades one of the priorities of the ROC’s votserkovlenie, literally “inchurcheration,” was Russian rock-music circles and young people who self-identified as belonging to one of its many subcultures. Yet when “Russian rock” itself went to a church to deliver its heated message, their cry ignited indignation and a strong desire to revenge.
It seems quite obvious that the lyrics and the music greatly contributed to the tension, but the fact that the performance happened in one of the celebrated Orthodox cathedrals in Moscow was the reason it met with strong emotions. There was an extended discussion that the ambon should not be stepped onto by anyone other than the priest. Men can step onto the altar if the priest blesses them to do so, but it is explicitly forbidden for women.
As Catherine Schuler attests, during the trial this fact received a special attention: “Several prosecution witnesses were particularly dismayed that women had violated a sacred space reserved exclusively for men. All claimed that they neither heard nor saw anything political in Pussy Riot’s music, words, and gestures. This was, they said, pure, premeditated, malicious blasphemy (koshchunstvo)”. Ambon is the place from which the priest delivers his sermon at the end of the liturgy, and the daikon reads ektenia (litany), and so Pussy Riot’s presence in this space metaphorically positioned them as priests.
The chain of reactions, diatribes, denunciations, and, on occasion, calls for the severest of responses from officials and high-rank clergy co-authored the event. “Bauman (26) and Hymes have suggested that audience’s evaluation of the communicative competence of performers forms a crucial dimension of performance,” Bauman and Briggs note (66). This is especially true in the cases when performance is read as an utterance in a political discourse.
In this case, I would suggest, it is not only the text that has illocutionary force, but the 9 place, the gesture, the tone, the music, all is saturated with meaning. Since Barthes’s and Foucault’s reading of authorship, 1967 and 1969 respectively, the understanding that meaning is not a set entity, but a constantly negotiated, contested space, is embedded in cultural practices.
Vasilina Orlova is currently working on her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. She holds a doctorate in philosophy from Moscow State University (2013). She has published a number of books of prose and poetry in Russian. Her prose and poetry has appeared in prominent Russian literary journals such as Noviy Mir, Druzhba Narodov, and Oktyabr. She has received several Russian literary awards She is the author of Contemporary Bestiary (Gutenberg, 2014) and Holy Robots (Gutenberg, 2017).
Tagged with: Alina Vitukhnovskaya, Catherine Schuler, KGB, Organization for Security and Co-operaiton, Pussy Riot, Russia, Sergius Stragorodsky, Soviet Union, Vladmir Lenin, Vladmir Putin