Pussy Riot v. Putin: A Front Row Seat at a Russian Dark Comedy
Though Pussy Riot's goal was to challenge Russian society through performance art, they were soon to discover that Putin's state insisted on imposing its own distinct political aesthetic. "Of course, the indictment came down on Forgiveness Sunday," Petr Verzilov said, referring to the fact that the criminal charge coincided with the day that Russian Orthodox believers ask each other's forgiveness before the beginning of Lent. "The people in the Kremlin are obviously given to small acts of theatricality."
THIS WAS PERFECTLY clear on the first day of the trial, which kicked off with statements from the defendants, read out by their lawyers. The young women, who sat in a cage of bulletproof glass (known colloquially as "the aquarium") apologized to the Orthodox believers they had offended; Tolokonnikova called it "an ethical mistake." Alyokhina, herself an Orthodox believer, apologized but also expressed her dismay at the lack of Christian forgiveness. "I thought the Church loved all its children," she said in her written statement. "But it turns out it only loves those children who love Putin."
And that's where the loftiness ended and reality began to disintegrate. The judge overruled the defense's motion to call any of its thirty five witnesses at the trial: the reason given was that it was too early, but she ended up rejecting the motion again and again throughout the proceedings. The prosecutor began to mutter his way through the indictment, using phrases like "imitating the Gates of Heaven" and "songs of an insulting, blasphemous nature." The girls, drifting off in their aquarium, stood accused by the Russian state of being motivated by "religious hatred," of "demonstratively and cynically putting themselves in opposition to the Orthodox world" and of "trying to devalue centuries of revered and protected dogmas" and "encroaching on the rights and sovereignty of the Russian Orthodox Church." Somewhere else in there was a statement about how the young women of Pussy Riot had shaken "the spiritual foundations" of the Russian Federation, which, until that point, had given the distinct impression of being a secular state.
Readers owe it to themselves to take a moment to enjoy this entire article. I'm sure the original performance was more exciting, but this report is almost as entertaining. And for Ioffe it's better than the GOP clown show selecting a candidate -- a story that just keeps on giving.
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