Pussy Riot Was Carefully Calibrated for Protest - NYTimes.com
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Pussy Riot Was Carefully Calibrated for Protest
Marcus Brandt/European Pressphoto Agency
Protesters in Hamburg, Germany, participating in a demonstration for Pussy Riot on the day of sentencing.
By MELENA RYZIK
Published: August 22, 2012
DEPENDING on your taste, punk died in 1979, or maybe 1994, or
whenever studded leather cuffs became a must-have mall-girl
accessory. Now, suddenly, punk has been resurrected, stitched
together anew in the form of the well-accessorized Russian women
who call themselves Pussy Riot.
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Enlarge This Image
The name helps. It’s its own form of
PRINT
culture jam, a savvy reference to
REPRINTS
feminist and musical history — riot
grrrl and Susie Bright, as well as a
wink to women’s appropriation of sexual agency and
bodily power. Madonna has worn Pussy Riot’s name on
her bare skin, a statement both of her support and of her
own rebelliousness. (She still knows how to flaunt it.) The
inevitable aesthetic judgment has found these girls, as
they sometimes refer to themselves, on the right side of
cool. For women identified with rock ’n’ roll — and for
fans, especially in the West — Pussy Riot is expertly
constructed, perfectly charged. Plus, it’s fun to say —
unless you’re in American network news, which has been
demurely referring to the group as an all-female punk
band.
But for artists and activists around the world the recent
travails of Pussy Riot, founded in 2011, have become a
cause célèbre. When its members, Maria Alyokhina,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/arts/music/pussy-riot-was-carefully-calibrated-for-protest.html[12/3/12 7:51:33 PM]
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Pussy Riot Was Carefully Calibrated for Protest - NYTimes.com
Natalia Kolesnikova/Agence France -Presse —
Getty Images
From left, Yekaterina Samutsevich,
Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda
Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot at their
sentencing on Aug. 17.
Enlarge This Image
Oleg Sharan/Associated Press
Madonna wearing Pussy Riot’s name
on her back as a statement of
support.
Enlarge This Image
Mary Altaffer/Associated Press
A protest in Times Square.
Enlarge This Image
Yekaterina Samutsevich and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova,
were sentenced on Aug. 17 to two years each in a prison
camp for staging a flash protest against President Vladimir
V. Putin in Moscow’s main Orthodox cathedral in
February, it served as another rallying point, at a time
when many are concerned with government malfeasance,
economic and social equality, and, not incidentally,
women’s rights. The ladies of Pussy Riot are of-themoment renegades.
That the group is so digestible to Western audiences has
been much noted. Yes, the choppy performance that got
its members arrested could have just as easily taken place
at an undergrad art school, where the corresponding video
might’ve been mocked for its low production value (or
turned up in a flashback episode of HBO’s “Girls”).
Instead, when it made the rounds online, it found eager
and sympathetic spectators and an instant distribution
channel aided by social media. Punk was never shy about
being amateur; DIY spread wide is its hallmark. And in a
country where public dissent is at a neophyte stage, Pussy
Riot’s “Punk Prayer,” a 40-second lip sync, only served to
highlight the discordantly severe punishment its members
received. Supporters — like the hundreds who gathered at
a reading in New York on the eve of the sentencing —
viewed the group members as unfairly judged, less
creatively shackled musicians than oppressed symbols of
heroism.
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It’s been a long time since music had the whiff of danger,
and longer still since it carried the beat of political change,
at least in democracies. Hardly anyone would’ve expected
that to come out of Russia, where both the songcraft and
the
messaging seem outdated, vestiges of retro power-pop
Sergey Ponomarev/Associated Press
and a barely concealed propaganda machine. The women
The band trying to perform in Moscow
in February.
of Pussy Riot took those tools and used them for their
own sophisticated means. Immediately after their
conviction on charges of hooliganism based on religious hatred — a more punk
indictment could scarcely be invented — Pussy Riot, though only nominally a band,
released its first single. Titled, in translation, “Putin Lights Up the Fires,” it’s defiance set
to bracing guitars and drum kicks. You can’t seal us in a box, the women shout in a
singsong as they demand more jail time. The chorus announces that the country is
taking to the streets, bidding farewell to the regime, driven by a “feminist wedge.” A few
acolytes, complete with balaclavas, performed it in the courthouse during the
sentencing. It’s pure agitprop, and it’s incredibly catchy.
Paul McCartney, Bjork, Peter Gabriel and many other performers have expressed
solidarity, as has Amnesty International; Kathleen Hanna, a founder of riot grrrl, saw in
Pussy Riot the movement’s future. Although called a punk band on TV, it’s not quite
right to consider Pussy Riot as musicians yet. Instead, these women belong squarely with
art provocateurs and thinkers like Judith Butler (whose pioneering feminist influence
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/arts/music/pussy-riot-was-carefully-calibrated-for-protest.html[12/3/12 7:51:33 PM]
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Pussy Riot Was Carefully Calibrated for Protest - NYTimes.com
they acknowledged) and Guerrilla Girls, the anonymous rabble-rousers who took on the
sexist art establishment only to be welcomed into it (now part of the permanent
collection in the Museum of the Modern Art). Pussy Riot’s unapologetic court statements
revealed an intellectual and philosophical rigor, and its earlier efforts with the art group
Voina offered even more brazen forms of dissent.
“Pussy Riot are our kind of girls: feminist activists in masks making trouble,” Kathe
Kollwitz and Frida Kahlo, pseudonymous Guerrilla Girls, wrote in an e-mail. “But,” they
added, “we live in a very different culture where art is not as dangerous, and we can
pretty much do what we want.”
The Russian response to Ms. Alyokhina, 24; Ms. Samutsevich, 30; and Ms.
Tolokonnikova, 23, has been mixed at best. Russians are generally deeply distrustful of
feminism, even though Russian women are no shrinking violets.
Yet the stoicism of Ms. Samutsevich, Ms. Alyokhina and Ms. Tolokonnikova — the latter
two, we are frequently reminded, the mothers of young children — has made a deep
impact in both Russia and the West. Their symbolism as radicals — Ms. Tolokonnikova
with her fist raised as she was led out of the courtroom — has been so successful in the
West that there is now debate not about whether to support them but on what grounds:
as social agitators, or broad critics of the Kremlin. For its part the group — along with
an unofficial spokesman in Pyotr Verzilov, Ms. Tolokonnikova’s husband — has made its
ambitions plain: revolution.
“One really inspiring thing about Pussy Riot is that they always make it clear that their
actions are political and feminist,” the Guerrilla Girls wrote. “The world needs more
feminist masked avengers. We urge everyone to make trouble, each in her own way.”
That message was not lost on Aug. 17, when thousands around the world protested the
two-year sentences. A lawyer for the women, Nikolai Polozov, said they would appeal,
though he noted they would not ask Mr. Putin for a pardon. “Literally this is what they
said: ‘Let them go to hell with their pardon,’ ” he told Agence France-Presse of his
clients.
Ms. Tolokonnikova and Mr. Verzilov’s 4-year-old daughter has been making plans to
bust her mother out of jail. “She draws diagrams showing how we can go about doing
this with bulldozers and buses, first by tearing down the prison walls and then by
breaking open the cage,” he told the German publication Der Spiegel.
In New York, where, as in many other cities, people were arrested as they expressed
their solidarity with Pussy Riot. Marian, a 12-year-old soon to enter eighth grade, came
to the demonstration in Times Square from her home in Queens. She held a neon
drawing of a balaclava, having been warned that wearing one might get her in trouble.
“It’s cruel — they’re in jail for two years, and they just spoke their minds; I’m here to
support them,” said Marian, whose parents did not want her last name used. She wore a
flowered dress and silver Doc Martens, explaining eagerly that she considered herself a
riot grrrl. “It was a thing in the ’90s,” she offered, adding that she began to think of
herself as a feminist at the age of 10, learning about it from her mother, Christine.
“Mostly by example,” Christine said. Marian, the daughter of a Russian father, read
about Pussy Riot online, absorbing its videos and ethos.
“The fact that they’re not apologizing for what they did is really inspiring to me,” she
said. She looked around the sparsely attended protest. “I feel like if people did this
more,” she said, “women would be more respected.”
A version of this article appeared in print on August 26, 2012, on page AR1 of the New York edition with the headline:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/arts/music/pussy-riot-was-carefully-calibrated-for-protest.html[12/3/12 7:51:33 PM]
Pussy Riot Was Carefully Calibrated for Protest - NYTimes.com
Carefully Calibrated For Protest.
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