Amnesty protesters outside the Russian embassy in London, 16/8/12
So that’s that, then. Pussy Riot are going to prison for two years.
Despite an enormous outcry around the world, a court has convicted the women on a charge of “premeditated hooliganism performed by an organised group of people motivated by religious hatred or hostility”.
And all for a short political protest in a cathedral in Moscow. No-one was hurt. No threats were made. The women left when security staff intervened. But still, the authorities felt moved to go after them, detain them for five months, put them through a high-profile trial and then pack them off to a labour colony.
Unbelievable.
The women should never have been arrested in the first place, they should never have been charged and this disgraceful affair should certainly never have gone to court. The trial itself was a deeply dubious business. To adapt one of Woody Allen’s best lines, “The trial was a travesty. It was a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.”
The trial always looked suspiciously politically-motivated, an attempt to punish a bunch of “transgressors” who’d mocked and criticised the two bastions of Russian power - the Kremlin and the church.
The Pussy Riot “punk prayer” in Christ the Saviour Cathedral combined the scathing and scatological (“Holy shit, shit, Lord’s shit! / Holy shit, shit, Lord’s shit”) with the pointedly political. The Virgin Mary was urged to become a feminist and drive Vladimir Putin out. The punk prayer version of Russia is one where the Orthodox Church and a repressive state are shown to be in cahoots (“Black robes, golden epaulettes”).
Pussy Riot’s disdainful jibes at Putin and the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church (Kirill I, Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyayev) seem to have prompted the judicial overreaction of a full-blown trial. Kirill himself has said the women were “doing the work of Satan” and called for them to be punished (he’s also on record praising Putin’s time in government as “a miracle of God”).
So, here we are. Three women heading to jail, for what? Their “crime” seems to have been no more than daring to voice their opposition to the status quo in Russia (doubtless their situationist flamboyance and general in-yer-face-ness has also incensed some powerful people in Russia). But having an opinion and expressing it is not a crime. Offending people is not a crime. Ipso facto - Pussy Riot are not criminals.
Well over 100,000 people have already supported Amnesty’s campaign for the release of Maria Alyokhin, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Ekaterina Samoutsevitch, and the international campaign for the release of these prisoners of conscience is now surely set to grow stronger still.
A final thought. Instead of hounding these three women could the Russian authorities - prosecutors, police, politicians - not have found something better to do with their time? For instance, could they not instead have re-doubled their efforts to solve the murders of dozens of journalists and human rights activists in Russia in recent years? Or how about scrapping laws that impose new restrictions on the activities of NGOs? Or maybe they could have set about facilitating (not blocking) Gay Pride events in Russia? Or perhaps they might have seen fit to allow “Article 31” protesters to freely demonstrate on the 31st of each month if they so wished?
In fact, almost anything would have been better than this very disturbing attempt to throttle free expression in modern Russia.
(Feel free to leave a message expressing your support for the three women via this Amnesty link).
9 months ago
The feminist credentials of VOINA are non-existent. The UK has passed laws banning extreme pornography, and that would certainly include sex films with animals.