The Pussy Riot scandal

It’s been 5 months now that members of the punk band Pussy Riot walked into the most important Orthodox Church in Russia, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, and performed for a few seconds whay they called a punk prayer, asking “Our Lady, chase Putin out”, and asked the Patriarch to “believe in God and not in Putin”. A video of their performance is embedded below:

Security guards quickly picked them up, it took about a minute and half all in all, and they have been detained in a Moscow prison ever since. In the trial that is starting this Monday, July 30, the three band members are facing up to 7 years prison colony, the same punishment that is usually handed out to rapists in that country. The accusations brought forward against the three women, two of them mothers of young children, are entirely bizarre. According to this report,

Leading members of the Orthodox clergy promptly condemned the Pussy Riot performance as blasphemy and sacrilege. Tellingly, the formal, supposedly secular indictment also drew on clerical language, citing “sacrilegious humiliation of the age-old principles aimed at inflicting even deeper wounds to Orthodox Christians”; “deep offense and humiliation of the religious guides of the believers”; “chaotically waving arms and legs, dancing and hopping… all with a goal to cause a negative, even more insulting resonance in the feelings and souls of the believers”; “desecrating the cathedral, and offending the feelings of believers.”

Let us see those “wounds to Orthodox Christians”, Russian justice system, show the world who exactly was harmed in the making of this performance other than Wladimir Putin’s aspirations of omnipotence. Blasphemy, seriously? A victimless crime if there ever was one. Oh, look, here’s one person who claims to have been harmed:

Two lawyers representing one of the security guards claim that their client, Vladimir Potan’kin, was so deeply emotionally wounded that he is now suffering from sleeping problems.

Sleeping problems! Well, that does it, off with their heads I say! No, this punk prayer happened just too close before Putin’s reelection, and a sacrificial lamb was needed to make it clear to Russians that modernization and openness is only ever going to go so far under the Putin regime, and that people better obey the laws and don’t take this crazy idea of democracy and modernization too far.

And who better to draw on to help to make that case than the Orthodox Christian Pope, the Patriarch Kirill, whose Church has for centuries been a defender of conservatism and anti-Western sentiment. So what this is, and why these young women are facing jail terms, is two ultra-conservative thugs conspiring to make an example of these 3 women, who dared to wear a mask in a church and speak out against the President. For all of a minute. One hand is washing the other here, the Orthodox Christian Patriarch and Putin, an alliance from hell rather than heaven, for sure. As the New Yorker article notes:

The top clergy are prominent members of the political élite, and the church and state are deeply engaged in mutually beneficial relations. Late last year, a new law handed over vast real estate to religious organizations (the Russian Orthodox church is of course the major benefactor), and Putin has promised government funding for religious schools. In return, the highest-ranking clerics have staunchly supported the government leadership and its policies.

The Russian Orthodox priesthood is, on the whole, deeply conservative, with strong xenophobic and anti-western streaks. Over the past years, the top clergy mostly kept those forces quiet, so as not to compromise the state and its modernization rhetoric. But as the government set out to quash the anti-government activists, it has found the social conservatism to be useful. The end Putin seeks is to consolidate the support of the conservative majority and neutralize the modernized ones. Polarization through aggression and xenophobia is the means. And that was the trap that caught Pussy Riot.

Well fuck Putin, and fuck the Orthodox Pope. The decent thing to do, Russian justice system, is to let those women go free, they have been in jail for way too long already. Russia relies heavily on economic ties with the West and Asia, so how about it, world leaders? How about you join public figures and artists like Sting and the Chili Peppers in demanding that Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alekhina and Ekaterina Samutsevich be freed from detention immediately, to end this shameful and embarrassing legal farce?

Those Orthodox Christian thugs, in demanding harsh punishments for the three women, are just as disgusting as the Catholic mob we get to deal with here in the West. No morality, no sense of fairness or humanity, just the desire to please the worldly authorities that have the power to help preserve their wealth and continued influence.

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