Russia: Cracking down on musical dissent

Even in jail, Pussy Riot remains defiant, said Miriam Elder in The Guardian (U.K.). Last month, after a “lightning-quick trial marked by procedural violations and absurdities,” three members of the punk band and activist group—Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22; Maria Alyokhina, 24; and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30—were sentenced to two years in prison for their February protest against President Vladimir Putin. The women interrupted a service in Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral to sing their protest anthem, “Mother of God, Throw Putin Out!” For that, these women, two of them mothers of young children, are to do hard labor. “The verdict shows just how scared Putin’s regime is of anyone who can undermine its legitimacy,” Samutsevich said.

The case has set Russians against one another, said Lyudmila Alexandrova in the Russian news service Tass. “The statists are against the liberals, and the Orthodox Christians are against the atheists.” Churches have been vandalized by suspected Pussy Riot supporters, while religious activists have attacked people wearing Pussy Riot T-shirts and disrupted a play about the trial. “The net effect is intolerance and the mutual fanning of enmity.” But that’s just among a small subset of Russians, said Anna Arutunyan in the Moscow Rossiyskaya Gazeta. More than 80 percent of Russians paid very little attention to the case, and many who did follow the trial believe the women got what they deserved for defiling a sacred space.

The band is, in fact, far more radical than its Western champions realize, said Anatoly Karlin in AlJazeera.net. The lyrics Pussy Riot sang in church were extremely profane, “laced with scatological references,” and sneeringly mocking of Christian believers. The band grew out of the Voina performance-art group, one of whose members was filmed in a supermarket in 2010 stuffing an entire frozen chicken into her vagina, “in front of dozens of slack-jawed onlookers.” Tolokonnikova herself participated in a public orgy when she was nine months pregnant. Such acts may be politically motivated, but they are also illegal.

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That distinction is lost on international observers, said Yelena Chernenko in the Moscow Kommersant. The West sees the Pussy Riot trial as “a litmus test for Russia’s democracy—and nobody seems to be happy with the test results.” Throughout the West, polls show that approval of Russia has fallen dramatically over the past year. Not only human rights groups but also European and American politicians have called Russia’s treatment of the group harsh and politically motivated. It’s about time, said Alexander Golts in The Moscow Times. The West is finally waking up to how authoritarian and repressive Putin really is. If he can over-react like this to an insult by a girl group, he could “show similar radicalism” and unpredictability in military issues as well. “The Pussy Riot case suggests that Putin is prepared to do absolutely anything to remain in power.”