The following is Pussy Riot’s response to Dmitri Anatolyevich Medvedev’s comment that the members of the group had “achieved their goal,” during a television interview the Russian President gave on April 26, 2012, to journalists from five television networks. This response was written after the president refused to consider the evident violation of the principles of the law in the Pussy Riot case.
“Freedom is when you forget the name of the tyrant.”
—Joseph Brodsky, 1975
“Freedom is a unique feeling, which is different for each person.”
—Dmitri Anatolyevich Medvedev, April 26, 2012
Dmitri Anatolyevich!
Exactly four years ago in May 2008, a few days before your inauguration as president, members of the art group Voina [“War”] visited some police stations near Moscow to place your portrait on the wall as a newly elected president, next to the existing portrait of Putin.
Activists from the group Voina called your inauguration day “a great achievement of the Russian people,” “a victory of freedom,” and declared May 7 an important holiday—even more important than the other May holidays.
Your portrait, affixed to the prison bars of the police departments around Moscow, encapsulated the hopes of millions of Russians in 2008. Your bright image was meant to penetrate into the darkest corners of the judicial, political, and penitentiary systems of the country to confront the monstrous medieval barbarity that characterizes Russian law today.
Four years passed.
Atrocities and torture committed by your so-called police force have become increasingly systemic. [Sergei] Magnitsky, a lawyer, was executed in prison; his persecutors got a raise and were nominated for awards. [Mikhail] Khodorkovsky and [Alexander] Lebedev got another big prison term. Taisiya Osipova has been in prison already for a year and a half without any medical help; she might hope that, after your regal attention to her case, she could embrace her daughter again a year or two before her ten-year sentence is due to end.
It is touching, as you said in your interview, that you see “a lot of sense” in the fact that today, “all of these cases have become public, transparent.” Over the last four years it has become absolutely transparent that in every serious situation in which conflicting interests demand legal justice, the Russian court will take the side of the stronger party, the side of those who have never bothered to pay attention to the law.
You proudly consider yourself a practicing lawyer. However, as you have repeatedly emphasized, in reality a period of four years was not long enough to carry out the reforms that would bring Russia closer to a constitutional state. It was not enough time to educate a new judiciary or police force. Four years were not enough to wean public officials from bribes and to stop them from hating their own people. Four years were not enough to develop and implement your beloved electronic systems that were supposed to make stuffing ballot boxes impossible.
Four years: this is also the age of the children of our group’s imprisoned members—Gera and Filipp, the daughter and son of Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina, respectively. The court that you slowly and carefully reformed during the last four years has left these children without their mothers.
What is going on in the mind of our practicing lawyer as he observes (of course you have already mentioned several times that as the head of state, you are not able to influence justice before a verdict is made) how the court of our nation first refused to detain the professional sadists—the policemen who tortured and killed people using bottles of champagne—and then twice extended the detention of women who, from the point of view of the religious institution, made a prayer in church but with the wrong intonation?
As a practicing lawyer, does it not trouble you that Yekaterina Samutsevich, one of the members of Pussy Riot, is being held in the same prison cell in Pechatniki prison where Major Yevsukov awaited trial in 2009? Is it possible to maintain your self-respect as a legal professional and accept the authority of the court when someone whose crime was a prayer in church should be isolated from society in the same conditions as a police chief who shot civilians with his service weapon?
During your television interview you responded quite cynically to Pussy Riot. You mentioned that the participants in the act had accomplished what they had hoped. Not without reason, the journalists around you presumed that you referred to the accomplishment of getting into prison. But, after a dramatic pause, you clarified your belief that we were merely seeking fame and celebrity.
We would like to assure you, Dmitri Anatolyevich, that the monstrous reaction of the Russian authorities to the punk prayer “Virgin Mary, Put Putin Away,” and the widespread outrage of huge numbers of people who cannot understand why three women are in prison—these are the things that have brought about our so-called celebrity. It is not on our merit that Pussy Riot gained international attention. In the same interview, even you at the end of your reign forcefully emphasized that nothing has actually changed during the last fifty years in Russia. It was you who made the candid observation that, just as it was a half a century ago, a person of culture must resist the government, even through imprisonment and prosecution.
Naturally, many of your colleagues and subordinates—including the Ministers of Justice and Culture, and the heads of the Federation Council and of the President’s Council on Civil Society Development—came out openly against the imprisonment of the members of Pussy Riot. To them it is evident that this trial will result in a public disgrace for Russian authorities. However, today the opinion of one man is more significant than all the power of collective intelligence and even your starry-eyed abstract notions of freedom. That is why our group appealed to the Virgin Mary to banish this man from Russian politics.
Thus the end of your presidential term will be remembered for the victory of bondage over freedom in Russia—the very opposite of your ambitions. The three girls imprisoned in Pechatniki in Moscow are unequivocally recognized by the international community as prisoners of conscience and serve as a vivid warning of Russia’s current path.
And this path is due solely to a very specific idea of freedom: a freedom in which one person, acting alone, is allowed to make the important decisions in our country.
—Pussy Riot