The special-forces officer sat down on a bench next to the metal cage the three defendants would be kept in throughout the pre-trial hearing and began to polish the barrel of his Kalashnikov absent-mindedly. Glancing up at the two dozen or so journalists crammed into the tiny Moscow courtroom, he took off his black ski mask to wipe the sweat from his brow, and warned off a press photographer who had pointed a camera in his direction. Outside, in the courthouse’s narrow, oak-panelled hallways and sprawling yard, more brawny officers from Russia’s elite spetsnaz unit kept a vigilant watch.
Despite the high-level security, the defendants were not terrorists or crime bosses, or even businesspeople charged with multi-million-dollar fraud. The suspects, who had already spent more than four months in custody, were three young women from an all-female punk group called Pussy Riot, detained that spring after a brief anti-Putin protest in Moscow’s biggest cathedral. Putin’s spokesperson had said the ‘national leader’ found the group’s actions ‘disgusting’ and the women, two of whom had young children, were now facing up to seven years in a brutal, TB-ridden penal colony far from the capital.
The defendants were already over an hour late and it was becoming unbearably hot in the courtroom, where the air-conditioning system had briefly spluttered into life at around eleven, before packing up for the humid summer afternoon. Deciding the risk of losing my place in the courtroom was infinitely less dreadful than succumbing to heat exhaustion and thirst, I pushed through the tightly packed journalists and stepped outside. ‘Free Pussy Riot!’ came the chant from the street, where dozens of the group’s supporters and a smaller number of religious activists had gathered. I made my way towards the noise and out through the metal crowd-control barriers, securing as I did so a promise from a court security guard that I would be allowed to re-enter.
After the dullness of the courtroom, the central Moscow side street was a kaleidoscope of colour and impressions, as Pussy Riot supporters, many wearing the group’s trademark bright balaclavas, argued furiously with Orthodox Church activists, who were holding wooden religious icons. Other believers, some clad in black ‘Orthodoxy or Death!’ T-shirts, prayed long and hard.
‘God does not suffer evil-doers!’ a small, enraged young man with a wisp of a beard repeated over and over to a twenty-something woman in an oversized Pussy Riot T-shirt. ‘God is not evil! God condemns evil!’
‘God forgives everyone!’ responded the slim, black-haired woman, whom I would later find out was an anti-Putin activist called Tatyana Romanova. ‘Yes, he forgives everyone!’
The young man reached out a thin arm and slapped Romanova hard on the cheek. ‘That’s sacrilege!’ he screamed. ‘Sacrilege! And I’ll strike again any blasphemers who say that God forgives evil. He does not!’
Romanova, I thought, to make a timely biblical point, really should have offered the other cheek. But, instead, she strode off down the street in search of a police officer, the still furious Orthodox activist in pursuit.
Footage of the slap later went viral among Russia’s opposition bloggers.
‘That’s the first blow in the holy war,’ commented one. ‘What’s next? The inquisition?’
After decades of the suppression of religious freedoms by the Soviet authorities, Orthodox Christianity made what church leaders hailed as a ‘miraculous’ comeback in the newly independent Russia. By the time the vote-fraud protests broke out, roughly 70% of Russians identified themselves as Orthodox Christians,1 around double the level when the Soviet system collapsed. Religious icons, once destroyed en masse by the atheist Bolsheviks, were suddenly everywhere again. Getting your child baptized was now the norm. This religious zeal was typified by a campaign in the summer of 2008 to build dozens of tiny, wooden Orthodox churches across the country in the space of just twenty-four hours. On a visit to the west Siberian city of Omsk, I watched as weary builders raced against the setting sun to hammer in the final nails on a new place of worship.
Despite his years of service in the Soviet-era KGB, the feared security agency in the world’s first officially atheist state, Putin has done his utmost to project a pious image since taking over the presidency from Yeltsin at the turn of the millennium. He has made a great show of celebrating religious holidays and receiving blessings from the influential heads of the Russian Orthodox Church, first Patriarch Alexei II, and then his successor, Patriarch Kirill.
And so, with protests against vote fraud having transformed into a broader demonstration of discontent with Putin’s rule in the run-up to the presidential vote, the support of the country’s spiritual leaders was vital. On 8 February 2012, Putin took part in a televised meeting at Moscow’s ancient St Daniel’s monastery with representatives of the country’s major religious faiths.
Russia’s chief mufti, rabbis, Catholics and even a Buddhist lama were all present at the monastery, seated around Putin at a large shiny table as cameras recorded the meeting for the evening news. In recognition of his status as head of the country’s largest confession, the seat at Putin’s right-hand side was reserved for sixty-five-year-old Patriarch Kirill.
Relations between the Orthodox Church and the authorities had been growing steadily warmer; just three months before the monastery meeting, Kirill had been awarded residency in the Kremlin. The government had also handed over large swathes of real estate to the Church and made promises on the introduction of Orthodox religion lessons in schools. The constitutional separation of Church and state was on shaky ground, critics cried.
But Kirill had so far failed to provide a public show of support to counter mounting discontent. Instead, he had called the vote-fraud protests a ‘lawful negative reaction’ to corruption. True, he had issued a vague warning about the danger of ‘internet manipulation’, but there was nothing resembling the kind of backing that Putin and his campaign staff were undoubtedly counting on. And, in a worrying sign for the Kremlin, other figures within the Orthodox Church had also begun to speak out.
‘As a result of the particular way in which power is set up in our society today, this arrogant attitude toward the people has become the abnormal norm,’ well-known Moscow priest Revd Father Zuyevsky said at a sermon in early 2012, which he then posted online. ‘Those in power are not only conceited, they refuse to allow anyone else but themselves the right to decide what is good and what is bad.’2
And Zuyevsky was not the only priest to criticize the Kremlin.
‘People of the most varied convictions are now gathering on the square, but they are united by one thing – their unwillingness to live like this any longer,’ said Archpriest Alexei Uminsky, a popular Moscow priest and host of a state television programme about Orthodoxy. ‘The same thing is happening right now in the Church.’3
But, on 8 February 2012, after Putin had outlined his vision for the country’s many faiths to those gathered at the centuries-old Moscow monastery, Kirill delivered what was expected of him. His speech left no doubt in the minds of the country’s millions of Orthodox believers as to whose name God wanted them to tick on the ballot paper.
‘The 1990s saw the destruction of the political system, the economy, society and the country,’ Kirill began, recalling the ‘heady’ Yeltsin era. ‘This period was comparable to the Time of Troubles, the Napoleonic invasion, Hitler’s aggression and the civil war. On each of those occasions arose the question – would the country survive?
‘But what were the 2000s?’ he went on. ‘Through a miracle of God, with the active participation of the country’s leadership, we managed to exit this terrible, systemic crisis. The country escaped the danger zone and began to turn itself around.’
The head of the Orthodox Church then turned his head to look at the former KGB officer to his right. ‘As the patriarch, sworn to speak the truth, I have to say this openly – you personally played a massive role in correcting this crooked path in our history. I wish to thank you.’4
Putin nodded in recognition of the patriarch’s praise, but said nothing. It was clear, however, that the Kremlin had secured what it had been after. The modern Russian state had lacked legitimacy in the years since the break-up of the Soviet Union, with no obvious ideology or vision other than an all-embracing patriotism. An alliance with the Orthodox Church and its thousand years of unbroken history invested it with an invaluable sense of solidity.
Close co-operation with the Kremlin was nothing new for the Orthodox Church. Outlawed after the Bolshevik Revolution, when priests were murdered and churches destroyed, Stalin allowed a controlled revival of Orthodoxy during World War II, in a bid to improve public morale. But its patriarchs were handpicked by the Kremlin. Unsurprisingly, the Church was riddled with KGB agents and informers. Anatoly Oleynikov, the last deputy chairman of the KGB, revealed in 1991 that a mere 15%–20% of priests had refused to collaborate with the security services.5
In an all-too-brief period of openness following the failed 1991 coup attempt by KGB hardliners, researchers gained once unthinkable access to the spy agency’s archives. One of these researchers was Gleb Yakunin, a dissident Orthodox priest who had spent five years in a Soviet jail. Elected to parliament in the year before the Soviet collapse, Yakunin had always suspected large-scale KGB infiltration of the Orthodox Church. But what he discovered when he studied the archives shocked him. The Soviet-era Orthodox Church, he declared, was ‘practically a subsidiary, a sister company of the KGB’. Yakunin urged Church leaders to admit to their KGB past. Instead, less than two years after making his discoveries, he was defrocked by the Orthodox Church. When he continued his calls for a full investigation into the Church’s collaboration with the Soviet spy agency, he was excommunicated.6
From the archives studied by Yakunin, who cross-checked the known travel itineraries of leading clergy with journeys made by agents, it seems likely that both Kirill and his predecessor, Patriarch Alexei II, were KGB operatives. Active cogs in the system of repressive state control. Kirill’s codename as he worked his way up the Church hierarchy is believed to have been ‘agent Mikhailov’. He is also alleged to have made a fortune as part of a tobacco and alcohol imports scheme run by the Orthodox Church in the 1990s. The Church denies both sets of accusations. It was no proof of anything, of course, but both Kirill and Alexei II were photographed downing a shot of vodka with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in the 1980s.
When Russia experienced a religious revival in the 1990s, the Orthodox Church was protected by its history of Soviet-era persecution, making it almost invulnerable to attack. But Kirill’s ‘miracle of God’ statement was like a red flag to the protest movement. From now on, the Church was fair game.
In early 2012, in an interview with a well-known television presenter, Kirill fended off suggestions that he led a luxurious lifestyle, one that critics said was inappropriate for a man of the cloth. Ukrainian media reports claimed the patriarch had worn a $30,000 Breguet watch on a visit to Kiev, but Kirill denied ever sporting the timepiece. Any photographs of him doing so had likely been doctored, he suggested. But eagle-eyed bloggers quickly discovered a photograph of Kirill wearing the watch on the Orthodox Church’s official website. The wristwatch was quickly airbrushed out of the photo. Unfortunately for the Church, the inattentive editor left intact the telltale refection of the luxury watch on a varnished table, triggering a storm of online mockery. An embarrassed spokesperson for Kirill said the watch had been deleted by a ‘secular’ employee who had made an ‘absurd mistake’. The original, undoctored photograph was quickly returned to the website. The patriarch had been caught out in a lie. Another scandal involved a mysterious woman said to be living at a luxury apartment registered in the patriarch’s name. The Orthodox Church denied Kirill had done anything untoward, and said it was under attack by ‘anti-Russian’ forces seeking to erode its authority.7
The most potent symbol of Russia’s ‘return to the faith’ is the colossal Christ the Saviour Cathedral that stands on the bank of the River Moscow. The original cathedral was destroyed in 1931 on Stalin’s orders to make way for a never-to-be-erected Palace of Soviets. At 415 metres, the proposed building would have been the tallest in the world at the time. According to design blueprints, it was to be topped by a gigantic statue of Lenin, from whose eyes beams of red light would shine out across Moscow at night. But the ground under the demolished cathedral proved too waterlogged to support such a vast edifice, and in 1958 a huge open-air swimming pool was opened on the site instead.
With the demise of the Soviet Union, the Christ the Saviour Cathedral began to rise again, with work funded by a host of oligarchs and the state arms-trading company Rosvooruzheniye. I visited the building site in 1997, and watched as workers scuttled around the heights of the vast under-construction edifice. By 2000, its golden domes would again dominate the skyline of the upmarket Kropotkinskaya district, where the local metro station had been constructed using marble from the original cathedral.
The modern-day cathedral is mired in controversy, with many Orthodox believers uncomfortable with the numerous commercial activities that take place on its sprawling territory. Directly underneath the Christ the Saviour Cathedral is a huge underground parking lot with space for hundreds of vehicles, charging prices that reflect its prime downtown Moscow location. Cathedral grounds also contain tyre-changing services, a chemist, halls available for rent for private functions, and shops hawking pricy religious souvenirs to the millions of worshippers who visit it each year. All profits are tax-free.
The cathedral is also where Russia’s leaders come to celebrate religious holidays in front of the TV cameras, dutifully crossing themselves as bearded priests light sweet-smelling incense and choirs sing songs of praise in Church Slavonic. Within sight of the Kremlin towers, it is hard to think of a better target for any activists wishing to attack the growing ties between the Russian Orthodox Church and the state.
Less than three weeks on from Kirill’s televised endorsement of Putin, five young female activists and a handful of opposition journalists mingled with the worshippers and tourists making their way into the cathedral.
Once inside, the young women slipped on the multi-coloured balaclavas that would soon become the headgear of choice for young female would-be revolutionaries the world over and made their way to the area around the altar.
‘Virgin Mary, drive Putin out! Virgin Mary, become a feminist!’ the Pussy Riot members yelled, alternately high-kicking and crossing themselves, the words echoing off the cathedral’s arched marble ceilings. ‘Patriarch Gundyayev believes in Putin – that bastard, he should believe in God instead!’ they screamed, using the head of the Russian Orthodox Church’s ‘secular’ surname.8
‘Shit, shit, holy shit!’ the group just had time to shout before church security dragged them away, and escorted them out of the building. In a show of respect for religious traditions, a security guard waited until one of the Pussy Riot members had finished crossing herself before pulling her to her feet.
‘What a nightmare,’ said one onlooker, as the women were led away.
‘They should have their heads torn off for that,’ muttered another.9
Later that evening, a punk soundtrack and additional earlier filmed footage was added to the recording of the group’s forty-second a cappella performance. The clip was then put online with the title ‘A Punk Prayer: Virgin Mary, Drive Putin Out!’
Despite its shock value, the protest appeared to be little more than a colourful skirmish in the anti-Putin opposition’s wider war. I even had to persuade an editor at the RIA Novosti state news agency, where I had just begun a stint as correspondent, that it was a story worth running.
After all, the group was notorious for its provocative musical performances, none of which had resulted in serious consequences for anyone involved. Just a month prior to the cathedral protest, for example, eight women from the group had raced through a track called ‘Putin’s Pissed Himself’ on a snowy Red Square. Police briefly detained the musicians, and released them later that day without pressing criminal charges. Pussy Riot had also performed on the roof of a detention facility where protesters arrested after vote-fraud demonstrations were being held. No criminal charges were brought that time, either.
There was certainly no reason at all to suspect the group’s ‘punk prayer’ would make international headlines and turn Pussy Riot into a household name in the West, drawing in a cast of international celebrities and politicians from Paul McCartney to Hillary Clinton and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi.
*
On the eve of Putin’s March 2012 election victory, some thirty police officers and anti-extremist agents detained Pussy Riot members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, twenty-two, and Maria Alyokhina, twenty-four, near a west Moscow metro station. After seven hours of questioning, during which officers made it clear to the suspects that the case was being handled ‘at the very highest level’,10 charges of ‘hooliganism as part of an organized group’ were brought. The quaint-sounding nature of the offence belied its seriousness – the maximum punishment was three years behind bars. And, when charges were altered to include the phrase ‘with the aim of inciting religious hatred’, the two young mothers were suddenly looking at seven years in a penal colony. Two weeks after the initial arrests, police detained a third suspect, Yekaterina Samutsevich, twenty-nine, and the scene was set for the most controversial trial in modern Russia’s history. All three suspects were denied bail. Even the intervention of Russia’s justice minister, Alexander Konovalov, who stated publicly that there was no reason to lock up the women, was insufficient to secure their release. Red Square and detention centres, it appeared, were all fair game for Pussy Riot’s musical protests, but not the symbol of the modern Russian state’s increasingly symbiotic relationship with the Orthodox Church. Someone very high up had been angered by Pussy Riot’s actions.
The women were stunned to find themselves facing such serious charges. ‘Nadya [Tolokonnikova] thought there was a 0.1% chance they would be jailed for the cathedral protest,’ her father, Andrei, a trained doctor turned part-time poet who had known of the group’s plans, told me. ‘After all, the Red Square protest had been just as high profile. But I told her that I thought they would find some way to jail her for it. But Nadya was under the illusion that she knew the rules of the game. I told her there are no rules. It’s impossible to talk Nadya out of anything though.’11
The case was quickly picked up on by human-rights groups. Amnesty International recognized the women as prisoners of conscience less than a month after their arrest, and the Kremlin’s own human-rights council would also call for their release. As the story began to make international news, the US rock band Faith No More became the first of dozens of Western musicians and actors to support the group when they invited the still-at-large Pussy Riot members on stage at a concert in Moscow.
It would be wrong, however, to think of Pussy Riot as a normal rock or punk group. With no constant line-up, the group does not play conventional, pre-announced gigs, nor does it release recordings on CD or vinyl. In fact, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the music industry.
Pussy Riot draw their influences from a wide range of sources, from the 1990s feminist US punk rock Riot Grrrl movement to the avant-garde art of the early Soviet-era OBERIU (The Union of Real Art) collective. Founded in 1928 in Leningrad by the absurdist writers Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky, OBERIU specialized in jarring, hallucinatory poetry and prose. The experimental collective also carried out unconventional public performances, with Kharms once surprising residents of Leningrad with a rooftop appearance. Criticized by the Soviet authorities for ‘deflecting the people from the building of socialism’,12 Kharms and Vvedensky both later perished in Stalin’s prisons.
‘Pussy Riot are Vvedensky’s students and heirs,’ Tolokonnikova would later say. ‘His principle of the bad rhyme is dear to us. He wrote, “Occasionally, I think of two different rhymes, a good one and a bad one, and I always choose the bad one because it is always the right one.”’13
Tolokonnikova, a slim and dark-haired Siberian with a pout soon to grace the covers of magazines the world over, had earlier made the news in Russia when she took part in a bizarre bout of public sex in a Moscow biology museum to ‘commemorate’ Medvedev’s 2008 presidential inauguration. The performance/protest was organized by the notorious Voina (War) art group, whose previous stunts had involved drawing a gigantic, erect penis on a St Petersburg drawbridge opposite FSB headquarters, and throwing live cats at staff in a McDonald’s in central Moscow. Four days after having sex on the floor of the museum with her husband, Pyotr Verzilov, a co-founder of Voina, Tolokonnikova gave birth. ‘I couldn’t have just stayed at home and done nothing,’ she replied later, when asked if she regretted taking part in the unorthodox protest against Medvedev’s inauguration. ‘I would have felt even worse.’14
As the Pussy Riot story unfolded, it was Tolokonnikova who attracted the most media attention, especially after she turned up at an early court hearing with her clenched fist raised, people-power style. Defiant throughout the months of court hearings, Tolokonnikova famously turned down a suggestion that the group could ask Putin for a presidential pardon. ‘Let him ask forgiveness from us,’ she reportedly snapped.15
Alyokhina, a curly-haired vegan and aspiring poet, went through the court hearings in a haze of apparent bewilderment at the Soviet-style legal proceedings unfolding around her. As the trial began, she told the judge that she was unable to plead because she could not understand the nature of the charges. ‘You have a higher education!’ snapped the judge. Like all three defendants, Alyokhina had no doubt that Putin was behind their prosecution. ‘If I cannot hear my child’s voice because of my criticism of the authorities, then welcome to 1937,’16 she said as the suspects were remanded in custody by a Moscow court, in a reference to the year that was the peak of Stalin’s Great Terror.
Samutsevich, the smallest, oldest and only childless suspect, was perhaps the most complex of the trio. A former computer programmer with tomboy looks, she would largely forego outright anti-Putin soundbites at court hearings in favour of an analysis of the system of control that the former Soviet security-services officer had constructed. She also put forward the most in-depth explanation as to why the group had chosen to protest in Moscow’s largest cathedral.
‘That the Christ the Saviour Cathedral had become a significant symbol in the political strategy of the authorities was clear to many thinking people when Vladimir Putin’s former KGB colleague Kirill Gundyayev took over as leader of the Russian Orthodox Church,’ Samutsevich told the court, glancing down occasionally at a scrap of paper. ‘After this happened, the cathedral began to be openly used as a flashy backdrop for the politics of the security forces.17
‘Our sudden musical appearance in the cathedral violated the integrity of the media image that the authorities had spent such a long time generating and maintaining, and revealed its falsity,’ she explained, hands stuffed in pockets, her features fixed in a mixture of disgust and punker boredom.
In the aftermath of the three women’s arrest, both influential Orthodox Church figures and ordinary believers called for leniency as a demonstration of Christian forgiveness. Pussy Riot had, some argued, simply been acting in the centuries-old Russian tradition of ‘holy fools’, those half-witted prophets given licence in medieval times to say out loud what others could not. The most famous was Saint Basil, the outspoken critic of Tsar Ivan the Terrible, who has an onion-domed cathedral named after him on Red Square.
But, for many older Orthodox Christians, Pussy Riot’s performance had brought back painful memories of the Soviet persecution of believers, when the faith was routinely ridiculed in public as part of the country’s official atheist ideology, and Christians imprisoned in the vast gulag system were subject to grotesque parodies of church services.
‘There was a great deal of public mockery of religious services, priests, vestments, etc., both in marches, performances, films and cartoons in the 1920s and early 1930s in Soviet Russia,’ Andrei Zolotov, an Orthodox journalist and expert on the Church’s relations with society, told me. ‘That’s why any contemporary art that also ridicules the faith is so disturbing to church people.’
Patriarch Kirill was in no mood for clemency. Speaking in a televised March 2012 sermon, he portrayed the performance as a demonic assault on the Church and all it stood for. ‘The devil laughed at us,’ he said. ‘But there are those who seek to downplay this sacrilege. My heart breaks from bitterness that amongst these people there are those who call themselves Orthodox.’ The group and their supporters, the patriarch went on, ‘believe only in the strength of propaganda, in the strength of lies and slander, in the strength of the internet, in the strength of the media’.18
Those members of Pussy Riot still at large hit back in a blog post.
‘We were deeply saddened that you allowed the Church to become a weapon in a dirty election campaign and urged the faithful to vote for a man who is as far as can be from God’s truth,’ the group said. ‘You cannot believe in an earthly tsar if his deeds contradict those values for which the Heavenly Tsar was crucified.’19
Tolokonnikova was first into court for the 4 July 2012 hearing that would determine when the group’s trial was to begin for real. Handcuffed to a burly police officer, she smiled and laughed her way to the metal cage, dark shadows under her eyes. ‘In Russia, anyone can end up in handcuffs,’ she said, shrugging. ‘There is nothing unique about this.’
Her husband, Pyotr Verzilov, wiry and bearded, held up a newspaper report of Faith No More’s show of support. He gave his wife the thumbs-up, but was prevented from handing the newspaper over by a special-forces officer.
Wearing a T-shirt bearing a clenched fist and the Spanish Civil War slogan ‘¡No pasarán!’ (‘They shall not pass’), Tolokonnikova alternately strode around her cage and slouched on its wooden bench as she waited for the hearing to begin.
‘What are conditions like inside?’ asked a journalist.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘I mean, OK for a prison.’
To the left of the metal cage, the group’s three lawyers were trying to wade their way through thick sheaves of legal documents. ‘They handed this to me when I got here and said you have an hour,’ complained lawyer Nikolai Polozov, a bespectacled Orthodox believer who had taken on the case over what he called the ‘legal nihilism’ of the allegations. He would later reveal that he had been given an informal warning that his defence of Pussy Riot could see him disbarred.
‘The investigation is fulfilling a political order and the court is going along with this,’ Polozov said when the court hearing began. ‘It was common to deny suspects the right to acquaint themselves with case materials in Stalin’s Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.’
The judge stared straight ahead, fixing her gaze on some point on the far wall. Was she even listening? Courts in Russia are widely believed to operate to a system of ‘telephone justice’ – highly placed officials call judges and tell them what decision to make in important cases. So who could really blame her if she chose not to pay attention? There was nothing Polozov could say that would have any effect on the court’s ruling.
Violetta Volkova, a larger-than-life, short-tempered lawyer who had represented almost all of Russia’s beleaguered opposition figures at one point or another, was even blunter than Polozov. ‘This is a farce,’ she said, staring at the state prosecutor. ‘You have falsified documents and I really don’t understand how you can do such things without feeling ashamed.’
To no one’s surprise, the court ruled against the defence team’s request for more time to study the case materials. Tolokonnikova was led out of the courtroom, the police officer she was handcuffed to squeezing her past journalists. ‘There is only one person to blame for all this, and his name is Vladimir Putin,’ she said.
After the hearing, I struck up a conversation with a red-faced police officer outside the court. Why, I wanted to know, did the suspects have to be handcuffed and kept in a cage? The cop stared at me. ‘What about the way those guys who rioted in London were treated?’ he said, referring to the mass disturbances in the UK the previous summer. ‘I bet they were kept in cages at their trials, no?’ He didn’t seem convinced by my insistence that cages were not a part of the British judicial system.
‘Those women spat in my soul,’ he went on, choosing not to push the cage debate further. ‘This lot only care about bringing Russia down,’ he added, waving in the direction of the group’s supporters. ‘They’d sell us all out to the West.’
The policeman’s fury symbolized the growing divide between Russia’s liberals, with their Western attitudes and fashions, and the socially and religiously conservative majority, who found Pussy Riot’s cathedral protest both incomprehensible and indefensible.
There was genuine anger among some believers, as I found out when I quizzed worshippers at the scene of the high-profile protest. ‘Those bitches should be put away for life,’ a young woman snapped, as she stood in brilliant sunshine on the steps of the Christ the Saviour Cathedral. It didn’t seem a very Christian attitude and I asked her how she could reconcile her fury with Christ’s teachings. I was genuinely curious. ‘Yeah, of course, Christ taught people to forgive their enemies, but, all the same, they should go down for life,’ she replied. ‘I’d have dealt with them right on the spot.’
Her friend sighed as she removed the silk scarf she had used to cover her head while in the cathedral. ‘If you don’t respect the beliefs of others, don’t come here and dance in our sacred place.’
An elderly church employee selling candles to worshippers scowled when I asked her to give her personal opinion on the case. ‘I’m not going to say anything that will increase their fame,’ she muttered angrily.
Not everyone was as harsh. ‘It’s just awful what they did, but they have children and I feel sorry for them,’ said Marina Semshyova, a young woman from Siberia, after visiting the cathedral. ‘They should not be jailed. God will judge them eventually.’
Even the very name Pussy Riot was an affront to the group’s enemies, most of whom were unsure what it meant, but were sure it signified something ‘bad’. Written in English letters rather than Russia’s Cyrillic script by the vast majority of the country’s media outlets, the words ‘Pussy Riot’ quickly became a symbol of something alien and dangerous. ‘I have a photocopy of a dictionary page,’ an appalled prosecution witness would later wail at the group’s trial. ‘“Pussy” is derived from “pus”. This is horrifying. The name means purulent riot.’20
This growing split in society was later neatly summed up by Putin himself, when he told state television in October 2012 that he was interested in not only the ideas of ‘intellectuals’, but also the thoughts of ‘real Russian people’. It was a revealing moment, and one that would come to symbolize growing attempts to portray opposition to his long rule as somehow un-Russian.
Putin also challenged a foreign journalist to translate the ‘obscene’ name into Russian in a rare TV interview. When the journalist at the Kremlin-backed Russia Today channel declined, Putin lashed out. ‘I know you understand it perfectly well, you don’t need to pretend you don’t get it,’ he said. ‘It’s just because these people made everyone say their band’s name too many times. It’s obscene – but forget it.’21
But this was something Putin, strangely, seemed unable to do. Aside from the Russia Today interview, the president would address the subject – unprompted – on a number of other public occasions, most notably at the annual Valdai club gathering of foreign political analysts and journalists. Putin, it appeared, just couldn’t stop saying ‘pussy’.
*
The persecution of Pussy Riot was shocking, and said much about the selective use of the legal system in Putin’s Russia. But the group’s impending trial also posed a genuine dilemma for the nascent protest movement’s figureheads: support the suspects and be tarred with the same brush as Tolokonnikova and her ‘orgy in the museum’ friends. Condemn Pussy Riot and lose the backing of the ‘creative class’, for whom the group had become a cause célèbre.
‘Pussy Riot is an incredibly convenient theme for the authorities,’ sighed Yevgenia Chirikova, the eco-activist and protest leader. ‘The entire opposition movement has become Pussy Riot for ordinary people. As if we were all dancing in that cathedral. I mean, it really was disgusting what they did. I go to church to communicate with God,’ she told me. ‘Why is this “holy shit”? But it was also disgusting to detain young mothers over this. That’s also unchristian.’22
Navalny, an Orthodox believer, expressed outrage over the harshness of the treatment of the women, but condemned their ‘repulsive’ actions. ‘I’d be angry if my daughter did something like this,’ he fumed. ‘But I don’t see why they can’t be put under house arrest. Why lock them up? They are no danger to society. When deciding the issue of the freedom of even the most disgusting people we have to stick to legal norms. The case has a clear political element.’23
The authorities had wasted no time in exploiting Pussy Riot to damage the protest movement. A documentary on the state-controlled NTV channel portrayed the group as pawns of foreign powers intent on destroying ‘holy Russia’. The programme featured an interview with an investigator involved in the case who announced that the group was made up of ‘revolutionaries and demons’. Suitably spooky music was played whenever the women’s faces appeared on the screen. Another interviewee also compared the group to Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, who had urged the wartime destruction of the Russian Orthodox Church as a necessary step towards conquering the Soviet Union. And the man behind Pussy Riot? Why, NTV alleged, it was Boris Berezovsky, the former Kremlin insider who had fled Russia after falling out with Putin in 2000. By now a massive Putin critic, Berezovsky had boasted in 2007 that he was funding ‘revolution’ in Russia. He denied, however, any links to Pussy Riot, but said he would have been ‘proud’ to have been involved with the group.24 The Kremlin’s propaganda may have been crude, but it was effective: the Pussy Riot saga effectively killed off the opposition’s hopes of making allies of millions of conservative Russians.
Tolokonnikova’s husband, Pyotr Verzilov, laughed sharply when I asked him if Pussy Riot was in the pay of demonic Westerners. A fluent English speaker with dual Russian and Canadian citizenship, Verzilov grew up in Toronto, where he ‘got a feel for Western culture’.25 Tolokonnikova later visited Toronto with him, attending lectures by the American feminist philosopher Judith Butler. Still in his mid-twenties, Verzilov had quickly become the group’s de facto spokesperson and he was clearly relishing his moment in the media spotlight. ‘Pussy Riot is a machine placed inside the media,’ he declared, when I journeyed with him to the pre-trial detention centre where Tolokonnikova was being held. ‘It’s designed to draw attention in the West to what’s going on in Putin’s Russia. And the group has succeeded.’26
He shrugged, however, when I suggested the group’s performance had also supplied the Kremlin with a powerful propaganda weapon in its fight against the protest movement. ‘We know that lots of people believe all that rubbish they see on TV,’ he said, smiling and stuffing his face with breadsticks as we drove through a beat-up residential zone. ‘We need a revolution of the mind before we can change Russia. But this could take a very long time. It could take some fifteen years or so to see real change. That’s what we are most afraid of.’
A controversial figure, Verzilov had been accused of being a police informer by fellow members of the Voina art collective, which acrimoniously split into Moscow and St Petersburg branches in 2009. ‘That’s all nonsense,’ he said. ‘The guy I was supposed to have informed on even said so.’
After Tolokonnikova’s arrest, Verzilov had been left to care for the couple’s four-year-old daughter, Gera, and Putin had become a bogeyman figure for the pre-schooler. ‘Gera’s been making plans to bust mummy out of jail,’ Verzilov laughed. ‘She’s been telling people that Putin has locked her up in a cage. Her nursery-school teacher even called me recently to ask if she could please not tell everyone quite so often that “Putin is evil, but my mummy and daddy are fighting him”.’
What, though, I wondered, would Gera say when she grew up and saw the footage of her parents naked and making out at the Moscow biology museum just days before she was born? Verzilov frowned, as if he’d never considered this before: ‘I don’t think she’ll be upset,’ he said. ‘After all, children of Hollywood stars don’t worry when their parents shoot erotic scenes, do they?’ And with that, he wandered off to his next interview, this time with CNN.
As the Pussy Riot story began to attract international attention, influential Moscow archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin became the Church’s de facto point man on the rapidly escalating row. An outspoken figure, Chaplin (his surname, not his title) quickly became the man to turn to for a memorable quote or two.
‘God is waiting for their repentance. He has revealed this to me, like he revealed the gospels to the Church,’ he said, as initial hearings into the case got underway in Moscow. In another interview, he alleged Pussy Riot’s protest was symbolic of the ‘Satanic rage’ the country’s opposition forces had unleashed against the Orthodox Church.
Eager to meet a man the Supreme Being deemed worthy of a one-to-one chat, I went to visit Chaplin – a forty-four-year-old bearded asthmatic with a fondness for visiting underground rock clubs27 – at the central Moscow cathedral where he was rector.
In over fifteen years in Russia, I have yet to shake the feeling of unease that I experience whenever I enter an Orthodox church. Under the onion domes of Russia’s Orthodox churches, the relation between God and humanity is one of pure surrender and unquestioning devotion. There are no pews in Orthodox churches. Worshippers stand at services, often for hours on end, among clouds of thick incense smoke and prayers intoned in Church Slavonic, a language all but incomprehensible to modern-day Russian speakers. Entering an Orthodox church from the busy, chaotic streets of Moscow is like stepping into a time machine. Unlike, say, Church of England places of worship with their trendy priests and Facebook posts for family fêtes, there is almost no concession to modernity.
Chaplin was busy when I arrived at the poetically named Cathedral of St Nicholas under the Three Hills. As I waited outside his office, I watched an elderly female worshipper praying. Her head covered in accordance with Orthodox rules, she crossed herself and kissed an icon, then stood silently in front of it. There was an almost tangible sadness about her. I suddenly felt uncomfortable, as if it was somehow wrong to be observing her prayers. It was a timely reminder that, for many Russians worn down by their country’s numerous problems, the Orthodox Church offers a comfort they are unable to find elsewhere.
*
‘A Christian country should act decisively when one of its holy places is attacked,’ Chaplin intoned, as we sat in his spacious, yet oddly ramshackle office.28 He was wearing his billowy, black priest’s cassock, from whose depths he would occasionally pull out his cell phone. The Kremlin and Patriarch Kirill had frequently suggested that an act of ‘sacrilege’ such as Pussy Riot’s cathedral protest would be clamped down on just as severely in any Western country. But it was a fact that in the United Kingdom, for example, gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell had in 1998 been fined the grand sum of £18.60 for interrupting the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Easter sermon with a protest at the pulpit. And even in Russia, in 1995, a performance artist named Alexander Brenner had disrupted a service in central Moscow’s Yelokhovo Cathedral by rushing into the church and chanting, ‘Chechnya! Chechnya!’ He was punished with a night in the cells and a small fine. Why were Pussy Riot different? I asked. Why was the Church unwilling to do the Christian thing and forgive the group?
‘If someone insults me personally, then of course I will forgive them,’ Chaplin responded. ‘But, if someone insults my faith or my God, I wait until they change their position and admit that they acted wrongly.’
I had not so long ago returned from a reporting trip to the Iranian capital of Tehran, where I had seen at first hand the power of the Islamic Republic’s many mullahs. And, while, clearly, the differences between Iran and Russia were vast, recent events had made me wonder if Russia might not also be heading in the same direction.
So what I wanted to find out from Chaplin was this: was the Orthodox Church seeking the same kind of power that Iran’s Shiite clerics enjoyed? The question sounded insane as soon as I had asked it, and I was about to cover my tracks by qualifying my words, but Chaplin was already answering. My query, it turned out, was not so crazy, after all.
‘For a Russian Orthodox believer, it is normal for the state and the Church to co-operate in harmony with each other,’ he told me. ‘They should have the same values and co-operate in the majority of spheres.
‘The separation of the secular and the religious is a fatal mistake by the West,’ Chaplin went on, before pausing for breath. ‘It is a monstrous phenomenon that has occurred only in Western civilization and will kill the West, both politically and morally. I don’t believe the political system in the West today is any better for a Christian than the Soviet system.’
It was an astonishing statement. Although I was sure he knew them, I reminded the archpriest of the facts. Some 200,000 clergy and believers were executed by the Soviet authorities between 1917 and 1937, according to a 1995 presidential committee report.29 ‘The more representatives of the reactionary clergy we shoot, the better,’ Lenin had said. Thousands of churches were destroyed, and those that survived were turned into warehouses, garages or museums of atheism.
But Chaplin just nodded when I asked him to reconfirm that he believed contemporary Western society was as bad for a Christian as the Soviet Union. ‘Yes. Of course, of course,’ he replied instantly. He looked bored with the discussion.
This ‘harmonious’ relationship between Church and state that Chaplin is so in favour of has deep historical roots. Orthodox Christianity’s traditions and lineage date from the Byzantine Empire, where the emperor was both secular ruler and protector of the Church. This means, that unlike in Western Christianity, there is no tradition in Orthodoxy of clerics rebelling against ‘godless’ heads of state. For most Orthodox Christians, the Bible’s insistence that ‘All authority is from God’ holds true even if, as in the Soviet era, the state is openly hostile to the faith.
Chaplin had recently met Navalny for informal talks and smiled when I reminded him of the encounter with the opposition figurehead. ‘He’s obviously a clever person, but it’s difficult for me to agree completely with everything he says,’ he said. ‘But it’s clear that such people should be drawn into national politics. I hope that Russia’s future political life will develop through dialogue, and not through revolution and chaos.’
Russia had seen more of the ‘revolution and chaos’ that Chaplin so feared in the past hundred years than many countries had suffered in their entire modern history. A clear sign, the archpriest was adamant, of God’s fondness for Russia and its people.
‘If God loves someone or something, he creates difficulties,’ he concluded, as he stood up to signal the end of our meeting. ‘If a person is living a sated, peaceful life, this means God has forgotten about him. This life is but a preparation for the next, real life, and it is through suffering that God prepares us.’
So did God love Pussy Riot? After all, Moscow’s pre-trial detention centres were well-known places of suffering. And even the prosecution had, in a widely reported slip-of-the-tongue, referred to the defendants as ‘the injured party’.
‘Without repentance there can be no forgiveness,’ Chaplin reiterated, apparently citing God once more, as he sidestepped the question. ‘And I do not see that they have repented.’
As the date of Pussy Riot’s trial drew nearer, pleas for leniency flooded into Russia from across the world, including from celebrities such as Madonna and Elton John. Noble Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi added her voice to the appeals. ‘I would like all the members of the group to be released,’ she said, joking that only people who sing ‘really terribly’ should be prevented from doing so.30
Dozens of Russian celebrities and cultural figures also signed an open letter calling for the Kremlin to show mercy. In an echo of the famous The Times editorial, ‘Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?’ on the 1967 jailing of Rolling Stones members Keith Richards and Mick Jagger on drug charges, Soviet-era pop icon and Kremlin favourite Alla Pugacheva declared a custodial sentence for the group would be like ‘shooting sparrows with a cannon’.31 Even Boris Grebenshchikov, the veteran Russian rock legend turned Buddhist, broke his self-imposed silence on worldly issues to condemn the prosecution of Pussy Riot. ‘The justice system that this is being performed under is not worthy of the name of justice,’ he told me, peering out from behind dark glasses as we sat near the banks of the River Volga.32 But the Kremlin does not enjoy being dictated to: Tolokonnikova and co stayed behind bars.
Like the pleas for their freedom, Pussy Riot’s ‘punk prayer’ would also go unanswered. The Virgin Mary, if she had heard, appeared in no mood to drive Putin out. The ‘national leader’ was heading back to the Kremlin.