In February 2012, a feminist punk collective called Pussy Riot became the latest recruits in the battle between popular music and the Russian state. The improbable battleground was the monumental Cathedral of Christ the Savior in central Moscow, not far from the Kremlin. The original cathedral had been destroyed by Stalin, and the lavish replacement was built in the 1990s. From a distance it looks impressive, a vast edifice topped with huge golden domes. Up close, it’s a kitschy Putinesque fantasy, and for the political pop activists of Pussy Riot, it had an obvious appeal. They had launched their mischievous assaults on Russian establishment targets eighteen months earlier, staging their brief unannounced performances in carefully chosen locations. The group mounted their attack on the excesses of the fashion industry in an expensive clothing store, and then startled diners at an expensive restaurant by delivering a song about the indulgences of lavish eating.
Pussy Riot chose the Cathedral of Christ the Savior to focus on their ultimate target, Vladimir Putin. Masked in their trademark fluorescent balaclavas, they began to deliver their punk prayer beseeching “Holy Mother, Blessed Virgin” to “chase Putin out.” Within seconds, police grabbed the women and bundled them out of the cathedral. It seemed to be the end of the protest.
Then, in the days after the performance, three members of the Pussy Riot collective were tracked down and arrested by police. Following his reelection as Russian president in May 2012, during a speech signaling an impending political crackdown, Putin called for harsh punishment of the Pussy Riot Three, as the arrested women had become known. The Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia condemned the performance as blasphemous, saying, “The devil has mocked all of us.” The women were held for months facing charges of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred,” which carried a threat of seven-year sentences. At a time when Putin was bearing down on all areas of opposition, including the shutting of more than a thousand websites, the detention of Pussy Riot was seen as part of the biggest drive since the Soviet era to silence government critics.
A gathering chorus of Russia’s cultural elite called for the release of Pussy Riot. Some twenty-five thousand people signed a letter of protest, and benefit concerts were held from Prague to Warsaw. Sting, Pete Townshend, and Yoko Ono lent their support. One of the leaders of the campaign to free the women was Art Troitsky.
I met up again with Troitsky in the summer of 2012 when he was lecturing at Middlebury College in Vermont. He was somber about the implications of the Pussy Riot affair. “This couldn’t have happened, even in Brezhnev’s time,” he told me. “It’s a reminder that Russia is still a hundred-percent medieval system ruled from the top.” But he insisted that while the attack on Pussy Riot was a throwback to Stalin’s rule over Russian culture, Russian citizens were different now. “People from the Beatles generation who want to live normally are aware of other countries, and they know things don’t have to be this way.”
I recalled a video I had seen recently of a flash mob gathering in Moscow in which hundreds of youngsters had come together for a thrillingly choreographed version of “Puttin’ on the Ritz”—rebranded as “Putin on the Ritz.” It had happened at about the same time as the Pussy Riot performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, and the joyous energy of those kids dancing in the flash mob on a raw winter’s day confirmed Troitsky’s belief that the children and grandchildren of the Beatles generation are determined to defy the Kremlin’s latest crackdown and insist on a “normal life.”
Art Troitsky, mellow in Vermont, July 2012.
Talking in the benign sunshine of a Vermont summer afternoon, Troitsky recalled the anti-Putin demonstrations of the Moscow winter. “I was on crutches after a foot accident, but I was beaten to the ground by police,” he said. Now he also told me how the campaign for the imprisoned Pussy Riot women was gathering strength. “As Putin has banned ‘gatherings,’ it would not be realistic to stage a concert in our police state,” he said. Writers and artists have arranged protest walks, attended by thousands, and Art had been asked to arrange musicians’ walks. “I told them that musicians don’t walk. So we decided to set up an Internet project asking musicians who support honest elections, law reform, and the Pussy Riot women to donate one track of original music. So far, we’ve received more than three hundred tracks.”
The protesters against Putin have chosen the color white as their banner, often pinning a white ribbon to their coats. Putin has called the ribbons “condoms.” In response, Troitsky told me he had addressed a recent demonstration dressed in a white rabbit costume. “I cut off the ears so I looked like a rebellious condom.”
But the three women remained in jail, refusing to speak to authorities, even to confirm that they had taken part in the performance at the cathedral. In late July 2012, trial proceedings began in a Moscow district court surrounded by riot police facing protesters in the pouring rain. The Pussy Riot Three were paraded in court each day, closely guarded in a glass cage. In early August, they made their defiant final statements. One of the defendants, Maria Alyokhina, compared the trial to the repression of culture under Stalin.
Performing in Moscow during the trial, Madonna declared her support for the women by wearing a balaclava and displaying the words Pussy Riot on her back. “I pray for their freedom,” she said. Russia’s deputy premier branded Madonna “a slut.”
Finally on August 17, 2012, the Pussy Riot women were found guilty of hooliganism and inciting religious hatred. They were sentenced to two years in a penal colony, sparking violent arrests in Moscow and demonstrations of support in dozens of cities around the world.
Meanwhile, the tracks continue to pour in to Art Troitsky’s music project to support Pussy Riot. Soon enough he was able to fill four or five CDs. He had decided on a title: “The White Album.” “After all,” he said, “the original Beatles record with that title contained ‘Revolution 1,’ ‘Revolution 9,’ and ‘Back in the U.S.S.R.’ And since white is the color of our protest movement, that feels perfect.” Paul McCartney sent a letter to the Pussy Riot Three urging them to “stay strong.” And Troitsky asked McCartney to send a song for the new “White Album”—to rock the Kremlin one more time.