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Punk vs
Putin
Three members of
Pussy Riot, a Russian female punk band who staged
an act of defiance against the Putin regime, are
currently on trial in a case that has taken the
country by storm. Pussy Riot are more than a punk
band - they're a bellwether. What happens to them
will be a sign to all Russians of what lies ahead
before Putin steps down in, um, 2024. Maybe. By
RICHARD POPLAK.
Here's what happened.
The four members of the punk band gently named
Pussy Riot, in February of this year, entered
Moscow's the famed Christ the Saviour Cathedral,
appended to the Moscow
Orthodox Church. They
donned masks - these sort of knitted tea-cosy
things, which are actually Mexican
wrestler-inspired balaclavas - stood on the Altar
in their punk regalia (a definite no-no), and
screamed into microphones a plea to the Virgin
Mary to "Throw Putin Out!" What was the song's
name, you ask? "Holy Shit", what else?
A
controversial sentiment, to be sure, one that
anywhere else in the civilised world would have
earned the young ladies a rap on the knuckles in
the form of a trespassing citation or two, and
maybe a disturbing-the-peace knock just for good
measure. A fine, some community service, a
dressing down from a religious judge. Maybe a
night in a drunk tank. (They were, unlike most of
Russia, sober at the time.)
Instead, Maria
Alyokhina, 24, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, and
Yekaterina Samutsevich, 29, find themselves front
and centre at another institution: Moscow's
Khamovniki court. Not a place for nice girls or
punk rockers alike, and their trial is unfolding
as the most prominent since former oil tycoon
Mikhail Khodorkovsky was convicted for a second
time in 2010 on trumped-up embezzlement charges -
in the very same courtroom where Pussy Riot are
fighting for their freedom. They are accused of
"hooliganism", and face seven years in prison for
the crime.
So what's a punk grrl to do? In
Pussy Riot's case, they have no choice - and let's
be fair, they set themselves up for the
opportunity - but to become icons of a critical
moment in Russia's history: the moment when even
the faintest notions of democracy, rule of law and
fair trial are thrown out for good, and Putin-ismo
takes its place as a presiding value. Which is to
say that the erasure of values has become the
status quo.
The astonishing thing about
postmodern Russia is how easy it has been to
accomplish all of this. Despite the courageous
marches and anti-Putin rallies leading up to his
once again accepting the presidency, the Russian
regime barely had to struggle to wipe the smile
off democracy's face. Here's a not-so-old joke: It
took 75 years for the Russians to prove that
communism didn't work. It took them 10 years to
prove that democracy didn't work either. We can
make all the pat statements we'd like about the
"Russian character" and their "need for a strong
leader", but the demise of reasonable society in
that country is a lesson to us all. Not least of
which are those of us here in South Africa.
"Putin and his team are for stability, but
stability kills development and results in
stagnation," the Nobel Laureate Mikhail Gorbachev
recently told the BBC. "The electoral system we
had was nothing remarkable, but they have
literally castrated it." The man who steered
Perestroika into being now gets to pronounce on
the death of Russian democracy. There wasn't much
lag time. It's almost too depressing to behold.
Here's how Kathy Lally and Will Englund
described Russia's "second experiment" in a recent
analysis in The Washington Post. It's worth
quoting an extended excerpt, because the lessons
are eerily universal:
"Twenty years ago…
communist hard-liners staged a coup here, sending
tanks rumbling to the Russian White House in an
effort to preserve the Soviet Union. Instead they
touched off a powerful expression of democracy.
"Boris Yeltsin, the first democratically
elected president in Russia's thousand years,
galvanized the resistance when he climbed atop one
of the tanks and called on citizens to defend the
freedoms he had promised to deliver. They mounted
the barricades, unarmed, willing to risk their
lives for democracy. The coup leaders lost their
nerve. A few months later, the Soviet Union was
dead.
"All these years later, so is
democracy.
"Today, Vladimir Putin presides
over an authoritarian government… Occasional
demonstrations in favor of democracy are small and
largely ignored, except by the police…
"[T]oday, elections are not fair, courts
are not independent, political opposition is not
tolerated and the reformers are widely blamed for
what has gone wrong…
"Today, Russia works
on bribes, and Putin's opponents call his United
Russia party the party of crooks and thieves.
People can say whatever they want to one another,
unlike in Soviet times when they feared the secret
police knocking in the middle of the night, but
television is controlled and any opposition is
publicly invisible…
"Many Russians despair
about their country, its prospects and their own,
but they say little and do less…
"Only a
tiny%age of the population takes part in civil
society, about 1.5 or two%, at the level of
statistical error…"
Sound familiar? Not
quite a corollary, but there's enough to give a
Daily Maverick reader with a South African
passport pause.
Which brings us back to
Pussy Riot, and their unfolding drama at a Moscow
kangaroo court. Amnesty International has, of
course, called for the release of the young women,
two of whom have children. They are being held in
a glassed-in cage in the courtroom, like rapists
or mass killers. Hundreds of thousands of
Russians, mostly young and middle class, took to
the streets earlier this year, and the Pussy
Riot-eers are being used by the regime as an
example. The fact that they engineered their
protest in a church, a conservative bastion of
Russian society, and one that has been remarkably
supportive of Putin's antics, was surely not
incidental. And it carries potentially massive
consequences.
Russian Prime Minister
Dmitry Medvedev pooh-poohed criticism of the case,
saying the trial was a "serious ordeal" for the
defendants and their families, but that "one
should be calm about it" and await the outcome.
"It seems to me that there will always be
different perceptions about what is acceptable and
not acceptable from a moral point of view, and
where moral misbehaviour becomes a criminal
action," he told the Times of London in an
interview. "Whether that is the case here is up to
the court to decide."
Yeah, right. There
are about 1.4 people in Russia who believe the
courts are independent. And the church's patriarch
spoke for broader conservative society when he
said, "We have no future if we allow mocking in
front of great shrines, and if some see such
mocking as some sort of valour, as an expression
of political protest, as an acceptable action or a
harmless joke."
He then said, "The devil
is laughing at us."
He has no idea how
right he is. The devil will be laughing even
harder if Russia debases herself further by
jailing a few punk rockers for speaking truth to
power.
Holy Shit indeed. DM
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article is run courtesy of Daily Maverick. To
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