The Pussy Riot Media Campaign ~ From Infotainment to Politics

Over the past month or so Pussy Riot has been in the news in various sorts of way. First, Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, recently released from prison, made a media tour of the US as reported here at The New York Times. During that tour The Guardian reported here that  letter purported from other members of the group had released a public letter announcing that Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova no longer were affiliated with them. Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova, in turn, more or less ridiculed the letter. All of this had an infotainment flavor.

But shortly thereafter, Pussy Riot - including the putatively purged Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova - turned up in Sochi during the Olympics and were not only harassed by local police (accused here of theft from their hotel) and subsequently attacked by whip-wielding Cossacks (report here). This last episode is one Pussy Riot could not have made up. Chatting with Colbert is amusing, fending off Police and Cossacks focuses attention on precisely the matters Pussy Riot aims to subvert. As the MasterCard advert says, for a group protesting ( among other things) religiously based patriarchy, being set upon by uniformed Cossacks is "priceless."

Storyville (BBC): Pussy Riot A Punk Prayer

Question: "Does your father support you?"

Nadia: "Yeah, he's the best. I am who I am today because of him"

That exchange comes @ 7:37. I hope my baby daughter Esme will say something like that some day.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova

I have posted here a number of times about Pussy Riot and their political persecution by the Russian government. Early in the fall one of the imprisoned young women Nadezhda Tolokonnikova published an open letter decrying the conditions of imprisonment. The authorities apparently deem her claims slanderous. For her efforts, Al Jazeera reports, she has been transferred to solitary confinement and - more troubling still - her family has reported that they have not heard from her since her transfer to solitary.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova - Pussy Riot, Hunger Strike

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, a member of Pussy Riot, convicted of "hooliganism" in summer 2012 for protesting in a Moscow church, has announced a hunger strike in protest at inhuman conditions of imprisonment. You can find an open letter from Tolokonnikova here at The Guardian.

"I demand that things be called by their names." ~ Nadezhda Tolokonnikova

The folks at n+1 have published this update on the travails of Maria Alekhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova members of Pussy Riot currently imprisoned for "hooliganism" in Russia. Unsurprisingly, the news is not good. Unsurprisingly too, the two women are unrepentant in the face of blatant judicial nonsense.

Amnesty International Graphics

I have noted here repeatedly campaigns that Amnesty International has run using provocative, creative imagery. Today on my news feed, this compendium of posters - including the ones I've lifted here - from various AI campaigns.

Jonathon Keats on Art & Politics

A short while ago I wrote this post prompted by an an essay in (of all places) Forbes by critic Jonathon Keats. In the meantime I have come across two more posts by Keats on the intersection of art and politics that also are smart and provocative. The first - here - is an astute analysis of the ways Pussy Riot traverses that intersection. The second- here - is takes up contrasting modes of "pragmatism" at work in the flamboyant politics of Ai Weiwei and the more easily assimilated performances of Cai Guo-Qiang. Both offerings are highly recommended. I admit that I am not a regular Forbes reader. Keats may change that.

Masks & Protest

Demonstrators gather outside a branch of Starbucks before the start
of an anti-austerity protest march through central London.
Photograph © Matt Dunham/AP.
Retrieved from The Guardian (20 October 2012).

What is wrong with this picture? Well, for starters, these folks might well  be violating the law if they chose to demonstrate not in the UK but here in the 'land of the free.' Take NYC, for instance, where - as protesters outside the Russian consulate last summer discovered - it is illegal for more than three persons to wear masks simultaneously at public demonstrations. So, actually, there is nothing wrong with the picture. There is something wrong with the laws.

I have been preoccupied lately [1] [2] with restrictions on the constitutional right to assemble in public. It is astonishing to see the lengths to which authorities have constrained the space of politics. In this we are in good company - with Russia, for instance - where the laws are similarly enlightened. But if The New York Times can refer to "Russia's Chilling Anti-Protest Laws," shouldn't we be taking a good look in the mirror?

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P.S.: As an aside, according to this report in The Guardian, two of the members of Pussy Riot who's arrest triggered the NYC protests in the first place have been banished to remote prison camps [1] [2] [3]. You,ll recall that the the women of Pussy Riot themselves wore masks during the initial "hooliganism" that has set off this entire chain of political and legal events.

Pussy Riot Appeal and a Parallel

This past summer I posted several times on the unsavory spectacle of the Russian courts convicting three members of the group Pussy Riot on charges of "hooliganism" and promoting "religious hatred." According to Amnesty International (who here offer the chance to drop a polite remonstrance to Russian officials) the women's appeal is scheduled for this coming Monday.

In an odd parallel, The New York Times reports that Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the man thought responsible for the video "Innocence of Muslims" that has inflamed religious passions in recent weeks has been jailed in Los Angeles. He has been detained after a hearing in which he was "charged with eight probation violations." Although Nakoula's video (if it is his) is pathetic, the response of rioters and those who have incited them is as contemptible. And the court here is clearly relying on legal technicalities to punish Nakoula for his alleged expression of studied ignorance and bigotry.

Not Just Pussy Riot ~ Taisiya Osipova

Political activist Taisiya Osipova reportedly has been sentenced to eight years in prison by a Russian court.

Pussy Riot, Liberalism, Hypocrisy

"How many fans of Pussy Riot’s zany “punk prayer” in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s erudite and moving closing statement were equally thrilled by her participation, naked and heavily pregnant, in a public orgy at a Moscow museum in 2008? That performance, by the radical art group Voina (Russian for “war”), was meant to illustrate how Russians were abused by their government. Voina had previously set fire to a police car and drew obscene images on a St. Petersburg drawbridge.

Stunts like that would get you arrested just about anywhere, not just in authoritarian Russia. But Pussy Riot and its comrades at Voina come as a full package: You can’t have the fun, pro-democracy, anti-Putin feminism without the incendiary anarchism, extreme sexual provocations, deliberate obscenity and hard-left politics." - Vadim Nikitim

Voina staged a live public orgy at the State Museum of Biology in the hall “Metabolism, energy, nutrition, digestion”. While five couples were copulating, the Voina chief media artist Alexei Plutser-Sarno, wearing a tuxedo and a top-hat, was holding a black pre-electoral banner reading “Fuck for the Bear” (29 February 2008).

I have to say that I found this scolding Op-Ed by Vadim Nikitin truly, ridiculously offensive. Why? Not because there are not many sanctimonious liberals who simply want to chastise far-away regimes for transgressions of the sort they wrongly believe never, ever occur here in the US. There are, of course, many liberals of just that sort. What is offensive about Nakim's argument (and Glenn Greeenwald's endorsement of it at The Guardian) is that there are many Americans who (1) speak regularly and loudly about transgressions by public - and private - powers in the US, (2) are quite aware that the women of Pussy Riot have been involved in provocative - some might say 'tasteless' or 'offensive' - performances in the past, and (3) nevertheless not only find it outrageous that the Russians are still running show-trials to rival those of the Stalin years but feel obliged to say so.

 A couple of things are important. First, Nikitim is right that protests of the sort Pussy Riot has staged might well get one arrested in many places other than Russia. But would they also get one a show trial and multi-year sentence - serious prison time? Second, the orthodox church is busy supporting the oligarchic Russian regime, and it is naive to assume otherwise. Just as when ACT-UP New York staged protests during the church services of Cardinal O'Connor, the Russian activists are identifying church complicity with oppressive policies. Imagine gay kiss-ins during holy mass! Third, Greenwald is off the mark when he invokes Chomsky's moralism. Sure the US is especially egregious in perpetrating violence world-wide. That in no way implies that we should sit on our hands when other regimes follow suit. And, of course, when liberals support 'freedom of expression' in cases like this, it becomes easy to turn the outrage around next time they demur in the face of domestic outrages.
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P.S.: A follow up. It would also be a mistake to assume that all Russians support the show trial prosecution. Consider this observation from The Nation: "Support has come from inside Russia and abroad. More than 40,000 Russians have signed an online petition protesting the band members’ arrest and detention. A hundred Russian civic and cultural figures have petitioned the country’s Supreme Court. Russia’s human rights ombudsperson has urged their release."

Pussy Riot Update

Well, according to this report at The Guardian, prosecutors in a Moscow court case are demanding three years in prison for members of Pussy Riot. This is shameful persecution of political speech pure and simple as this post at The New York Times makes clear. For additional background have a visit here to Mother Jones. Amnesty International are running a campaign on their behalf - you can find a link here and there is a webpage for supporters here.

Pussy Riot Trial

From left: Maria Alekhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, members of feminist punk group Pussy Riot sit behind bars at a court room in Moscow, July 30, 2012. Photograph © Mikhail Metzel / AP; Caption © TIME.

Back in 1970s in what then was Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel coordinated respectable "dissidents" around the cause of the Plastic People of the Universe, a rock band engaged in what the Communist regime regarded as politically inappropriate performances and events. Today in Russia, members of the rock band Pussy Riot are imprisoned while on trial on charges of "hooliganism" and respectable, churchgoing opinion seems to be that the ladies are guilty and stand in need of punishment. You can read a report here in The New York Times and find an archive of articles here at The Guardian. The take away is not that Putin seems to have endorsed leniency in the case, but that the women face seven years in prison for making a political statement. This is the new "democratic" Russia.