Pussy Riot by Игорь Мухин
Last night, Pussy Riot paid a visit to the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. I was there to see the radical feminist Russian punk rock group with some other mothers and our teenaged daughters.
It wasn’t a riotous concert but a Q&A, featuring clips from a documentary about the group’s protest performance in a Moscow cathedral, their trial and imprisonment, and the international outpouring that preceded their release.
Imagine if the colorful, costumed marchers protesting in the streets of Madison against Scott Walker in 2011 were rounded up and shipped off to a penal colony. Putin’s crackdown on dissent in Russia—after an outpouring of post-Soviet free expression—was just as much of a shock. When they started to make pointed critiques of the Putin regime, Pussy Riot caught the brunt of Putin’s backlash.
Cheddar Revolution band member Catherine Capellaro—one of those costumed protesters from the uprising in Wisconsin, interviewed the band for Isthmus, Madison’s alternative weekly.
For my daughters and their friends, who took part in demonstrations against Walker, hearing from these radical young women who went to prison for their beliefs was eye-opening—especially in the wake of the election of Donald Trump. (In the car on the way to the event, we listened to an NPR interview with Richard Spenser, the white nationalist who coined the term “alt-right,” on his hopes for the Trump Administration. The kids were aghast.)
Pussy Riot members Masha Alyokhina and Basha Bogina talked about standing up against Putin’s repression, why they felt a particular kinship with Wisconsinites during the uprising against Walker, and how they continued rebelling even in prison.
Masha described her battles with abusive prison guards, her five months in solitary confinement, and her legal victories against the guards in the penal colony where she was imprisoned.
They showed clips from their news website Mediazona, which members started after they got out of prison—a shoestring operation that competes with official state media in Russia—and continues to shine a light on Russian repression, including in Chechnya and the Ukraine. A homemade video showed troops in Chechnya attacking human-rights workers and reporters and setting fire to their bus.
To an American audience, that video might look like a bunch of “strange men in strange beards” committing violent acts in a “strange country,” Masha said. “But this is our country,” she added.
And not long ago, it was a very different place.
Pussy Riot’s courage is both inspiring and daunting.
“Things can change very fast,” said Masha. “From freedom to repression—don’t wait as long as we waited to start protesting.”
Ruth Conniff is editor-in-chief of The Progressive.