PrintWhen Madonna calls her World Tour fans to support you, and Bjork starts to market T-shirts sporting your band’s emblem, you know you’ve rocked the world—not just the world of pop culture, but that of world news. That’s precisely what three members of the Russian feminist punk band, Pussy Riot, have done. This past February, Maria Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova held an illegal performance on a Moscow cathedral altar. They wore colorful balaclavas over their faces, mockingly bowed down to the altar, and crossed themselves, after which they chanted a “punk prayer.” The lyrics: “Mother of God, chase Putin away!”
In the United States, this irreverent punk act would have gone viral on YouTube—and, just as quickly, it would have died down. In Russia, it got the three women arrested. The Russian courts decried the act as “hooliganism” and sentenced the women to two years of imprisonment. In the weeks following the trial and its contentious decision, the Internet has become inundated with questions about Russia’s political and cultural climate, about feminism—but most of all, about the modest punk band at the epicenter of this global controversy.
Pussy Riot may not be on par with Green Day or the Sex Pistols. Their known discography, scattered across YouTube and MySpace, consists of a meager six songs, all employing the unadorned, three-chord chaos expected of the genre. But that doesn’t make the band any less relevant.
“People are asking, ‘Is Pussy Riot the most influential punk rock group?’ Probably,” says Katheryn Holt, a Columbia 7-year graduate student in the Slavic Department and N + 1 Magazine’s translator for the Pussy Riot closing statements. “No one knows their music—but conversations are being started.”
Pussy Riot occupies a small but especially loud niche of punk music called Riot Grrrl, a 90’s subculture rooted in D.I.Y. aesthetics and gender positivity. “A lot of credit certainly goes to Bikini Kill and the bands in the Riot Grrrl Act,” Pussy Riot member Garadzha stated in a recent interview with VICE. “That’s an important principle for us.”
But while it may be easy to compartmentalize Pussy Riot’s actions in the Riot Grrrl ethos and call it a day, there are more factors at play— particularly, Russia’s brand of gender politics. Professor Catharine Nepomnyashchy, Director of Columbia’s Graduate Slavic Department and Barnard’s Slavic Studies department, who will be teaching a class on Russian Women in Literature and Culture this semester, has a particular interest in the role that gender played in the protest.
By using their bodies to make political statements, she says, the members of Pussy Riot are continuing a type of feminist protest that’s been seen in Eastern Europe before. She mentions women in Ukraine baring their breasts and Moscow State Journalism School Students posing as pin-ups for a calendar dedicated to Putin as examples. “When you’re looking to get your point across, using your body gets attention,” Nepomnyashchy says.
Nonetheless, Nepomnyashchy, is hesitant to see the Pussy Riot verdict as having much bearing on feminism—particularly because the word itself can be “distracting, so overloaded with meaning,” she says. “Pussy Riot’s primary message with the cathedral protest was not a feminist protest. It was about changing the government structure of Russia.”
“The capacity for individualism is absent in Russia,” Dr. Peter Rutland, a government professor at Wesleyan University, says. Despite the uproar the verdicts have caused, Rutland believes that the conversations surrounding the verdict won’t necessarily amount to a revolution, considering what the trajectory of Russian history has been until now.
“Historically, Russia’s political system has been deliberately designed to crush civil society. It’s not a mystery,” Rutland says. “No society can escape past that easily ... but 1991 [the year of Russia’s first presidential elections] was surprising. Russia may then have a possibility to lurch off in a new direction. Putin is no Gorbachev or Lenin.”
Despite the large amount of positive press, the band still has its critics. Nasi, a Serbian nationalist far-right organization, recently created an online game called “Shoot the Pussy Riot—Death to Enemies,” which involves shooting balaclavas—the band’s emblem—as target practice.
When contacted via e-mail, Vjekoslav Cerovina, Nasi’s international cooperation manager, said, “Pussy Riot are the enemies to the West and the ugly joke on the East,” going on to refer to the band as an “attack on the Byzantine model of Russia.”
Meanwhile, others take issue with the widespread coverage of the incident in Western media. Natalia Ermolaev, a curator at Princeton, comments on the media’s treatment of the three Pussy Rioters: “They’ve been portrayed as victims, as martyrs,” Ermolaev says. “These weren’t victims. These women knew what they were doing. They meant to provoke, to shake society out of its stupor.”
Though the two-year sentence is certainly harsh, Ermolaev believes, one could argue that the results of the trial signaled a victory for the three women. They have attracted media attention. With that attention, they have begun conversations. Whether or not those conversations will lead to sociopolitical change is uncertain, but one thing’s for sure: These women are making more noise than Green Day ever could.