Political genius doesn’t come around very often. Not everyone can figure out a way to alter the way we think and make social change. Martin Luther King Jr. had it. Mahatma Gandhi had it.
Pussy Riot have it, too.
The Russian art collective is a phenomenon unlike any other the world has seen. They are everywhere, taking aim at anything: sexual repression, human rights violations, prison conditions. Look out.
They can strike at any time and any place: in New York City, where they released the I Can’t Breathe song and video in the wake of the police beating death of Eric Garner at the Sochi Olympics, where they were attacked by Cossacks or in T.O., where members Nadezhda (Nadya) Tolokonnikova and Maria (Masha) Alyokhina appear at Pride festivities. They lead the Pride parade and then hit Yonge-Dundas Square stage during the wind-up, doing what they won’t say – of course.
On the phone from Moscow, Nadya explains why Pussy Riot are so outraged by the situation of gays in Russia. Queer activists Nikolai Alekseev, Yevgeny Gerasimov and Vadim Gruzdev were sentenced to 10 days in police cells earlier this month. Later, Alekseev rode a quad bike and carried a rainbow flag and orange smoke flare down the main Tverskaya Street and was detained again.
“I don’t tell people to go into the streets – it is too dangerous,” Nadya explains in a heavy Russian accent. “But we can provide information to people so they understand that gay people are not the enemy.”
It’s the state you have to watch out for.
“The anti-propaganda laws [passed in Russia forbidding queer-positive messaging] are very harmful to the gay community. When you come into the streets carrying a rainbow flag, people are free to beat you. And our governments don’t prosecute those people, they just encourage them.”
That’s what happened to her and her crew when they hit the streets to support gay rights during the Olympics in Sochi. A cadre of Cossacks, well armed, attacked them with whips while snickering police looked on.
Fortunately, at the same time, Pussy Riot were deploying their own savvy strategy of videotaping every action they undertake. They do that primarily to communicate with the world, but it’s also a way to control the message, keeping it unfiltered: here’s what we’re doing, here’s the response, here’s what we mean by oppression.
In the past five years, other major radical activists have been political game changers: Idle No More, the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring, for example, but Pussy Riot are very different. The collective does not operate via that slow political burn that cooked up the Idle No More and Occupy movements over a protracted period.
Russian authorities don’t sit by and passively watch dissident movements build. They swoop in and attack, whereupon those authorities wind up getting more than they bargained for.
Right now, Pussy Riot are Vladimir Putin’s worst nightmare. They’re more a cross between guerrilla theatre and the bad-boy Yippie activists of the 60s than a slowly developing grassroots movement.
Here’s what works for them.
First, the name. Taking an English-language moniker was a smart move, and this one’s an instant attention-getter.
Next, they’re elusive. Attempts by members to expel Masha and Nadya in 2014 because they were “violating the collective’s ideals” were ineffectual because the membership changes every day. Nadya’s always shrugged off the controversy.
“Right now we have 10 people in the collective,” she says, “but we add people all the time hundreds can be involved. You could be in Pussy Riot. Make up one of your own.”
They organize via email but almost never through Twitter.
“It’s not quite that open,” Nadya laughs, explaining that there are always people who could sabotage an action.
Third, to paraphrase Monty Python, their greatest weapon is surprise. Three years ago, members quietly climbed onto the altar of a church, shed their outerwear, donned their trademark neon-coloured balaclavas and proceeded to rip into an anti-Putin punk song.
Three of them, including Nadya and Masha, were arrested. A show trial designed to feed the Putin political machine – an event seen worldwide in the excellent documentary Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, built around the collective’s own video footage – made them an international sensation and a profound embarrassment to the Russian regime.
It helps, too, that they are politically very sophisticated. The three defendants were extremely well prepared for trial. Taking different, meticulously thought-through approaches to the charges, they consistently outwitted their prosecutors.
And finally (this shouldn’t matter, but who are we kidding?), all three are very easy on the eyes.
Nadya and Masha wound up going to jail for 18 months. Naturally, Nadya didn’t nap through that experience, but, rather, used it to educate herself about prison conditions and reform.
“Everyone suffers in prison,” she declares. “While we were in jail we went on a hunger strike to demand an eight-hour workday rather than the current 16 hours.”
That issue continues to take up most of her time. Just hours after she hung up from our phone conversation, she was back in the streets with prisoners’ rights advocate Katherine Nenasheva to protest prison conditions. The action saw Nadya sewing a Russian flag on the uniform she wore while in prison. As usual, the authorities swooped in and arrested her.
Serious pursuits aside, you could be forgiven for thinking of these Riot girls as the first political activists to become a bona fide brand. The duo couldn’t resist a guest appearance on Netflix’s House Of Cards, and Nadya, now the most recognizable of the group and a consistent spokesperson, has a publicist, something else you don’t see among Idle No More and Occupy activists.
She insists she’s not famous. But while resisting her own personal celebrity, she doesn’t mind riding the coattails of someone else’s. Where ultra-radical activists would have sneered at Madonna’s support – she wore the wordsPussy Riot” on her back during a concert after the initial arrests – and other Pussy Rioters complained when Nadya and Masha appeared at Madonna’s concert for Amnesty International, Nadya remains unapologetic.
“I appreciated it. I want to say thanks to Madonna for being so open to what we say. When she makes a statement like that, you can reach more people and make a difference.”
These are Nadya’s constant themes: reaching out, communicating, changing awareness.
“If you have the voice, you have the responsibility to help people who don’t have that voice.”
The collective began as a feminist punk band, but Nadya admits they were never musicians – and that’s obvious in their “performances.” The feminist impulse, though, is real.
“It’s sad that there are so many women in Russia who want to be strong and independent but they won’t call themselves feminists.”
She suggests that feminism comes across as too earnest, too serious and forbidding, which is why she’s so intent on pushing irony in everything she does. She famously participated in a live sex show at Moscow’s Biology Museum in 2008. Russian media dismissed the show as an orgy created for titillation purposes, but it was always intended as a satiric attack on Russian repression.
“Political change can come out of irony and humour,” she explains. “I love those Slut parades [Slut Walks] – you invented them in Canada, didn’t you? They’re so cool because they take an ironic approach. The women call themselves sluts and bitches and make those words mean something else. People did the same thing with the word ‘queer.'”
Always the activist, never a tourist, she doesn’t park her politics when she enters another country. In New York during a major I Can’t Breathe protest, she was inspired by the passion she saw and helmed Pussy Riot’s I Can’t Breathe video, featuring a very non-punk melodic vocal by Sascha Klokova from the band Jack Wood.
To those tempted to tell her to mind her own nation’s political business, she fires back with her signature eloquent defiance.
“Some people say it’s not our country, but if you want to stay alive, you have to stay alive everywhere you go.”
susanc@nowtoronto.com | @susangcole
