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| Nadya Tolokonnikova enters the courtroom vowing resistance. |
I don't usually do SCISSION on Sunday, but I found this interview with Pussy Riot on my friend Bill Berkowitz's Facebook page, and I found it interesting. So if you are ticked off to get a Scission on Sunday, blame Bill. On the other hand, a Pussy Riot article on Sunday seems almost destiny.
FREE PUSSY RIOT!
FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS!
The following is, believe it or not, from GQ....
Pussy Riot: The Jailhouse Interview
They've become global heroes and foils to the macho rule of Vladimir Putin. But not even a two-year prison term can keep Russia's celebrated punk band muzzled. Michael Idov smuggled a few questions into the grrrls' gulag. Judging by their answers, the riot is just getting warmed up
BY Michael Idov
This year, Russia launched its first crossover pop stars since the days of Gorky Park—and it's done so by throwing them in jail. Pussy Riot, a feminist punk collective that staged guerrilla performances all over Moscow (culminating in a "punk prayer" in a cathedral, which got three of its members arrested), showed up on every front page from Libération to the New York Post and single-handedly revived riot-grrrl chic. Meanwhile, the fate of the three prisoners—Nadezhda "Nadya" Tolokonnikova, Maria "Masha" Alyokhina, and Yekaterina "Katya" Samutsevich—became an international cause, championed by everyone from Madonna to David Cameron. Sentenced to two years each on the absurd charge of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred," the "girls," as everyone in Russia calls them, are getting by without the Internet, only vaguely aware of their global celebrity. GQ managed to correspond with them by slipping questions in with their lawyers. Katya's answers got confiscated. Nadya's and Masha's follow.
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GQ: What is your average day like now? How do you get the news from the outside?
Masha: They have small, medium, and large cells here. We're in three different small ones. Only the large cells have in-room showers; we get showers once a week. After 6 a.m., you're not allowed to sleep under a blanket. Theoretically, until lights-out at 10 p.m., you're not allowed to sleep at all, but in practice you can lie on top of the blanket and cover yourself with your coat. Nobody can explain why; the only answer you hear to any question is "That's the rule" and "We keep to a regimen here." Every day there's an hour-long walk in a "yard," which is a concrete box with two benches and a sliver of sky between a cement wall and a plastic roof. It's all "Hug the wall" this and "Hands behind your back" that. They search our cells regularly and confiscate our drawings and notes. Why? "The rules." Pretty much the only news we get is from federal TV channels. Only now do I realize the sheer amount of lies and censorship there. When you have the Internet, you don't feel it as sharply. But once a week our lawyers bring us different news, words of support, and that helps a lot.
Nadya: Prison is a good place to learn to really listen to your own mind and your own body. I've learned to read much more deeply, for instance. For four months, I had nothing to read but the Bible, so I read it for all four months—diligently, picking everything apart. Prison is like a monastery—it's a place for ascetic practices. After a month here, I became a vegetarian. Walking in circles for an hour in that tiny dusty yard gets you into a pretty meditative state as well. We don't get much in the way of the news. But enough to get inspired.
GQ: A Moscow newspaper has printed a vicious article about how you're getting "VIP treatment" in prison, with massages and manicures.
Nadya: Did Auschwitz have VIP death lounges? If yes, then I suppose you can call our conditions VIP treatment.
GQ: Your closing statements in court, where you cite everyone from the Bible to Dostoyevsky to Socrates to Solzhenitsyn, have become instant classics. Some lines, like Katya's "We have already won" or Nadya's "People can sense the truth. Truth has an ontological superiority over lies" are now as famous as your songs. How did you manage to write these speeches with no access to any research? Were you at least able to coordinate them?
Nadya: Our trial, as you know, was designed to be as short as possible. The judge scheduled back-to-back court sessions from ten in the morning to ten at night. Then it took a couple of hours more to get us back to the cells. There, I would eat an orange, drink some milk, and start working on my speech by night-light. To get closer to the dim lamp, I would sit on an upside-down wash basin, right under the hooks where our clothes hang. After twelve hours at the courthouse and two transfers, I wasn't in the best of states. But it doesn't take that much effort to put truth on paper. Even if your head is splitting from exhaustion, it feels kind of nice to just let go and be sincere, to have an open soul. You can even allow yourself to be a kind of idiot, like Dostoyevsky's Count Myshkin.
Masha: Here in Russia, a prisoner has no Internet access, no computer, not even a typewriter, so I wrote everything by hand: many rough drafts and then a combined "clean" draft. We read some bits of our speeches to each other during the transfer, in the unventilated, smoke-filled prison bus.
Nadya: We didn't really coordinate with each other. After putting on performances together, we had learned to understand each other without words. But in court, we had some surprising coincidences. For example, Masha's statement and mine ended up using the exact same two quotations from the New Testament.
GQ: So, were you ready to end up in here when you put on the balaclavas a year ago?
Nadya: We knew we were in a kind of risk zone. But we deliberately did things that were peaceful and nonviolent and didn't even damage other people's property. We specifically made sure not to break any laws. When people asked us if we were afraid, we'd say, "We're not doing anything illegal—and if someone decides to put us in jail, they'll do it anyway."
We acted according to Paul Feyerabend's slogan: "Anything goes." From our very first performance on, we were shadowed by the so-called Tsentr E ["Center for Combating Extremism," basically a police unit designed for persecuting political opposition], but we decided to keep going regardless of the pressure. Anything goes.
GQ: Did you think that it would be specifically the church performance that got you arrested? Your Red Square show [where Pussy Riot performed a song titled "Riot in Russia—Putin Is Chickenshit" right by the walls of the Kremlin] seemed far riskier at the time.
Nadya: To be frank, we tried not to think about the possible arrests at all. If you start thinking about this sort of thing, you can't do anything political. Plus, we couldn't even imagine that the authorities would be so dumb that they would actually legitimize our influence by arresting us. Sure, Tsentr E tried to intimidate us by tailing us constantly. But unlike Putin, we're not chickenshit—so we didn't stop performing. The church performance was a perfect opportunity for Putin's apparatchiks to claim that our motives were religious intolerance and not political protest. This way our persecution could be framed as a righteous burning of blasphemers, as opposed to just stifling free speech.
GQ: "Pussy Riot" is a weirdly perfect band name, especially considering you're Russian. Who thought of this first?
Nadya: It's hard to even remember now. We were all in this near panic. We had just suddenly realized that there has never been a feminist punk collective in Russia and decided to create one right there. So we were all kind of manic and excited and came up with the name on the spot.
Masha: Everything is collective—the lyrics, the band name.
GQ: Did you know that your anonymous bandmates who are still at large would actually drop a single, "Putin Lights Up the Fires," on the day of your verdict?
Nadya: I had no idea. I was also pleasantly surprised when they blasted the single [outside the courthouse] during the verdict. Masha: I had an inkling they would.GQ: Were you surprised by the scope and the volume of Western support for you?
Nadya: I still can't shake the feeling that I've spent the last six months acting in a big-budget movie. The amount of Western support that we got is a miracle. I believe that if Russia had independent national media, our performance would be better understood at home as well. Right now we're in hell here. It's hard living in a place where everyone can hate you because of something they heard on TV. That's why every gesture of support is so important and so much appreciated.
GQ: How and when did you find out that Madonna has performed "Like a Virgin" in a balaclava, with the words "Pussy Riot" on her bare body?
Nadya: On August 7, the judge suddenly ended the session at 6 p.m., not at 10 as usual. "She's going to Madonna's show," we joked as they took us out in handcuffs, with that police dog barking at us. Next morning, as we arrived to the courthouse, our lawyers ran to us with some blurry black-and-white photos of a half-naked woman in a balaclava, with "Pussy Riot" on her back. We're like, "Oh wow, that's cool." And our lawyers say: "You don't get it, this is Madonna!" "Wow, that's REALLY cool." That was all we could even say before the judge came in, and our useless trial began again.
GQ: Does it bug you as feminists that your global popularity is at least partly based on the fact that you turned out to be, well, easy on the eyes?
Nadya: I humbly hope that our attractiveness performs a subversive function. First of all, because without "us" in balaclavas, jumping all over Red Square with guitars, there is no "us" smiling sweetly in the courtroom. You can't get the latter without the former. Second, because this attractiveness destroys the idiotic stereotype, still extant in Russia, that a feminist is an ugly-ass frustrated harridan. This stereotype is so puke-making that I will deign to be sweet for a little bit in order to destroy it. Though every time I open my mouth, the sweetness goes out the window anyway.
GQ: This is perhaps an insensitive question, but what's more useful for the progressive movement in Russia right now: Pussy Riot at large or Pussy Riot in jail?
Nadya: We will know the answer only after the next wave of protests. I would love to see that, even imprisoned, we can still be useful and inspiring. In any case, I'm happy I got two years. For every person with a functioning brain, this verdict is so dumb and cruel that it removes any lingering illusions about Putin's system. It's a verdict on the system.
Masha: At large, of course. That's why the authorities don't want to let us out. But we still have things to say, and we still want to say them. And even locked up, we're not doing too bad of a job.
"We couldn't even imagine that the authorities would be so dumb that they would actually legitimize our influence by arresting us. Sure, they tried to intimidate us constantly. But unlike Putin, we're not chickenshit."
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