12:06 pm Aug. 17, 2012
The news this morning that three members of the Russian feminist-punk collective Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in prison for hooliganism was not unexpected.
But it will be a disappointment to those who gathered last night at The Ace Hotel’s Liberty Hall on 29th Street, where actress Chloe Sevigny, writer Eileen Myles, artist K8 Hardy, musician and Le Tigre alum Johanna Fateman, and others read letters, poetry, and translated courtroom statements written by the three women. (The event was arranged in short order by musician J.D. Samson (Fateman's former bandmate in Le Tigre) and Robert Lieber of FreePussyRiot.org.) A crowd of over 700 people, many of whom wore Pussy Riot T-shirts, wrapped around the block beforehand.
The readers, sometimes struggling to pronounce the polysyllabic Russian surnames, delivered impassioned performances.
“The fucking end to sexist Putinists!” Hardy shouted during “Death to Prison, Freedom to Protest,” provoking cheers from the predominantly female audience. The performance artist Karen Finley read Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina’s opening statement, her voice cracking with emotion as she recited Alyokhina’s claim that Pussy Riot “never had any religious hatred of the Orthodox Christianity.”
Sevigny, stoic and poised in a white dress, read Alyekhina’s Letter from Prison, dated March 5. When she left the room shortly after, several journalists followed in pursuit, requesting interviews.
“I’m not leaving,” she said tiredly. “I’m just going to the bathroom.”
Other readings—by turns outraged, intellectual, wry and comical—included "Letter from Pussy Riot to President Medvedev," "Selected Court Transcripts from the Prosecution," and "Putin Pissed Himself," which the flier noted is sometimes translated as “Putin Got Scared.”
The evening drew other activist collectives not ostensibly connected with Pussy Riot. A New World in Our Hearts laid out a table full of zines, whose titles included “Judeo-Christian Degradation of Women” and “Genital Autonomy: Why Circumcision Must Be Stopped.” Joshua Zero, 35, a member of the group, said, “We’re interested in encouraging dissent,” before unfurling a banner that read: “We Are All Hooligans.”
Not everyone present was familiar with the punk-rock feminists.
“I don’t really know anything about this, but I wanted to come,” said a man in a pair of blue stockings.
“Pussy what?” said a woman who’d accidentally entered Liberty Hall while searching for the bathroom.
It seems strange that anyone could have missed the moment. Over the last few weeks, the women have received an overwhelming display of support from Western pop stars, celebrities and cultural figures. In a recent concert in Moscow, Madonna performed “Like a Virgin” with “Pussy Riot” scrawled on her back. Paul McCartney published an open letter to the women last Thursday, asking Russian authorities to “support the principle of free speech for all citizens.” Even actress and vegetarian activist Alicia Silverstone chimed in, requesting in a letter to Putin that the group be served vegan foods in jail, after learning that Alyokhina, a vegan, had collapsed from hunger during the trial.
But many had been closely following the trial of Alyokhina, and her comrades Yekaterina Samutsevich and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova—jailed and accused of “hooliganism in an attempt to incite religious hatred” for an agitprop performance staged near the altar of Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow. Their faces hidden behind colorful balaclavas, for about 40 seconds, the women flailed around and occasionally genuflected while lip-synching to a song titled “Punk Prayer,” punctuated by shrieks of “Holy Mother, drive Putin away!” as a protest against the corruption of President Vladimir Putin and Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia.
Sasha Krylova, 28, a Moscow native living in New York for six months, said she came to see whether the crowd at The Ace Hotel knew what they were supporting.
“My mother benefitted from the fall of Communism, and she doesn’t support Pussy Riot,” she said. “She thinks they deserve it, because it was a church and blah blah blah." She went on: "But I have, with my own eyes, seen the head of the church drive through Moscow in a bulletproof Jeep with guns sticking out. He’s supposed to represent peace, the church, the Dalai Lama of the Orthodox. But he doesn’t. He’s Mafia.”
Ms. Krylova, who admitted she works for a government-owned Petrol company in Moscow (“I’m a part of the system”), added that “the mass” in Russia tend to believe the propaganda cast against the collective on television.
“They think these girls participate in orgies with their kids and put bottles in their vaginas,” she said with exasperation. “And they believe this because this is what you see on the news. Here the news is owned by Republicans and Democrats, but in Russia, everything is owned by the state. So the mass tends to think Pussy Riot deserves seven years, if not life in prison, if not a death sentence.”
Jeanine Troisi, 47, a registered nurse and former activist, said she has several Russian friends who immigrated to the United States. “Russia says it’s progressive and Western and it’s identifying itself with us,” she said. “But if they want to get into the Western ideal, they need to believe in the democratic separation of church and state, and they clearly don’t.”
The reading concluded around 9:45, after which the readers spoke to members of the press. Eileen Myles compared the collective fervor surrounding Pussy Riot to Woodstock, which she’d attended.
“Everybody knew about it, and we went like lemmings toward it,” she said, adding: “There’s a cultural bubble that we’re all in, and we’re starting to realize that we’re all are in prison. Pussy Riot is in our culture and Russia at once.”
Masha Gessen, a Moscow-based journalist who penned an article for the New York Times comparing the Pussy Riot trial to the Stalinist show trials, said that the case has been a cause for despondency in Moscow.
“It’s a witch trial, and an incompetent witch trial, which somehow adds insult to injury,” Gessen, who is in New York on vacation, said. (N+1, the journal edited by her brother Keith Gessen, published translation's of the bandmembers' closing statements earlier this week on its website.) She correctly predicted that the members of Pussy Riot would be convicted and sentenced to several years in jail. But she also noted that the collective sentiment in Russia has shifted of late.
“At some point, it began to feel like ‘The worse, the better,’” she said, referring to the popular Russian saying. The state is “showing their true colors like they never have before. And in that way, Pussy Riot has won.”
In the verdict this morning, they were found guilty and sentenced to two years in prison apiece.
Several actions were being planned to take place in New York today, including one outside the Russian Consulate, at which three protesters were arrested. A large protest in Moscow, unrelated to the Pussy Riot trial, is scheduled for August 19.
“It was stupid of them not to delay the verdict for a few days,” Gessen added, “because now even more people will show up in the streets.”
