Pussy Riot and the Translatability of Cultures

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Irina Dzero and Tatyana Bystrova Kent State University [email protected]; [email protected]

Abstract

The punk feminist collective Pussy Riot translate new ideas by embedding them in the visual symbols of the target culture. With their short bright-colored dresses and tights they tap into the stylistics of the Russian female performance as non-threatening am- biance to take the stage and protest against misogyny and authoritarianism. In 2012 they performed at Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral and asked the Virgin Mary to put an end to Vladimir Putin’s rule. They were captured and sentenced to two years in prison for instigating religious hatred. Welcomed in the West, they made a music video “I Can’t Breathe” (2015) using the case of Eric Garner to explain the tolerance for authority in Russia. We look at the eclectic mix of thinkers and artists Pussy Riot named as their inspirers, and use the collective’s work to examine the changing attitude to the translatability of cultures.

Keywords

Pussy Riot – tolerance for authority – authoritarianism – intercultural translation – performance art

Pussy Riot, a Russian punk feminist collective, rose to fame after their “punk prayer” – dancing at the altar at the Moscow Christ the Savior Cathedral and asking the Virgin Mary to “chase away” Vladimir Putin, Russia’s ruler since 2000. This article examines the collective’s work as intercultural translation: they seek to make intelligible bodies of knowledge poorly known or understood in the target culture. In performing for the Russian audiences, they introduce feminism and political activism. They use visuals – their image, dress, and dance moves, the place they choose for their performance (prison roof, church, luxury boutique) – to get these new ideas across. With their short bright -colored

Pussy Riot and the Translatability of Cultures 265 dresses, they tap into the image of a stereotypical non-thr eatening female en- tertainer and buy themselves a few minutes to promote, in a visceral and offensive manner, the principle of government accountability and transparency, and women’s rights. Pussy Riot also tap into the Orthodox Russian cultural tradition of holy foolishness: disruptive, strange, and spectacular behavior to challenge the excesses of the Church, the wealthy, and the autocratic ruler. In their “punk prayer,” Pussy Riot accused the head of the Russian Church and the head of state of stifling the movement for democracy in Russia. The state responded by retranslating this performance into a crime of religious hatred. A group of experts assembled to evaluate the performance argued that the group’s intention was to insult the Russian Christians. The two captured members of the group, Maria Alekhina and Nadia Tolokonnikova, spent almost two years in prison. After they were released, western politicians and audiences received them with open arms. The duo gave public lectures at us and European universities, met with politicians, appeared in The House of Cards and even in Glamour magazine to explain punk feminism in terms of girl power. When they began performing for western audiences, they focused on the high tolerance for authority in Russia and the arbitrary use of force by the state against its citizens. Their music video “I Can’t Breathe” uses the case of Eric Garner, which many take to prove that ethnic minorities do not enjoy the same civil rights as the white majority. We propose to examine Pussy Riot’s work as performance of intercultural translation and a case study of the shifting attitude to intercultural translation in general. To understand the group’s objectives and strategies, we look at the thinkers and artists they named as their inspirers: Judith Butler, Rosie Braidotti, Shulamite Firestone, Andrea Dworkin, bell hooks, Valie Export, Lynda Benglis, Santiago Sierra, Artur Žmijewski, Boryana Rossa, and Elena Kovylina. This eclectic blend of influences exemplifies the optimism of the early 2010s inspired by Democracy’s Fourth Wave – the rise of anti-authoritarian movements in the non-western world. Cultures were considered permeable, translatable, and enriching for one another. This thinking has been put to the test since then, as the escalating suspicion of all estab- lished authority is changing societies all over the world.

Dress, Dance Moves, Lyrics, and Artistic Inspiration

Pussy Riot’s logo is a fiery-eyed girl in a short bright dress and a balaclava, armed with a guitar that shoots lightning bolts. The collective explain that the name “Pussy Riot” aims to “turn the female sex organ, supposedly receiving and shapeless,” into a symbol of “radical rebellion against the cultural order

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Figure 1 Kropotkin-Vodka: Pussy Riot Burns Putin’s Glitz (2011) that keeps trying to define it and show it its place.”1 The performers wear neon- colored short light dresses, tights, and sports shoes. They jump, kick, punch and thrust their pelvises as they shout insults at sexists and conformists in the government and in their accidental audience. With their short colorful dresses, Pussy Riot tap into the modern-day formulaic female performance as non- threatening ambience to get access to their performance venue. When they take the podium at a private fashion show at a Moscow mansion (Fig. 1), the models, arms akimbo, look down on them with scorn, taking them for incom- petent competitors, but competitors all the same. Pussy Riot look like young shapely women, and the audience does not mind giving them a listen, expect- ing relaxing entertainment. Pussy Riot members exploit and derail the typical Russian female singer image following their inspirer Judith Butler. Butler argued that gender is not a law of nature but an act of copying gender models shaped by cultural practices. She called for performative acts that decompose these “normal,” “original” gender categories.2 Pussy Riot explain their androgynous stage image: “something

1 Pussy Riot, ‘Meeting Pussy Riot,’ interview by Harry Langston, Vice (March 12, 2012), http:// www.vice.com/read/A-Russian-Pussy-Riot (accessed 2 December 2016). 2 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1999), 176 and 187.

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Pussy Riot and the Translatability of Cultures 267 looking like a woman but having no female face or hair.”3 In 1973 Lynda Benglis, another inspirer of the collective, burst into the art world with a similar gender travesty performance in her series of artist publicity photos. Photographed in a suit caressing a Porsche, she wears a man’s bearing and gaze – complacent, confident, not seeking to please, as “the ultimate mockery of the pinup and the macho.”4 Another inspirer, artist Valie Export, walked into an art movie theater in crotchless pants, parading her genitalia at the face level of the audience in “Action Pants: Genital Panic” (1968), in order to protest the cinematic packag- ing of the female body as passive. In another performance, “Tap and Touch Cinema,” Valie Export invited passersby to explore her naked upper body con- cealed under an open-front box covered by curtains. The performance was meant as a “step towards becoming a subject”5 for women. Like these first-wave feminists, Pussy Riot do not smile. Shulamite Firestone, another of their inspirers, described women’s readiness to smile as a “nervous tic,” “acquiescence to [their] own oppression.”6 Following these pioneers of feminism, Pussy Riot fashion their bodies and body language as a parody and weapon to challenge the subordination of women. Why conceal their faces with balaclavas if they expect to be, and are, detained by the police during their unsanctioned performances? Santiago Sierra, another artist Pussy Riot name as their inspirer, uses concealment to attract attention to people who usually go unnoticed. He pays migrant workers to sit hidden for hours in large cardboard boxes displayed at art exhibits. Hidden in a box and displayed as an art object, an object of luxury, these people acquire a visibility for the general public which they do not have when they are physi- cally visible and available to talk. The man Sierra paid to live hidden for 365 hours behind a brick wall at the MoMA exhibit in New York told the artist that “no one had ever been so interested in him and that he had never met so many people.”7 A young female person is regarded to be of little importance in Russia, so concealing her with a balaclava paradoxically heightens her visibility.

3 Ekaterina Samutsevich, interview by Ksenia Sobchak, Snob (19 November 2012) http://snob .ru/selected/entry/53946 (accessed 2 December 2016). 4 Lynda Benglis, ‘Lynda Benglis: Now You Are Ready,’ The Guardian (22 February 2012) http:// www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/feb/22/lynda-benglis-uk-retrospective-interview (accessed 2 December 2016). 5 Roswitha Mueller, Valie Export: Fragments of the Imagination (Bloomington, in: Indiana up, 1994), 17. 6 Shulamite Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Mac- millan, 1970), 90. 7 Santiago Sierra, interview by Teresa Margolles, Bomb Magazine 86 (Winter 2004) http:// bombmagazine.org/article/2606 (accessed 2 December 2016).

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What is more, women all over the world can don a balaclava and become Pussy Riot. The artists argue that their feminist and democratic agenda does not have one center or one leader; instead, it spreads laterally as a rhizome, as a non-hierarchical network of activists. Their inspirer Rosi Braidotti (former student of Deleuze) calls authoritarian power structure “phallogocentric,” and describes it as static and having run its course: “nothing happens at the center…: the heart of being is still, like the center of a nuclear reactor.”8 Pussy Riot insist that in order to decompose the authoritarian and vertical power structure, the pro-democracy movement should be rhyzomatic and have “no chieftains. Many people today are waiting for the coming of a new leader, a fatherly tsar who will take care of everything for them. But the coming of a new universally revered big boss is bound to protract the era of authoritarianism.”9

Performance Art and Political Intent

Performance art interacts with the audience to create new realities. Pyotr Pav- lensky, Pussy Riot’s ally, said that art is overcoming boundaries.10 He said it to a police officer, in December 2015, when he was arrested and questioned after his performance The Threat, in which he photographed himself in front of the entrance door of the Russian secret police building Lubyanka after setting that door ablaze. The performance act challenged authoritarianism and its recent history in Russia: Lubyanka was the place where thousands of innocent citizens perished during Stalinist purges. After conversing with Pavlensky, the police officer dropped out of the investigation and became a defense lawyer. Similarly, Artur Žmijewski, the collective’s inspirer from Poland, calls for art to transform life and to fight “that terrible ideological cynicism that is spreading like wildfire through the entire world, through institutions of the state, and the world of politics.”11 Art “has this impossible inventiveness that enables us

8 Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia up, 1994), 187. 9 Pussy Riot, ‘Nelegal’nyi kontzert na turemnoi kryshe’ [Illegal concert on the prison’s roof], LiveJournal.com (14 December 2011) http://pussy-riot.livejournal.com/5763.html (accessed 2 December 2016). 10 Pyotr Pavlenskiy, questioning of Pyotr Pavlenskiy by Pavel Iasman, Snob (22 January 2015) https://snob.ru/selected/entry/77648/page/2 (accessed 2 December 2016). 11 Artur Žmijewski, ‘Art’s Inner Life,’ interview by Adam Mazur, Biweekly.pl (1 November 2011) http://www.biweekly.pl/article/3071-art’s-inner-life.html (accessed 2 December 2016).

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Pussy Riot and the Translatability of Cultures 269 to redefine the world, where we react to what goes on in our reality, where we find solutions to the problems of today.”12 Žmijewski’s videos appropriate and transform places and experiences of submission to sadistic authority: partici- pants play tag in Nazi gas chambers or reenact the Stanford prison experiment by rebelling against the “guards.” It is precisely “to open the world of politics to average people, especially in the case of decision making, to democratize the government, and to politicize culture,” as Žmijewski puts it, that Pussy Riot perform in most unlikely venues and for people who seek to avoid engagement with political issues – shoppers, bystanders, private fashion show audiences, oil rig workers, prison inmates, churchgoers, and police officers. Another Pussy Riot inspirer, Bulgarian-American artist and academic Bo- ryana Rossa, in her Civil Position performance stood kneeling for two hours at a public square in Sofia, hooded and handcuffed. Leaflets spread around her called passersby to stand up and resist government crackdowns on protest demonstration.13 Pussy Riot also explain each performance in a thought- ful and tongue-in-cheek report. For example, they performed their “Kropotkin Vodka” in a luxury fashion boutique to suggest that the business and artistic elites support the autocratic regime in exchange for a luxurious lifestyle. The performers help themselves to thousand-dollar fur coats because they “feel the need to measure up to the boutique’s atmosphere,” and one of them “in a bout of hunger, picks up and snacks on a sandwich she found on the floor.” The gesture of eating someone’s leftover food while wearing a luxury coat is meant to mock and offend the business and artistic elite, and the performance report explains why: “Putin’s glitz thrives on passivity, conformism,” “avoiding politics and consuming mind-numbing posh stuff.”14

Viscerality

When Pussy Riot perform, they want to elicit from their accidental audience first a visceral response – “what was that?” and then an intellectual one – “why did they do that?” They take inspiration from artists who used visceral response as a technique. Some sew themselves with surgical thread to another person or

12 Ibid. 13 Boryana Rossa, ‘Civil Position,’ Works: Performance and Intervention (2007). http://boryan- arossa.com/civil-position (accessed 2 December 2016). 14 Pussy Riot, ‘Kropotkin-Vodka, Pussy Riot zhget putinskii glamur’ [Kropotkin-Vodka, Pussy Riot is burning Putin’s glitz], LiveJournal.com (1 December 2011) http://pussy-riot.live journal.com/5164.html (accessed 2 December 2016).

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270 Dzero and Bystrova to an object, as Rossa or Pavlensky; others invite the audience to sit down at a table set for an exquisite tea party and set the tablecloth afire, as their inspirer artist Elena Kovylina in Would You Like a Cup of Coffee? Or Burn Down the World of the Bourgeoisie! To elicit this visceral response, Pussy Riot use flammable powder and a fire extinguisher. Their lyrics, too, are visceral. They perform for people who shy away from politics to make them consider that political apathy may be the cause of their unsatisfactory living conditions. This audience does not read academic jour- nals to learn about their subordination – they do not even perceive it as such. Geert Hofstede’s parameters for differentiating national cultures assess Rus- sia’s tolerance for authority as high, with a power distance index of 93 (com- pared to 40 in the us).15 Societies with a high power distance index “accept a hierarchical order in which everybody has a place and which needs no further justification.”16 Authoritarianism has dominated Russia for centuries and Rus- sians tend to rely on their leaders even in the absence of stable income, reliable healthcare, pension, and education systems which leaders promise to provide. Pussy Riot represent this tolerance for authority as conformism in exchange for status, financial perks, and peace of mind. They challenge reliance on authority with offensive and mocking lyrics, for example, “All women must do is give birth and make love” (zhenschiny dolzhny rozhat’ i liubit’), and often with expletives: “It’s fucking curtains for sexists, fucking conformists” (pizdets seksis- tam, ebanym konformistam).17 Their inspirer Andrea Dworkin was first to use this offensive and aggres- sive style to make women aware of their subordination. In Right-Wing Women, Dworkin used the expletive ‘fuck’ and its derivatives over fifty times to explain the mechanics of gender inequality. Dworkin argued that women are afraid of male violence and relinquish their agency to obtain protection. But men abuse women’s trust and instead of protecting them “fuck them into submission; subordinate them through sex.”18 Women who do not believe in feminism choose to be perpetual minors without agency. Dworkin chooses words she knows will offend her readers:

15 Hofstede Centre, National Culture: Russia (2016) https://geert-hofstede.com/russia.html (accessed 2 December 2016). 16 Geert Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Or- ganizations Across Nations (Thousand Oaks, ca: Sage Publications, 2001). 17 Pussy Riot, ‘Punk-moleben’ [Punk prayer], Pussy Riot: Kak v krasnoi tiur’me (22 February 2012) pussy-riot.info (accessed 2 December 2016). 18 Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women (New York: Perigee Books, 1978), 129.

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Pussy Riot and the Translatability of Cultures 271

From father’s house to husband’s house to a grave that still might not be her own, a woman acquiesces to male authority in order to gain some protection from male violence. She will save herself by proving that she is loyal, obedient, useful, even fanatic in the service of the men around her. She is the happy hooker, the happy homemaker, the exemplary Chris- tian, the pure academic, the perfect comrade, the terrorist par excellence. Whatever the values, she will embody them with a perfect fidelity.19

Dworkin uses offensive wording to take her readers out of their comfort zone, to make them consider that conformity may be the reason why “neither men nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings.”20 Another Pussy Riot inspirer, bell hooks, builds on this argument to say that black women abandoned their agency to men during the American civil rights movement, and lost it. “They allied themselves with black patriarchy they believed would protect their interests” and called feminism “white women foolishness.” “What has begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy,” concludes hooks.21 Feminism in Russia continues to remain a sealed body of knowledge treated with suspicion, even among the intellectuals. It is no wonder Pussy Riot turn to first-wave feminists of the seventies – Andrea Dworkin, Kate Millet, and Sh- ulamite Firestone. In the us their once radical ideas became part of the popular culture, but in Russia they are still largely unknown or misrepresented. Ozon, the largest Russian Internet book retailer, offers no books by Millet or Firestone. Dworkin, Spivak, and bell hooks appear together in one (1) gender studies anthology. Of all feminist thinkers Pussy Riot named as their inspirers, only Simone de Beauvoir’s 1953 classic Second Sex is available in Russia. If the first-wave feminists were translated into Russian, it would have hap- pened after the fall of the Iron Curtain in the early 1990s. But it was too late – they did not capture the attention of the public. Either the publishers could not generate interest in these works, or the post-Soviet reading public was al- ready weary of the talk of equality between men and women, which has been around since the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. The formal legal equality of men and women fossilized as one of the bureaucratic formalities of the Soviet State, along with the “bright future” and the “victory of the world proletariat.” In the 1970s, when the first dissidents denounced the Soviet State as totalitarian, they

19 Ibid., 14. 20 Ibid., 21. 21 bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (London: Pluto Press, 1982), 9.

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272 Dzero and Bystrova turned for inspiration to mystical Orthodox Christianity (then prohibited by the state). The subordinate position of women never became part of the dissenting intellectuals’ agenda.22 Natalia Pushkareva, chair of Ethnos and Gender Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences, argues that feminism’s poor reputation in Russia is the making of Soviet and post-Soviet ideologists. “These stories they’ve been feed- ing us for decades” presented all feminists as men-hating radicals. As a result, few women believe they can or should aspire to positions of leadership, and few women hold such positions. “When you ask Russian women, ‘Who would you rather see in charge, men or women?’ it is rare to hear ‘it does not matter as long as it’s a good person.’ Instead, they often say, ‘We want a man to tell us what to do,’” notes Pushkareva. Women work as underpaid and overworked hospital personnel, men as head physicians; women work at daycares and as teachers, men define the curriculum at the Russian Academy of Education. Among the members of the Russian Academy of Sciences, women account for less than 4%.23 Journalist and literary critic Anna Narinskaya says that Russians “missed out on” feminism. Instead of scoffing at feminist theory as “banal and even boring,” Russians need to study it first and talk about it in an “accessible language.”24 “We do not possess a language in which we could discuss this,” echoes writer Linor Goralik. “Regular folks can’t figure out which gear we [feminists] slipped” (s kakogo duba my upali).25 Ksenia Sobchak, pop culture icon and journalist, could not believe her ears when Ekaterina Samutsevich, the third known Pussy Riot member, told her that they get together to discuss events, issues, “and sexism, of course. – Why, young and pretty girls getting together and discussing sexism!” gasps Sobchak in mock amazement. – “I, for one, cannot imagine my- self and my girlfriends getting together and talking about sexism rather than dudes.”26 Women are not expected to formulate their opinions and demands in their own name and must rely on men to get what they need, be it a fur coat

22 Anna Narinskaya, ‘Chto takoe feminizm v Rossii’ [What is feminism in Russia], Colta (13 February 2014) http://www.colta.ru/articles/specials/2038 (accessed 2 December 2016). 23 Natalia Pushkareva, ‘O prodolzhenii seksual’noi revoliutsii i neudachakh rossiiskogo feminizma’ [The present of the sexual revolution and the fiascos of Russian feminism], The Village (19 August 2014) http://www.the-village.ru/village/city/city-news/162785-chto -novogo-genderolog (accessed 2 December 2016). 24 Narinskaya, ‘Chto takoe feminizm v Rossii.’ 25 Linor Goralik, ‘Delo Pussy Riot i sostoianie feminizma v Rossii’ [Pussy Riot case and the state of feminism in Russia], Afisha.ru (22 August 2012) http://gorod.afisha.ru/archive/ delo-pussy-riot-i-sostojanie-feminizma-v-rossii (accessed 2 December 2016). 26 Samutsevich, interview by Ksenia Sobchak.

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Pussy Riot and the Translatability of Cultures 273 or basic necessities. Even Irina Khakamada, a politician who ran for president in 2004, says she is not a feminist. “Men and women are equal in Russia,” she declares, and in the same breath confides that when she was campaigning for president, she had to wait for five minutes for the hooting audience to quiet down.27 In 2009, the then-president Dmitry Medvedev deplored at a women’s forum that many employers in Russia say, “we don’t want to employ women, because guys are easier to work with.” “But that’s the truth,” interjected the then-prime minister Putin good-humoredly.28 It is not known what Putin’s female audience thought of his joke, but Pussy Riot reacted to it with anger: “Sexists have certain ideas about how a woman should behave, and Putin, too, has a couple of thoughts on how Russians should live. Fighting against all that – that’s Pussy Riot.”29

“Punk-prayer,” Incarceration, and the Rise to Fame

The group’s 2012 “punk prayer” performance at Christ the Savior Cathedral made them first infamous, then famous. Pussy Riot danced on the altar for about 40 seconds (the time it took the guard to chase them away), often drop- ping to their knees and crossing themselves. The lyrics criticized Russia’s head of state and head of the Church for excluding women, political activists, and lgbt people from the public sphere. Intriguingly, the verdict that found them guilty was also embedded in the Western ideological commitment to diversity. The verdict accused Pussy Riot of intolerance to the values of the Rus- sian state and the Church and lack of respect for cultural diversity: “In today’s world, relationships between nations, ethnicities, and faiths must be built on mutual respect and equality. The belief that a given ideology, social group, or religion is superior to others prepares the way for hostility and hatred,”30 reads

27 Irina Khakamada, ‘Feminizm: diagnoz ili forma protesta?’ [Feminism: a diagnosis or a form of protest?] Echo Moskvy (8 September 2012) http://echo.msk.ru/programs/ kulshok/927417-echo (accessed 2 December 2016). 28 ‘Putinu bol’she nravitsia rabotat’ s muzhchinami, chem s zhenshchinami. A Medvedevu – net’ [Putin prefers working with men than women, but Medvedev doesn’t], Gazeta (25 November 2011) http://www.gazeta.spb.ru/608219-1 (accessed 2 December 2016). 29 Pussy Riot, ‘Meeting Pussy Riot,’ interview by Harry Langston, Vice (12 March 2012) http:// www.vice.com/read/A-Russian-Pussy-Riot (accessed 2 December 2016). 30 Marina Syrova, ‘Verdikt o Pussy Riot,’ Snob (22 August 2012) http://snob.ru/selected/en try/51999 (accessed 2 December 2016).

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274 Dzero and Bystrova the verdict. The judge noted that “being a feminist in Russia is not a crime” but stressed that “feminism does intrude on moral values, decent behavior, fam- ily and sexual relationships.” Therefore, Pussy Riot’s advancement of feminism runs counter to the “centuries-old values” of Russian Christians.31 This intriguing verdict accuses artists who claim to have access to the political process of intolerance to other people’s traditions and beliefs. It builds upon the expert examination of the “punk prayer” conducted by professors of psychology, law, and philology. The philological component that gives shape to the entire verdict was written by Vsevolod Troitsky, member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Troitsky concluded that Pussy Riot’s primary target were Russian Christians. In order to mock this large group and avoid punishment, they used Putin and the Patriarch to pose as political dissidents. We have seen that the verdict relies on the Western commitment to diversity to condemn Pussy Riot’s rebellion against authoritarianism. For his part, Vsevolod Troitsky relies on Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnivalesque rebellion against authority to condemn them for the same. Both the verdict and the expert evaluation remove the political intent from the “punk prayer” and the theoretical tools they employ. Troitsky first examines the song’s most offensive verse, ‘Patriarch Kirill believes in Putin/He should have believed in God instead, bitch’ (Patriarkh Kirill verit v Putina/Luchshe by v Boga, suka, veril).32 He studies the meaning of the “lexeme ‘bitch’” in four dictionaries: a female dog, a prostitute, a trai- tor, an informer, a thief in law, and a thief who put his past behind him and concludes, “It is perfectly clear that the song uses the word ‘bitch’ precisely in its profane meaning, rather than to mean ‘a female dog.’”33 Troitsky posits that applying such an epithet to the Patriarch must target Russian Christians because they hold the Patriarch sacred. The academic avoids pondering on the meaning of the verse which the insult intensifies: that the Patriarch has often publicly praised the head of state and lent legitimacy to his policies and practices. Shortly before Pussy Riot’s performance at the cathedral, the Patri- arch thanked Putin for “mending the crookedness of our history,” adding, “You once said that you work as a galley slave. The only difference is that slave’s

31 Ibid. 32 Pussy Riot, ‘Punk-moleben.’ 33 Vsevolod Troitsky, V. Abramenkova, and I. Ponkin, ‘Zakliuchenia ekspertov po delu Pussy Riot’ [Experts’ evaluation of the Pussy Riot case], Russkaia Narodnaia Liniia (24 November 2012) http://ruskline.ru/analitika/2012/10/24/zaklyuchenie_komissii_eksper tov_po_delu_pusi_rajt (accessed 2 December 2016).

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Pussy Riot and the Translatability of Cultures 275 work wasn’t so efficient, while your work is.”34 The Patriarch also asked parish- ioners to avoid taking part in the 2012 mass demonstrations against electoral fraud because “Christians don’t take to the streets to protest, their voices can’t be heard, they pray in the silence of monasteries, in monastery cells, in their homes.”35 Next Troitsky examines the refrain which consists of the repetition of ‘holy shit’ (sran’ gospodnia). He writes that the expression’s extreme obscen- ity comes from bringing together the “anal and excremental semantics of the lexeme ‘shit’ and the lexeme ‘holy.’” “This technique of combining the sacred with the profane” again pursues the objective of mocking and insulting Rus- sian Christians and their faith. The expert fails to mention the source of his interpretation: Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of anarchic and carnivalesque rebellion. Although the book Troitsky is quoting, Rabelais and His World, is about a French Renaissance writer, Bakhtin wrote it to respond to the terror and intimidation of the 1930s Stalinist purges. High and low, sacred and profane come together at medieval and Renaissance carnivals. These carnivals are inspired by the human desire to be free, and for the duration of the carnival, all hierarchies and dogmas come undone. When Bakhtin submitted this work as a dissertation to the Gorky Institute of World Literature (the same research institute where Troitsky now works), the intimidated academics nearly rejected it but finally awarded him a lesser degree of Candidate instead of Doctor of Phi- losophy.36 Bakhtin’s work was rediscovered by a group of young scholars of the Gorky Institute in the early 1960s – shortly before Troitsky arrived there. In the West, Bakhtin inspired schools of thought that study oppressive structures and discourse (for example, deconstruction and postcolonial studies). Conversely, this expert evaluation of Pussy Riot’s performance uses Bakhtin’s ideas to condemn the group for taking a stand against state oppression. Troitsky notes that campaigning for the rights of women and lgbt minorities “contradict[s] the teachings of Christianity.” The collective knew that but still urged the Virgin Mary to become a feminist (Bogoroditsa devo, stan’ feministkoi!) to insult Rus- sian Christians, concludes Troitsky.

34 ‘Patriarch Kirill Thanks Putin for Leading the Country out of Crisis in 1990s,’ Interfax- Religion (8 February 2012) http://www.interfax-religion.com/?act=news&div=9049 (accessed 2 December 2016). 35 ‘Patriarch Kirill o protestakh’ [Patriarch Kirill talks about the protests], Gazeta (1 February 2012) www.gazeta.ru/news/lenta/2012/02 (accessed 2 December 2016). 36 Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (London: Routledge, 2002), 89.

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276 Dzero and Bystrova

The Holy Foolishness Tradition in the Tsarist Orthodox Russia

Pussy Riot’s distinctly parodic, defiant, and absurd performance style taps into the old Russian cultural tradition of holy foolishness (iurodstvo). Holy fools (iurodivye) spoke in riddles and profanities and acted strangely and aggres- sively to defy worldly wisdom, beauty, and power in the autocratic Orthodox Russia.37 The tradition stems from St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians: “If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God” (i Cor. 3:18–19). Holy fools enjoyed immunity against legal prosecution. It is no ac- cident that the collective said at the trial, “We are jesters, harlequins, maybe holy fools, we convey no evil… We must be acquitted.”38 The holy fools’ bizarre words and actions were considered prophecies and truths to ponder over and interpret. They stole things at the market and threw them on the ground, shouted and threw things during church services, or rebuked rulers as fear- some as Ivan the Terrible. In Muscovite Russia holy foolishness establishes itself alongside autocracy:39 holy fools had special access to rulers as their “walking conscience.”40 Today’s Russian performance artists emulate and parody the holy fools’ ostentatiously bizarre defiance and “rhetoric of scandal.”41

Translating Tolerance for Authority for Western Audiences

Pussy Riot’s captured members Tolokonnikova and Alekhina were convicted for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” and sentenced to two years in prison. 46% of Russians found this sentence an adequate punishment (35% found it excessive, and only 9% said that such actions should not be tried in a criminal court).42 Public opinion on the case has been shaped by

37 Per-Arno Bodin, Language, Canonization and Holy Foolishness (Stockholm: Stockholm up, 2009), 198. 38 Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, ‘My dolzhny byt’ opravdany’ [We must be acquitted], ntv (7 August 2012) http://www.ntv.ru/novosti/319096 (accessed 8 June, 2017). 39 Ibid., 199. 40 Priscilla Hunt, Introduction, Holy Foolishness in Russia (Bloomington, in: Slavika, 2011), 4. 41 Bodin 209; Laura Piccolo, “From Stylization to Parody: The Paradigm of Holy Foolishness in Contemporary Russian Performance Art,” Holy Foolishness in Russia (Bloomington, in: Slavika, 2011). 42 Levada, ‘Rossiiane o dele Pussy Riot’ [Russians on the Pussy Riot case], Levada.ru (31 July 2012) http://www.levada.ru/31-07-2012/rossiyane-o-dele-pussy-riot (accessed 2 December 2016).

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state-controlled media but also misogyny: thousands of online comments rep- resented the performers as puppets of a man who planned the entire performance or as sexual perverts and bad mothers to their children who deserve a good spanking for their inappropriate and unrepentant behavior. According to Levada polling center, Pussy Riot’s fiercest critics are women over 45 with low and average income43 who suffer from gender discrimination but also repro- duce it. During their incarceration, the band members were awarded a number of prizes at home and abroad: the Soratnik Prize, Snob Magazine Prize, John Lennon Peace Prize, and Hannah Arendt prize. Art Review and Foreign Policy included them in their 2012 lists of the world’s most influential people. Tolokon- nikova exchanged letters with Slavoj Žižek. Released from prison on the eve of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Alekhina and Tolokonnikova found- ed a news portal Mediazona, gave public lectures at American and European universities, sang with Madonna at an Amnesty International concert, and met with the secretary of state Hillary Clinton and the members of the us Congress. In the early 2010s, many Western politicians and academics argued that the time of authoritarians was soon to end and celebrated anti-authoritarian non- Western movements. For this reason, Pussy Riot rose to international fame as unprecedented symbols of protest against misogyny and authoritarianism in Russia. The episode of the popular us Netflix series The House of Cards aired in 2015 has the two Pussy Riot members and a fictional Putin meet at the White House. Elegantly attired, Tolokonnikova and Alekhina attend a state dinner given in the honor of the fictional Russian President whose name (Victor Petrov) and appearance transparently allude to Vladimir Putin. Petrov attempts to co- opt Pussy Riot and raises his glass in a toast to Russia, saying that despite their differences, he and they have in common their love for their homeland. Tolo- konnikova and Alekhina respond with a performance. They spew in a high- pitched voice and rapid tempo a toast to a president who respects his critics so much that he puts them all in jail, pour out their champagne, smash their glasses, and walk out. Throughout the episode, Viktor Petrov tries to bully the American President into removing American military bases from Europe. He even plants a kiss on the First Lady’s lips in front of everyone. In the end, the American President (played by Kevin Spacey) follows the example of Pussy Riot and sends Petrov home empty-handed. He calls Pussy Riot “Russia’s true patriots because they stood up to President Petrov and forced him to listen to

43 ‘Samye iarye kritiki aktsii Pussy Riot’ [Pussy Riot’ performance worst critics] rbk Daily (12 April 2012) http://www.rbc.ru/newspaper/news/562949983548448 (accessed 2 December 2016).

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278 Dzero and Bystrova the truths that he didn’t want to hear. And that had a profound effect on me because it made me realize that I need to stand up to him as well, as does our country.”44 This episode shows that in the West of the early 2010s, Pussy Riot acquired the same symbolic importance as Russia’s official ruler. But when they tried to perform in Russia during the 2014 Sochi Olympics, security officers dressed up as local militiamen (the Cossacks) flogged them with whips to confirm their back-home symbolic status of “petty hooligans,” which is how Vladimir Putin refers to them.

Hijacking or Translating? Translating Police Abuse in “I Can’t Breathe”

In their English-language music video “I Can’t Breathe” (2015), Pussy Riot at- tempted to translate the Russian government’s reaction to anti-authoritarian movements in Ukraine and at home using a cultural situation familiar to Amer- ican audiences. “I can’t breathe” are the last words of Eric Garner, an asthmatic African American who died as he was arrested in New York on suspicion of selling unlicensed cigarettes. A grand jury decided not to indict the policeman who put him into a chokehold and caused his death, stirring nationwide demonstrations against excessive use of force by the police against African Amer- icans. Alekhina and Tolokonnikova wrote the song after marching in a New York rally. The opening shot shows an empty pack of cigarettes on the ground. The two women are lying in a ditch while unseen people shovel earth on top of them, letting earth cover their mouth, eyes and body with anguished resigna- tion (Figure 2). They are wearing Russian riot police uniforms. When they can no longer be seen, the camera soars over the overturned ground, showing the shovels and a freshly smoked cigarette butt. The pack of cigarettes seen in the opening shot is the new brand called Rus- sian Spring (Russkaia Vesna). It shows the silhouette of the Crimean peninsula and two men with a machine gun and a cat. The brand commemorates Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014, when Russian soldiers occupied the peninsula to oversee the referendum during which the majority of this Ukrainian territory voted to become part of Russia. The cat symbolizes the well-meaning nature of the intervention. A twitter account @vezhlivo (politely) markets the soldiers as “the polite men” (vezhlivye liudi), posting pictures of them posing with smiling local children and young women. At first, the government claimed

44 House of Cards, Chapter 29, directed by Tucker Gates, performed by Kevin Spacey, Robin Wright, Lars Mikkelsen. Netflix, 2013, dvd.

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Figure 2 Still from “I Can’t Breathe” music video (2015) that “the polite men” were local pro-Russia militiamen. A year later Putin ac- knowledged having directed the annexation himself and deployed regular troops in a documentary commemorating the event. 45 The Russian government denies the presence of Russian soldiers in the southeastern Ukraine Donbass region controlled by pro-Russian separatists. When the opposition politician Lev Schlosberg made public the information that the Russian soldiers who die in Ukraine are fired postmortem from the army and have their names erased from their gravestones,46 he was seriously hurt by unknown at- tackers. In the music video, the two Pussy Riot members wear the Russian riot police uniform as they are being buried to show that autocrats dispose of both their dissenting and loyal subjects as they see fit, and the regime’s defenders are bound to also become target of abuse sooner or later. “Policemen, soldiers,

45 ‘Kak Rossii udalos’ vziat’ Krym bez boia’ [How Russia succeeded in taking Crimea without firing a shot], bbc (20 March 2015) http://www.bbc.co.uk/russian/russia/2015/03/150320_ crimea_film_battle (accessed 2 December 2016). 46 Lev Schlosberg, ‘Ikh ne prosto obmanuli, ikh unizili’ [They weren’t just cheated, they were humiliated], Novaya gazeta (5 September 5 2014) http://www.novayagazeta.ru/in quests/65127.html (accessed 2 December 2016).

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280 Dzero and Bystrova agents – they become hostages, and are buried with those they kill, both figu- ratively and literally. Hundreds of Russian soldiers who are secretly sent to the war zone in Ukraine have been killed in combat, and it is forbidden even for their families to know where they have died and why,” argue Pussy Riot.47 In this music video Pussy Riot seek to communicate the vulnerability of the Russian dissidents and the selective use of the justice system in an equivalent repository of knowledge: racial inequality in the us criminal justice system. In Russia, high-ranking officials, police and military personnel, members of the administrative and business elite and people connected to them are not likely to be held accountable for their actions. Countless corruption scandals do not make it into the mainstream media and courts refuse to investigate them. Conversely, anticorruption activists are regularly arrested and convicted on embezzlement charges. Sergei Magnitsky, an accountant who went to the police to report that an organized group of judiciary and bankers fraudulently reclaimed $230 million in taxes, was himself detained and imprisoned. After he died in prison from alleged maltreatment and medical negligence, he was found guilty of abetting tax evasion in Russia’s first posthumous trial.48 When the opposition politician and anticorruption activist Alexey Navalny used crowdsourcing to run for Moscow mayor, hundreds of people who donated money to his campaign were called in for questioning by the police. Navalny himself has been prosecuted twice so far on charges of embezzlement. He was convicted with a suspended sentence, which makes him ineligible to run for public office; his brother is serving a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence. In 2016 a person was sentenced to two years in prison for re-posting a text entitled “Crimea is Ukraine,” in one of several similar cases. Why did Pussy Riot choose to use Eric Garner’s case to make intelligible this selective use of the criminal justice system in Russia? David Cole, law profes- sor at Georgetown University, has argued that the American criminal justice system “affirmatively depends on inequality” (author’s italics). Privileged citizens can feel safe from random police abuse because racially marked citizens cannot: “Absent race and class disparities, the privileged among us could not enjoy as much constitutional protection of our liberties as we do; and without

47 Pussy Riot, ‘Q&A with Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina,’ interview by Luke Harding and Peter Verzilov, The Guardian (18 February 2015) http://www.theguardian .com/world/2015/feb/18/pussy-riot-i-cant-breathe-nadya-tolokonnikova-masha-alyokh ina (accessed 2 December 2016). 48 Miriam Elder, ‘Sergei Magnitsky Verdict ‘Most Shameful Moment since Stalin,’’ The Guardian (11 July 2013) http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/sergei-magnitsky -russia-trial-verdict-tax-fraud (accessed 2 December 2016).

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Pussy Riot and the Translatability of Cultures 281 those disparities, we could not afford the policy of mass incarceration that we have pursued over the past two decades.”49 This is why Barack Obama called the death of Eric Garner “an American problem and not just a black problem. It is an American problem when anybody in this country is not being treated equally under the law.”50 Earlier, after the acquittal of the community vigilante who shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African American teenager, Obama said that he remembers feeling followed at department stores, hear- ing car locks clicking when crossing the street, and seeing women hold their breath and clutch their purses while riding an elevator with him. He said the inequality of the American criminal justice system is grounded in “a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.”51 Pussy Riot argue that Eric Garner’s words “I can’t breathe” “can also stand for us and for many around the world, for all who can’t breathe because authori- ties act with impunity and feel invincible and above the law in using power to humiliate, intimidate, hurt, kill and oppress. We’ve known, on our own skin, what police brutality feels like.”52 This strategy has met with criticism. A number of American reviewers accused Pussy Riot of “hijacking” Eric Garner’s case: “They skip over most of everything that makes this American cause American, and speak instead about a universal struggle against state-sanctioned violence, and about Russia,” writes Spencer Kornhaber.53 Kelsey McKinney wonders “whether or not Pussy Riot is taking the life and struggle of one man – and a culture they are not a part of – and using it as a publicity stunt.”54 Arielle Castillo concludes, “to put it bluntly, their experiences just don’t correlate with

49 David Cole, No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System (New York: The New Press, 1999), 5. 50 Igor Bobic, ‘Obama Reacts to Eric Garner Decision: ‘This Is an American Problem,’’ Huffington Post (3 December 2014) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/03/obama -eric-garner-decision_n_6264762.html (accessed 2 December 2016). 51 Jonathan Capehart, ‘From Trayvon Martin to ‘Black Lives Matter,’’ The Washington Post(27 February 2015) http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2015/02/27/ from-trayvon-martin-to-black-lives-matter (accessed 2 December 2016). 52 Pussy Riot, ‘Q&A with Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina.’ 53 Spencer Kornhaber, ‘Is Pussy Riot Helping the Eric Garner Cause or Hijacking It?’ The Atlantic (19 February 2015) http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/02/ what-is-pussy-riot-doing-making-a-video-about-eric-garner/385643 (accessed 2 Decem- ber 2016). 54 Kelsey McKinney, ‘Pussy Riot’s New Song ‘I Can’t Breathe’ Is About Eric Garner,’ Vox (18 February 2015) http://www.vox.com/2015/2/18/8064367/pussy-riot-eric-garner (accessed 2 December 2016).

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Garner’s and his peers. Despite their own struggles, it is near impossible for the pair to fully understand the experience of a person of color confronting daily, systemic racism and policing in the u.s.”55 The collective’s work and the different reactions to it illuminate the shifting attitude to the translatability and permeability of cultures. The first decade of globalization ushered a hope that cultures could come together as pieces of one whole. Cooperation and mutual enrichment, harmony and understanding would come to replace animosity and conflict. To make cultures permeable, translatable, and mutually enriching, good communicators would find appropriate cultural situations in the target culture to make intelligible mentality, behaviors, and expectations of the source culture. Pussy Riot rose to fame as cultural communicators who sought to make intelligible non-Western acceptance of authority, especially the authority of a male ruler, for the Western world, and the Western non-acceptance of such authority for the Russians. When mass protests against electoral fraud broke out in Russia in 2011, the Western world took them as a sign that Russians embraced the Western democratic model of free elections and accountable leaders. Pussy Riot translated this protest all the more effectively by tapping into Western feminist theory, the perception of young females as persons without agency, and the Russian Orthodox tradition of holy foolishness. Hooligans, perverts, and bad mothers back home, where they have been jailed and whipped, Pussy Riot were received as daring thinkers in the West and placed on the lists of the world’s most influential people and magazine cov- ers. More recently, however, translation that assigns value to cultural practices such as tolerance for authority has been put to the test. Tolerance for authority ebbed in non-Western countries and hit a record low in Western countries. The ousting of authoritarian rulers in non-Western countries triggered violent civil wars and an unprecedented refugee crisis. Politicians in Western democratic countries are welcomed with shoes, eggs, and cakes: a cream pie was thrown at Ségolène Royal (2002) and Nicolas Sarkozy (2007); ketchup at Lionel Jospin (2002); flour at François Hollande (2012); tomatoes at Sarah Palin (2009), eggs at Bill Clinton (2001), Arnold Schwarzenegger (2003), the uk Prime Minister David Cameron (2010), and the then-president of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovich (2004); shoes at George W. Bush (2008), the Australian Prime Minister John

55 Arielle Castillo, ‘Pussy Riot Attempts to Support Eric Garner in New Song ‘I Can’t Breathe,’’ Fusion (18 February 2015) http://fusion.net/story/50582/pussy-riot-attempts-to-support -eric-garner-in-new-song-i-cant-breathe (accessed 2 December 2016).

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Howard (2009), former uk Prime Minister Tony Blair (2010), and Hillary Clin- ton (2014), to name just a few incidents. Right-wing political forces are on the rise: Eurosceptic parties Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, Front national in France, Lega Nord in Italy; the uk Independence Party in England, politicians Pauline Hanson in Australia, Donald Trump and the alt-right in the us. These political forces reject the idea of the enriching permeability of cultures they perceive to have been created and enforced by the liberal establishment who preceded them. Despite this recent turn to protectionism and isolation- ism, events that affect one culture continue to resonate in others. Intercultural translation will also continue, and we are yet to see what shape it will take.

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