Words Will Break Cement: the Passion of Pussy Riot Free

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When videos of young women Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot bright dresses and face masks, playing punk music and Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot political slogans in strategic public spaces in Russia, first began appearing on the Internet, they seemed to come out of nowhere. Punk performance art? Flash mobs? In the land of Vladimir Putin?! Whereas the opposite side lies excessively, and people sense this. People sense the truth. Truth really does have an ontological, an existential advantage over lies. As Russia waves sabers at the Ukraine and considers a new cultural policy that explicitly rejects multiculturalism and tolerance, the young women of Pussy Riot increasingly seem not like radicals but prophets. Gessen, a Russian-American journalist who has previously written a book about Putin, had deep access to most of the principals of this story, although Nadya and Maria were in prison, so Gessen had to rely on letters from them to her and others. Occasionally, her account gets bogged down in the minutiae of the courtroom drama. But her biographical sketches of the three Riot girls who went on trial — the beautiful, brilliant ideologue Nadya; the hippieish, sisterly dreamer Maria; the quiet but tough tomboy Katya — are vivid and empathic. While they have been freed, the punk prayer they sent out remains unanswered. Share story. By Evelyn McDonnell. Evelyn McDonnell. Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot by Masha Gessen – review | Books | The Guardian

On February 21,five young women in brightly colored tights and dresses entered the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in central Moscow. There was no service in progress, and there were only a few people in the cathedral. The women pulled on neon balaclavas, stepped onto the stage-like area at the foot of the altar, and, jumping, punching, and kicking, shouted out a song that began: Virgin Mary, Mother of God, chase Putin out. Security guards carried one of the women, Yekaterina Samutsevich, out of the cathedral before she could even start performing. The other four women were hustled out about a minute into their performance, before they could get all the footage they wanted. That day, they felt that the action had failed. But they spliced the footage together with some clips they had filmed in previous days, in other cathedrals with less security. They added a prerecorded audio track and then posted the video online. After a period of hiding, three Pussy Riot members—Samutsevich, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Maria Alyokhina—were arrested and held without bail. Various international celebrities, mostly musicians, voiced their support; they perceived Pussy Riot as a musical group, though it would have been more accurate to call them conceptual artists. We refuse to perform as part of the capitalist system, at concerts where they sell tickets. The international media showed the punk prayer music video occasionally and reprinted some of the lyrics, though rarely all of them. Mostly it told a story of bravery in the face of tyranny and showed photos of the women on trial: beautiful, behind bars, smiling beatifically. Tolokonnikova declared a hunger strike for which she was eventually hospitalized. For the West, the Pussy Riot trial was appealing in part because it seemed to be a familiar story with a modern twist. Tolokonnikova particularly captured the public imagination. Clearly, the Pussy Riot affair—the sensation, the controversy, the appalling trial, and the outrageous sentence— was about much more than words spoken against Putin. There is censorship in Russia, but people say bad things about Putin and his government all the time. The members of Pussy Riot are not the only Russians who have used their bodies to make a point. The entire country is slowly transforming into one huge prison. Both Pussy Riot and Pavlensky sought to use their bodies to reconfigure politically charged spaces. They got a lot of attention, but did their message come through in the way they had intended? This action is only worth considering in our specific place, in Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot nest of power. Though Russia now receives fairly extensive coverage in the Western media, discussion of the country still relies heavily on tropes that date back to the Cold War and a different political system: the Gulag, Stalin, Solzhenitsyn. This picture of the bad old Russia has been updated with images of the weird new Russia: Putin wrestling bears, dash-cam crash videos, and photos of sad-looking women in tracksuits and too much makeup, posing seductively in front of carpets hung on walls. In both cases, Russia is a bit of an enigma. It was hard even for Russians to parse, let alone for foreigners. Perhaps more importantly, there is no certainty that it will have any effect on Russian reality. For all their popularity in the international media, Pussy Riot attracted relatively little sympathy in Russia; in fact, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot making it seem that the political opposition is full of anarchist feminist blasphemers, Pussy Riot may have done Putin a favor, strengthening his support from his conservative core constituency. In the West, sympathy for Pussy Riot was also mixed with confusion. Were they musicians or performance artists? Did their imprisonment mean that Russia had gone back to its Soviet ways? Had Pussy Riot changed the course of Russian history, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot had its members merely thrust themselves into the international limelight? Masha Gessen is one of the most important journalists covering Russian politics for a Western audience. A liberal Russian American who is completely bilingual and has lived and worked in both countries, she has played an essential role in interpreting Russia for her readers. For all their popularity in the international media, Pussy Riot attracted relatively little sympathy in Russia. Gessen captures the sense of purpose, belonging, and exaltation that comes from participating in a group like Pussy Riot. She eventually stopped drinking and became an ardent, if somewhat eccentric, environmental activist and yoga enthusiast, and she joined Pussy Riot relatively late in the game. She went on to become a jailhouse lawyer, ferociously defending the rights of her fellow prisoners and winning many victories. In Pussy Riot, she found her purpose. The same was true for Samutsevich: a dissatisfied engineer from a strange family, she felt left out of the new Russia and was in need of friends. When she met Tolokonnikova, a born leader, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot finally found a sense of direction. Tolokonnikova is the star of the book, partly because Gessen had the most contact with her and partly because of her charisma. Tolokonnikova was a precocious student in Norilsk, a polluted city in the Russian Far North. As a teenager, she was already a dissident, rebelling against school rules and reading widely. While still in secondary school, she fell in love with the work of the great Conceptualist poet, performer, and visual artist Dmitri Prigov. He was the inspiration for Voina, which Tolokonnikova founded with her husband, Pyotr Verzilov, and another couple. Tolokonnikova and Verzilov had met during a brief stint in the philosophy department of Moscow State University. As the Russian protest movement began to gain steam in —08, the young couple turned their attention to art and protest. In —12, as the protests became increasingly dramatic, Voina and then Pussy Riot took bigger risks, because that was the only way to stand out. Gessen has a gift for swift, engaging narrative: Words Will Break Cement is a page-turner with compelling characters. But for the most part, Gessen contents herself with crafting a heroic story that will be easily digestible for Western readers. Words Will Break Cement also seems torn between two competing theses: one about the power of words, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot to the history of Soviet dissidence, and one about using the body when words have lost their power. This seems a false binary given the close connection, in Soviet history and Russian art, between protest through language and protest with the body. This is in keeping with the Soviet dissident tradition, which was based largely around illicit texts, and also with the Christian one. Russian society has been obsessed with the power of words for centuries, which helps explain its tradition of strict censorship. Gessen portrays her as socially clueless, unable to solve problems or think of new ideas, with a suspiciously indirect way of speaking. While Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina bravely speak truth to power, Samutsevich, according to Gessen, has a roundabout way of expressing her thoughts. Yet Gessen too takes a roundabout approach; the sections on Samutsevich are marred by heavy use of indirect quotation. This makes for easy reading and a rather compelling story, but it also makes it unclear where Samutsevich ends and Gessen begins. At other points in the book, Gessen suggests that Russian words have lost their power entirely. This is where discussion of the body begins. Although she does not fully develop this point, Gessen suggests that Pussy Riot and Voina differed from Soviet dissidents in that they emerged in a society in which words had lost their power. There were no words left. Why then does Tolokonnikova keep making speeches? Why does she keep talking about Solzhenitsyn? What about other Russian opposition writers who have formulated powerful protests in words? They are a small minority—but so were the Soviet dissidents. As Gessen tells us, while in prison, Tolokonnikova requested a copy of the memoirs of Anatoly Marchenko, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot late Soviet dissident who died after a lengthy hunger strike in the Gulag. The prison medical staff removed the skin Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot bore the offending words and stitched it up. Again he was sent to the hospital to have his skin removed and stitched back up; by the time it healed, his skin was so tight that he could no longer close his eyes. By inserting young female bodies into the cathedral, Pussy Riot drew attention to the corrupt relationship between church and state in Russia. Putin countered by throwing the bodies of three Pussy Riot members in prison. Putin, Pussy Riot, and Pavlensky are not alone in placing the human body at the center of Russian political discourse. It was suggested that instead of being put in prison, the women should be spanked, pinched, stripped naked and whipped, covered in honey and feathers, and thrown out in the cold. The idea was to treat the women like naughty little girls rather than as artists making a serious political statement. Such proposals did not come Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot from hardline Putinists or from the Orthodox Church; they came from liberal opposition figures as well. Now that Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina have been released, some of their detractors have managed to realize their sadistic fantasies. In both cases, the men who attacked them did not feel it Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot to cover their faces, though the attacks were filmed. No arrests were made. During the attacks, Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina remained remarkably calm. Maybe this was because they knew that their attackers, like Putin, like the prosecutors in their trial, were just playing their roles in a work of art that continues to ripple outward—from Moscow, to the provinces, and into the wider world. Sign up for the Dissent newsletter:. New issue and subscribe button. Pussy Riot in Translation | Dissent Magazine

One of the virtues of thuggish dictators is that their thuggishness makes their opponents look good Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot even opponents who have glaring faults of their own. These antagonists are callow, juvenile, and sometimes vulgar. But as if by alchemy, the juxtaposition with Putin makes them into heroes, and makes their publicity stunts into sublime acts of political defiance. The dissidents — Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, now twenty-four, Maria Alyokhina, twenty-five, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, thirty-one — are founding members of a punk collective known as Pussy Riot. For maximum subversive effect, they chose a section of the church called the soleas, reserved for the male Orthodox priests. Their discordant chanson lasted forty seconds and earned them two years in a penal colony by way of reprisal. Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina, both mothers of small children, were released by presidential amnesty in December in a pre-Olympiad show of mercy; Samutsevich was given a suspended sentence. Gessen adores her subjects, and as a Russian-American feminist and anti-Putinist writer, she clearly views them roughly as they view themselves: victims of a corrupt system, martyrs in the cause of freedom. She meets their parents and traces their upbringings and education to find the origins of the rebellious streak that led them to stand up to Putin and to the Orthodox establishment that increasingly acts as a religio-fascist branch of his government. Russia has a long tradition Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot punishing its dissidents before canonizing them. Gessen makes a strong case that the members of Pussy Riot will someday be seen Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot in that tradition, which has heretofore been dominated by austere, grave men with long prison beards. Pussy Riot, by contrast, is young and female, and in its choice of expression it has been frivolous, even impish. Even in the act that got them sent away, the basic vibe was silliness. Words Will Break Cement is particularly sharp in the procedural detail of how Pussy Riot was denied justice in court. Tolokonnikova read out a long closing statement that Gessen quotes in full. Graeme Wood is a staff editor at The Atlantic. His articles and reviews have appeared in many publications including The New YorkerGood magazine, and The American. Most Recent. Previous Previous Post: Talking with Strangers. Next Post: Dept.