by Masha Gessen
After that, they headed back to the West and more theoretical work addressing obscure topics, which provided much-needed relief for the audience: the French performance artist Orlan’s work on plastic surgery and diatribes against stereotypes and fixed identities. To relax the viewers further, they introduced Marcel Duchamp’s gender-altered Mona Lisa, with the penciled-on mustache and beard, and Man Ray’s portrait of Duchamp as a female movie star. Duchamp’s urinal made it into the slide show too, possibly to provide the audience with at least one familiar image in addition to the Mona Lisa. Then there was Diane Arbus’s portrait of a transvestite, Yasumasa Morimura’s portrait of an Audrey Hepburn impersonator, and Morimura himself as the model in a Vermeer painting. And back to Russia, where the male artist Vladislav Mamyshev had made a career out of being Marilyn Monroe. Was that all that Russia had to offer to cap this tour of contemporary feminist art? A gay male artist who had risen to prominence twenty years earlier and had invented nothing new since?
They had probably given the audience as good an introduction to feminist art as any undergraduate seminar in feminist art might offer in a country where such seminars are offered. But the last thing Nadya and Kat wanted to do was deliver what amounted to a lecture on how things were done “over there.” They were, after all, activist artists at an activist conference, and that kind of abstract presentation makes bad activism and bad art.
The fact, though, was that feminism had never taken root in Russia. It had been part of Bolshevik ideology in the 1920s, when “revolutionary morality” replaced bourgeois morality, abolishing marriage and monogamy and introducing free love, communal children, and full gender equality. The USSR even introduced the world’s very first laws against sexual harassment in the workplace. But the egalitarian spirit did not last. Starting in the 1930s, laws against homosexual conduct were restored, as was marriage; abortion was banned (to be legalized a few decades later, and to become the country’s sole method of birth control); a child’s legitimacy once again became paramount in establishing social standing; and Communist Party organizations commenced close watch over the integrity and moral purity of families. “If he cheats on his wife, he will cheat on his country” became a catchphrase.
Bourgeois morality was, in other words, fully restored, but in keeping with the principle of calling things by the names of their opposites, it was called “Soviet morality” while feminist thought was branded bourgeois. Virtually all Soviet women held two full-time jobs—one for pay and one, at home, for nothing but hardship, which, in light of constant food shortages, could be extreme—and this was called “full gender equality.” Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, the tradition of reviling and ridiculing feminism proved surprisingly resilient. A few feminist organizations that appeared in the late 1980s, on the glasnost-and-perestroika wave, either stayed small or disappeared. Feminism was an academic pursuit, and an unpopular one. Combined with the general paucity of political content on the Russian art scene, that meant that Nadya and Kat had only Kovylina’s (problematically commercial) work to show. If they wanted to show something radical, feminist, independent, street-based, and Russian, they would have to make it up.
“It is worth noting,” Nadya said importantly, “that punk feminist art is being produced in Russia today. Here is an example. The Pisya Riot collective works in a great variety of genres, including both visual and musical compositions.”
Pisya is a kid’s word for genitals of either sex; it is most like wee-wee or pee-pee.
Nadya brought up a slide of Titian’s Madonna with Child and Saints, where the male saints had been replaced with a woman, a clothesline from which a variety of boxer shorts were hanging had been placed in the background, and piles of anachronistic dirty dishes occupied the foreground. The reproduction and the alteration were flawless. The audience observed respectfully.
Then Nadya pushed a button on a boom box. A sound like the scraping of a thousand rusty nails started up. Nadya and Kat rose and quickly but calmly left the audience alone with Pisya Riot’s first and only musical composition, “Kill the Sexist.”
———
BEING A FICTIONAL GROUP, Pisya Riot could not write its own music. Neither of the real-life members of the phantom group could; Nadya had taken music lessons as a child and had not done well, and Kat had no musical background. So they borrowed a track from the British punk group Cockney Rejects and used a handheld Dictaphone to record their lyrics over the sampling:
You are sick and tired of stinky socks,
Your daddy’s stinky socks.
Your entire life will be stinky socks.
Your mother is all in dirty dishes,
Stinky food remains in dirty dishes.
Using refried chicken to wash the floor,
Your mother lives in a prison.
In prison she’s washing pots like a sucker.
No freedom to be had in prison.
Life from hell where man is the master.
Come out in the street and free the women!
Suck on your own stinky socks,
Don’t forget to scratch your ass while you’re at it,
Burp, spit, drink, shit,
While we happily become lesbians!
Envy your own stupid penis
Or your drinking buddy’s huge dick,
Or the guy on TV’s huge dick,
While shit piles up and rises to the ceiling.
Become a feminist, become a feminist
Peace to the world and death to the men.
Become a feminist, kill the sexist!
Kill the sexist and wash off his blood.
Become a feminist, kill the sexist!
Kill the sexist and wash off his blood.
They found they liked being Pisya Riot. Maybe they even really wanted to be Pisya Riot. To become a punk rock group, though, they would need musicians. They thought of N, a woman Nadya’s age who had come to Voina with her boyfriend; they were both anarchists. Nadya sought her out. N was with another boyfriend now, a cool older guy who collected and fixed antique bicycles, and she was no longer an anarchist—she was making a living as a computer programmer and apparently maintaining a perfectly respectable middle-class existence, though she was still serious about her music. N found Nadya changed too: “In Voina, she had been this chubby-cheeked child, and now her cheeks had thinned and her voice took on a certainty. She had chosen her issues, and she may even have chosen them at random, but now she was serious and her topics were LGBT and feminism. And the choice had changed her: she no longer saw herself as an appendage to Petya and Vorotnikov, even if she had once been a willing appendage. It had still limited her. When you are with someone, you are not flying through the cosmos, because your soul always has its home in another person—you may need it sometimes, but it is limiting and it keeps you from taking flight. Nadya got this at some point and took flight.” Pisya Riot, on the other hand, seemed to N almost pure silliness, but she envied whatever it was Nadya felt. She took on the music.
They would need other participants too, but that did not seem like a big issue; what they had in mind could be done by three or five or seven or eleven people, and they had friends and the Rodchenko School had students to be recruited. They also needed a stage. At first, playgrounds, with their platforms and slides, looked pretty good. They had recorded “Kill the Sexist” at a playground. It was raining. It was also nighttime, which meant there were no children at the playground, but there were beer-drinking and cigarette-smoking young people, who grew concerned when they heard young women screaming their heads off about stinky socks.
They said, “What happened? Did someone hurt you? Do you need help?”
Nadya and Kat had said, “Don’t worry, we are just making a record.” But now that they were planning on making videos, they needed a different stage, something more spectacular, One day, as they got off the Metro, they spotted it: some stations had towers made of scaffolding, with platforms at the very top, for changing lightbulbs or painting ceili
ngs, or performing punk rock, perhaps. Moscow Metro stations are, for the most part, grand architectural affairs, all marble and granite and ostentatiously spanning arches and dramatic lighting; they look like classical concert halls, and the crude scaffolding towers, viewed from the right angle, look very much like a punk affront of a stage.
They performed a number of reconnaissance missions and identified several stations where the towers were particularly tall and well placed, which is to say, placed close to the center of the hall. Then they began rehearsing. If they were going to be a feminist punk rock group, they were going to have to have instruments—Kat picked up a bass—and they were going to have to climb up the tower and unpack their instruments and mics and amplifier and take up positions fast, faster than the Metro police knew what was happening.
They practiced at playgrounds.
As they rehearsed, it became clear they needed staging and visuals and costumes. “Because if we just got up there and started screaming, everyone would think we were stupid,” Kat explained to me. “Stupid chicks just standing there screaming.” First they came up with wearing balaclavas, which would make them anonymous—but not like Russian special forces, who kept their identities hidden behind black knit face masks with slits for the eyes and mouth, but like the opposite of that: their balaclavas would be neon-colored. Then they would need dresses and multicolored stockings, to show that the whole getup was intentional. Bright, exaggerated makeup showed surprisingly well through the slits in the balaclavas. And the pillow—the pillow appeared because parliament members had begun talking about banning abortion and Putin kept talking about Russia’s so-called demographic problem, by which he meant that Russian women were not getting pregnant often enough, and so Nadya stuck a pillow under her green dress. And then she tried taking it out during the screaming, or the singing, and ripping it open. The feathers created a sort of snow effect, in addition to the birth effect and the abortion effect. That worked.
They spent a month filming their first clip. This was now a complicated production, and it opened the door for Petya—who had been itching to join them—to actually do so. Nadya was good at putting together lectures, Kat was good at helping her, N was good at the music, Tasya was good at filming, but all of them were a nightmare when it came to logistics—at which Petya, with his rare combination of manic energy and attention to detail, was incomparable. There was one time they climbed atop a Moscow electric bus and performed—it turned out the feather-letting worked outdoors as well—but mostly they filmed at Metro stations, as many as fifteen of them in all. A couple of times, they got detained. Once, Tasya, who was filming, got beaten up by police. This was before many Russians came to think of being beaten up by police as a regular part of their existence. There was the time when the police tried to beat up Petya, and Nadya wedged herself between him and them and literally shielded him with her body, and there was probably no one, not even Nadya, who appreciated the beauty of her doing this after screaming about stinky socks and penis envy.
And there was the time when the police called Stanislav Samutsevich. “They would not let me see them,” he recalled. “They were in a holding pen. I had a conversation with two interesting young men. They talked to me about contemporary art and activism. I asked them who they were, and they said, ‘We are art critics in civilian clothing.’” It was an unfunny joke that Stanislav Samutsevich did not get: art critic in civilian clothing was a term used to denote KGB agents whose job it was to inform on dissidents in the Soviet Union; just like their predecessors in the 1970s, Pisya Riot had developed a following among these “art critics” before the broader public ever heard of them. That is, the secret police had literally started following them around—there were more of them with each consecutive taping.
Stanislav Samutsevich would not have known, or wanted to know, anything about dissidents in the Soviet Union, or about those whose job it had been to spy on them or jail them. “So I shared with them my views on contemporary art.” What were they? “Well, I am an old man.” The ones in civilian clothing were more knowledgeable about contemporary art. “The girls had really wreaked havoc there and the police didn’t know what to do with them. Then a big police vehicle came for them and Yekaterina told me to go home. She came home later, on the last train. I had a talk with her after that, but I am a dinosaur and I don’t understand anything about anything, so that was the last time she ever told me anything.” From that point on, Stanislav Samutsevich learned about performances from the media—or from police. He did try to protect the girls from themselves. “One time they were in the hallway, painting posters of some sort, and I came out and said to them, ‘Look, you’ve already been to the police station once, and no one knows how things could end.’ Nadya stopped coming over to the house after that.”
After that particular detention, the media got wind of the tower climbing and the screaming and the feathers flying in the Metro. They assumed Voina was back in action. Petya and Nadya were invited to the studios of the lone independent cable television channel, Dozhd (“Rain”). They denied it had been a Voina action. They said they had been detained while attending a performance of a new, different art group. They said it was called Pussy Riot.
FIFTEEN SHOOTING DAYS, a month of organizing, rehearsing, and editing, one night spent at a police station, several police chases, and a few skirmishes later, Pussy Riot had its name, its identity, and its first video. On November 7, 2011, the ninety-fourth anniversary of the October Revolution and Nadya’s twenty-second birthday, Pussy Riot launched its blog with the publication of its first clip, “Free the Cobblestones.” The music was borrowed from the British punk rock band Angelic Upstarts and arranged by N, and the voices, now declaiming more than singing or screaming, were clearly pronouncing lyrics that no longer sounded like a caricature of what a feminist punk group might say if it existed in Russia but were making a serious attempt at what Pussy Riot would master in the next couple of months: painting a portrait of Russia in words that could mean nothing else:
Voters are stuffed into classrooms,
Polling booths stink up stifling rooms,
It smells of sweat and it smells of control,
The floors have been swept and stability has been served.
Free the cobblestones! Free the cobblestones!
Free the cobblestones! Free the cobblestones!
Toilets have been shined, chicks dressed in civvies,
The ghost of Žižek flushed down the drain,
The Khimki forest has been cut down, Chirikova kicked off the ballot,
Feminists dispatched on maternity leave.
Free the cobblestones! Free the cobblestones!
Free the cobblestones! Free the cobblestones!
It’s never too late to take charge.
Nightsticks are loaded, the shouts get louder.
Stretch your arm and leg muscles
And the policeman will lick you between your legs.
Free the cobblestones! Free the cobblestones!
Free the cobblestones! Free the cobblestones!
Egyptian air is good for the lungs,
Turn Red Square into Tahrir,
Spend a full day among strong women,
Find an ice pick on your balcony and free the cobblestones.
Tahrir! Tahrir! Tahrir! Benghazi!
Tahrir! Tahrir! Tahrir! Tripoli!
The feminist whip is good for Russia.
The clip went viral. Pussy Riot got press. A typical item read, “It appears a new sort of urban nutcases are on the loose in the country. A feminist group calling itself Pussy Riot consists of five girls in face masks with bad voices that they use to shout out songs ‘about the tyranny of housework, a triple workday for women, contemporary trends in revolutions, and the right ways to subjugate men.’ And they perform their songs only in places where it is illegal, like on the roof of a bus or on the Metro.” Pussy Riot thought this was perfect.
Three weeks later, they produced their second clip. This time t
hey focused on the Putin era’s obsession with luxury. Most of the performances that made up the clip were shot along Stoleshnikov Lane, a pedestrian street lined with designer boutiques. They stormed into these boutiques, unpacked their equipment, and performed until security guards got their bearings and removed them. One time, they climbed atop a glass display case surrounding a luxury car—or at least they thought it was a glass case; it turned out to be made of Plexiglas, which bowed perilously beneath their feet. They were terrified of falling in and onto the car, but that did not happen, and their fear and discomfort were not visible in the resulting video, which showed them strong and confident atop the display case, spraying from a fire extinguisher and screaming:
Use your frying pan to occupy the city.
Come out with your vacuum cleaner and reach orgasm.
Seduce battalions of policewomen.
Naked cops are happy about the latest reforms.
Fuck the sexists fucking Putinists!
Kropotkin vodka is swilling in their stomachs,
You feel good while the Kremlin bastards
Face a toilet riot, a deathly poison.
No flashing lights will help them. Kennedy is waiting.
Fuck the sexists fucking Putinists!
Sleep it off, another day comes, time to subjugate again.
Brass knuckles in your pocket, feminism sharpened.
Take your bowl of soup to eastern Siberia
To make the riot really truly crude.
Fuck the sexists fucking Putinists!
The song was called “Kropotkin-Vodka”: Kropotkin for Peter Kropotkin, Russia’s anarchist prince, and vodka for unbridled consumption. In the process of filming “Kropotkin-Vodka,” Pussy Riot got pretty good at talking to the police. They developed rules. Rule Number One: Do not give your real name. They found an old online database and memorized random names and addresses. It would turn out this was not the most brilliant idea ever—the database had been compiled by the police, and some of the people on the list were wanted for more than outstanding traffic tickets. In addition, Pussy Riot often could not manage to keep their stories, names, and addresses straight, and this infuriated the cops. Still, it was probably better than accumulating an arrest record. Rule Number Two: Tell a good story. The story was, they were applying to theater school and needed to make a clip and wanted something both original and brave in order to really stand out. It was not a particularly convincing story, but it seemed to work, and perhaps it worked precisely because it was so absurd. Neither the police nor any of the boutique owners ever pressed charges. And Pussy Riot never really damaged any property—except one time.
