by Masha Gessen
They crashed a fashion show. They had this idea of creating visual effects with white flour, which they sprinkled on the floor, and balloons, which they let float up off the floor. But after they had unpacked their equipment and started singing, the flour on the floor caught fire from candles that the show organizers had placed along the walls. Fire spread instantly along the floor and up the balloon strings, singeing and burning garments. Miraculously, no one was hurt. But everyone was terrified. Pussy Riot finished their song and ran out, with one of the show’s organizers in pursuit. “Stop them, stop them!” she yelled to the bouncers, who stood flabbergasted. Then she addressed Pussy Riot themselves: “What did you do? You just burned us down.”
“We are sorry,” Pussy Riot said.
“Who are you?” the woman screamed.
“Here, have a phone,” Pussy Riot said, pressing a cheap cell phone into her palm. They always bought these cell phones for actions: the devices had SIM cards that the security services did not have on file and presumably could not start tracking in the space of one night.
“All right,” the woman said, unaware, in her state, that the gadget was of no use or worth. Pussy Riot walked away, and then they pulled off their balaclavas and started running, up the street, then down, down, down, all the way into the Metro. On the train they started laughing.
“We are burning up!”
“Hot!”
“Let’s call this one ‘Pussy Riot Burns Down Putin’s Glamour’!”
They got off two stops later, at Kropotkinskaya—not because it was named for Peter Kropotkin but because this was where the Metro line turned and ran alongside the Moscow River away from the center, which created a kind of psychological boundary. It was dark, cold, unseasonably snowless, and damp, as it had been for days and would be for another couple of weeks. It was late—nearing midnight—but the area around Kropotkinskaya was full of people: tens, possibly hundreds of thousands standing quietly in line outside the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The people, most of them women, were waiting to see the Holy Girdle—that is, a fragment of what was said to have been the Virgin’s undergarment. The relic, which normally resided in a monastery in Greece, was winding up its tour of Russia. More than three million had come to see the Girdle as it toured the country, more than a million of them in Moscow, spending long days and nights in the freezing rain, waiting their turn.
What a strange city this was, with its alternating rituals of glitter and Girdle. And how in the world was Pussy Riot going to fit it all into their performances, finally to point up the frightful absurdity of the land? This was what they wanted to do, but now that the adrenaline from the run was ebbing, the task seemed just about impossible. Because the city, and the country as a whole, seemed endlessly willing to accept whatever it was handed: the enormous income discrepancy, the rampant corruption that fed both the boutiques and the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, and the lies that underlay it all.
———
UNTIL DECEMBER 5, that is. “Kropotkin-Vodka” was published on December 1. Three days later, there was the parliamentary election that was no less but also perhaps no more rigged than the ones four and eight years earlier, but it drew more attention from Russian citizens than any election in a decade and a half. They came out to vote and, more important, they signed up in droves to become independent election monitors. And on December 5 criminal defense attorneys Violetta Volkova and Nikolai Polozov sat drinking their cappuccinos in a second-floor café and watching as Russians came out into the street. The space allotted for a three-hundred-person rally, for which a city permit had been issued, filled up in a matter of minutes. And then they watched as ten times that many people arrived from every direction in the space of ten minutes. And, in another ten minutes, there were three times that many again. More than seven thousand in all, and perhaps as many as ten thousand. They watched prisoner transports pull up, and water cannons, and buses with special forces troops. They watched a peaceful rally proceed, as the police looked on without interfering. They watched the rally starting to break up and the police opening up only a very narrow passage in the direction of the Kremlin and secret police headquarters at Lubyanka. They saw several thousand leave easily, through wide passageways open in other directions, and they saw nearly half of those present squeezing into the bottleneck in the direction of the Kremlin.
“It’s going to start now,” said Volkova.
And it did.
The people who had turned toward the Kremlin tried to organize a march. The police started to sweep them up. More than five hundred were detained. Volkova and Polozov spent the night going from police precinct to police precinct to holding facility. They got scores of people released on the spot, and they met a lot of new people in addition to each other. In the morning, when it seemed they were done, Polozov told Volkova it was his birthday and went home to grab some sleep before his party. Just after he left, Volkova got a phone call—her number had gotten around through the night—asking her to come to a holding facility in northern Moscow, where several dozen prominent activists had been taken. She was slightly awestruck when she saw Boris Nemtsov, a former cabinet member now in opposition to Putin: he was there to deliver McDonald’s hamburgers to the high-profile detainees. “I had never seen him in person. Actually, I had never been interested in politics.” Volkova was not familiar with most of the names of her new clients, who had been separated from the rest of the night’s detainees because they had arrest records. A skinny bearded guy named Petya Verzilov was among them.
———
WHAT STARTED THAT NIGHT was the Russian protest movement, what came to be called the Snow Revolution; the name appeared the following day. A lot of patterns were set that night. People would be getting arrested in the coming months, almost every day. A small team of young men would be tracking the arrests and helping coordinate legal help (the tracking system was born that night at my apartment, near the protest site, when one of the young men came there to warm up and started Tweeting information about detentions—I watched it start but did not know what I was seeing). Volkova and Polozov would be the two lawyers at police stations at all hours, defending those who got detained. It did not matter that they had never done this before. Everyone in the protest movement was making it up as things developed. Including, of course, the women who had become the group they had made up a couple of months earlier. Now that the revolution had started, Pussy Riot would be heard.
FIVE
Maria
“LAWLESSNESS, THE DENIAL OF RIGHTS, and forced mutual dependence that results from collective responsibility are all things to which we have become accustomed.” The courtroom was stuffy—and stuffed with people. Most of us had spent a day or so getting here: take the red-eye from Moscow to Perm; brush your teeth in the airport bathroom, where the chipped, muddy-colored tile and an entire collection of filled-to-bursting black trash bags were somehow made bearable by piped-in seventies disco music; then catch a transport to Berezniki—a four- to six-hour drive, depending on the snow—then line up outside the Civic Collegium of the People’s Court, one of dozens of identical gray five-story buildings on Five-Year-Plan Street in this city of scores of identical five-story buildings, which house all of its 150,000 residents and all the courts, polyclinics, and residential authorities that rule their lives.
———
IT WAS MINUS-TWENTY DEGREES CELSIUS (minus-four Fahrenheit) in Berezniki, the kind of weather against which any sort of clothing can provide protection for only minutes, not for a stationary wait of a couple of hours. The court marshals allowed journalists and activists into the building one at a time, conducting thorough searches of every frozen person. In the end, about a hundred people filed into the courtroom and another fifty or so had to stay in the lobby and watch the proceedings on a video monitor set up especially for this uniquely media-worthy occasion. The courthouse, or at least a part of it, had been given a fresh paint job and a glass-and-plastic aquarium to hold Maria Alyokhina in t
he courtroom. Her high-pitched voice bounced off its smooth new walls, so to the audience in the courtroom she sounded like a dodgy telephone connection, coming in loud and fading out.
All day, the court had been reviewing Alyokhina’s motion to postpone the serving of her prison sentence until her son turned fourteen—a measure sometimes applied in cases of nonviolent offenses, and, in cases of the well connected, not just the nonviolent ones. “This is our unfreedom, which, as we all recall, is worse than freedom,” said Alyokhina, referring to former president Dmitry Medvedev’s awkward declaration that “freedom is better than unfreedom.” He had been talking up his economic policy.
“This is the way we are forever serving life rather than living life. I want to live life. My freedom is this: Here I stand, I can do no other, as Martin Luther said. My cause may be hopeless, but I find my freedom in the responsibility I take on, and to retreat for me would be to die a little, to use the words of the students protesting at the Sorbonne in 1968.” I thought there were probably only three or four people in the crowded courtroom who got Maria’s references and appreciated their proximity to one another, and to Martin Heidegger, whom she had quoted earlier in the hearing. Two of those people were Petya and I.
———
MOST THINGS MARIA HAD SAID in her life were addressed to people who did not even try to understand them. Her mother, Natalya, had discovered the chasm that separated her way of thinking from her daughter’s when Maria was thirteen. “After seventh grade, I had her change schools to go to one with a concentration in mathematics,” Natalya told me, chain-smoking in an overpriced Moscow coffee shop. Here was another parent who would not receive me at home—it was too big a mess for visitors, she claimed. I found this easy to believe: Natalya had the air of someone who struggled, probably unsuccessfully, with the daily requirements of homemaking and family life. She was a software engineer who had always lived with her own mother—a perfectly normal pattern for Russian women of her generation—and had never married, which was unusual. She had given birth to Maria at thirty-five, an almost impossibly advanced age for first-time motherhood in Russia, even in 1988. Maria’s father was a mathematician who did not stick around to see the baby born—or show any other sign of life until Maria was a teenager, at which time Natalya shot down his sudden attempt to communicate with his daughter.
The daughter, meanwhile, had spent seven years at a decent school near their apartment building in the relatively scenic bedroom suburb of Kuntsevo (unlike most of noncentral Moscow, Kuntsevo had a variety of buildings—some brick and some concrete, some five and some nine stories tall). It was a boarding school with intensive instruction in English, and Maria was a day student, which meant she took all her meals at school and came home after seven o’clock in the evening. In grade school, she was a bit of a bully, regularly beating up her enemies and occasionally swinging at her friends. As she grew into a teenager, her aggressive streak vanished. And Natalya decided it was time to transfer to a math school, as she herself had done at that age—and as she thought only natural.
Maria rebelled. Natalya was surprised. “I don’t understand the word ‘humanities,’” she complained when she talked to me. She started a frantic search for a suitable new school. She finally placed Maria at a school where she knew the principal—but not before conceding that she would probably never understand what her only daughter said, read, or wanted. When it came time to look for a college, Natalya said, “I can’t give you any advice on this: I don’t even know anyone in the humanities.”
What might have made another child feel abandoned and misunderstood made Maria feel independent and respected. When I asked her to sketch her autobiography in a letter from the penal colony, she began as follows: “You might say I was raised at home: I never went to preschool, and I spent my time in the building’s yard. I loved climbing trees, getting to the very tops of oak trees and birch trees and looking down at the way their branches intertwined beneath my feet. I lived with my mother and grandmother and I was always treated like an adult; no one fussed over me, and actions were always discussed. Probably the most important thing about my childhood is the absence of unmotivated prohibitions. If something was not allowed in our family, the reason was always transparent. Independent opinions and actions were respected.”
Maria’s grandmother died when the girl was nine, leaving Natalya feeling helpless in the face of the challenges of keeping house and raising her daughter. “Our relationship was chilly ever since the incident with the math school,” she told me, and then corrected herself: “No, ever since my mother died. I guess it was my fault—it’s always the parents’ fault. I’m probably too aggressive when it comes to arguing. She always said, ‘I don’t want to argue with you.’” It seems once Maria got out of the habit of slugging her enemies and her friends, she developed a kind of private policy of nonconfrontation—as though, perhaps, she were saving her strength for fighting on a global scale. “It’s the strangest thing,” N, who was a lifelong friend, told me. “I can tell you anything at all about her because I just know she won’t take it the wrong way.”
———
EVEN AFTER ESCAPING from math school, Maria continued to perceive high school as an unfortunate obligation. When something caught her interest—usually this was a Russian literature lesson—she paid attention; the rest of the time she sat in a corner on the floor with a book, looking like a flower child out of place and out of time. Her reading list was unburdensome: Russian quasi-dissident science fiction that had been trendy in the seventies and mildly satirical popular fiction that had been trendy in the nineties. Her part-time job at a video rental store provided a slightly bigger intellectual challenge: there she watched her first David Lynch, Hitchcock, and Fellini films, as well as one movie each by Lars von Trier and Catherine Breillat. None of this made for common ground with her high school classmates—though once, when she ran into N in a pedestrian underpass near home, she told her about Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky’s grim movie about addiction, and this rekindled their friendship. Though as N grew more sophisticated in her tastes, she poked fun at Maria for falling for Aronofsky’s maudlin musings. Maria did not take offense.
Maria wandered to the Arbat, an historic area of Moscow that had served as the city’s lyrical heart, then its counterculture center, then its first modern tourist attraction, and, finally, a caricature of itself. In the sixties, singer-songwriter Bulat Okudzhava crooned, “Ah, Arbat, my Arbat, you are my calling, my joy, and my sorrow.” In the seventies, hippies would gather at the Gogol monument at the end of Arbat Street, where police would regularly sweep them up for loitering. In the late eighties, Arbat Street got a makeover as a pedestrian mall—just as the USSR was starting to lift the Iron Curtain. In the nineties, street vendors of everything from fur hats to handmade jewelry shared the street with street musicians, street artists, and fans of the once wildly popular singer Viktor Tsoi, who had died in a motorcycle crash in 1990 at the age of twenty-eight. The fans had constructed a tiled wall in the Arbat as a memorial to him and milled around it, mourning their idol 24/7, year after year. Tsoi’s most famous song was “Change!” “Our hearts demand change! / Our eyes demand change!” went the refrain.
By the naughts, the Arbat had turned into the tackiest street in Moscow, lined with overpriced cafés with bad food and stores selling counterfeit antiques. Of the street vendors, only the fur hatters remained. Tsoi’s wall drew a crowd only in August, on the anniversary of his death. The street musicians had gone on to get real educations and actual jobs as advertising executives, and the only trace of their existence were three or four men who continued to strum their guitars in “the Pipe,” the pedestrian underpass at one end of the Arbat. Their audience was a semipermanent group of inebriated adolescents who had been drawn to the Arbat by its old reputation, in search of the counterculture or perhaps even a cause (Tsoi had represented one) or meaning (Okudzhava had promised it). This was where Maria met Nikita in 2006.
N
ikita was older—twenty-two to Maria’s seventeen—and had been drinking harder and longer. He had a backpack with his essential belongings, which included a slim volume of Immanuel Kant, and he had been wandering central Moscow for a few years, with only an occasional stopover at home, in the northern Moscow bedroom suburb of Otradnoye (“Delightful”), one of the most dreadfully gray and desolate areas in a city almost unremittingly gray and desolate around its edges. Maria and Nikita started wandering together. They were both slim, not very tall, and both had long, slightly frizzy chestnut hair. Perhaps together they felt like the ghosts of those long-ago Arbat hippies. “It was a marginal way of life,” Nikita told me over tea in Moscow’s first vegetarian café. “A megamarginal way of life.”
Whatever it was that Nikita had been seeking when he drifted to the Arbat, he had long since stopped looking. Maria barely managed to graduate from high school; getting into college was out of the question. “When she did something, she threw herself into it fully,” N told me. “And drinking was no exception.” Most people I asked about Maria tried to skirt around the drinking issue—it seemed inappropriate, and disloyal, to discuss her teenage binges while she was struggling in jail—but found it difficult to tell the story without this part of it. “Should I be talking to you about this?” N asked me. I admitted I was not sure how I was going to handle the drinking in the writing, but told her this: I had been a teenage alcoholic myself; I nearly flunked out of high school because I was always either drunk or hungover; and I had no real explanation for what it was that enabled me to stop drinking. Nor did anyone really understand what gave Maria the strength and vision to quit: Nikita thought it was the Art of Living, a prepackaged yoga outfit that provided her with daily exercises that anchored her better than daily drinking; N thought it was getting pregnant—which Maria did in the fall after she did not go to college. She was eighteen.
