by Masha Gessen
“We got very inspired when she got pregnant,” Nikita told me. “We started researching birth, going to classes. She made plans. She has this ecological bent, she tries to lead an ethical life without the killing of animals, so she wanted to give birth at home and we made plans.” A home birth would indeed have required planning, as well as money, and trying to make and keep either with an alcoholic is a lost cause, so when Philip was born in May 2007, it was on the gray sheets and within the yellow walls of a regular neighborhood “birthing home,” where giving birth is rough and free. The only item on Nikita and Maria’s to-do list that they could actually check off was putting up new wallpaper in one of the rooms in Natalya’s apartment in Kuntsevo, where all four of them were now resident. Maria and Nikita, though, maintained a regular schedule of breakups, so most of the time the Kuntsevo apartment housed only the child, his mother, and grandmother—just as it had two decades earlier.
Philip was not yet three months old when Maria and Nikita took him to Utrish, a national park in southern Russia. Nikita had been hitchhiking to camp there for many summers; Maria fell in love with the place her first time there.
I had asked Maria to tell me what had led her to become an activist, and the path stopped here. “Looking at this list of facts, neither you nor I can tell how I became an activist or why I continuously changed the focus of my activism,” she wrote. “I acted intuitively—I generally tend to trust myself when I take steps that I later realize were important. In 2008, when I was in my first or second year of college, I read the news that Utrish, one of the places I hold dearest in Russia, would be cut down. I found two telephone numbers and addresses on the Internet, packed a knapsack, and, straight from college, went to the offices of the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace. I met some of their staff members. The people at Greenpeace counseled me to start collecting signatures and printed out sign-up sheets for me.”
I could visualize this scene. Moscow nonprofits do not get a lot of foot traffic—they are usually staffed by seasoned activists, many of whom have spent time living, working, or studying abroad, in countries where one might get the idea to become an activist. The appearance of a starry-eyed young woman looking like a throwback to some imaginary 1970s—wearing a hand-sewn skirt, a wide-brimmed hat over frizzy long hair, and a backpack, as though she were planning to hike to battle without delay—and speaking (in the high-pitched voice that tends to crack when she is excited) of how much she loved Utrish was definitely odd and quite possibly comical. Handing her a stack of sign-up sheets may have been an attempt to test her or just to get rid of her.
“So this was all I had—a bunch of blank sign-up sheets and not a single activist among my friends. I collected forty-three hundred signatures in one week and met wonderful people: artists, students who belonged to the environmental group at Moscow State University—I can’t even list them all. Many people wanted to help.” Pretty soon Maria was in charge of the grassroots organizing effort for the defense of Utrish, though she modestly omitted that fact from her letter to me. She helped organize rallies and pickets and, when the illegal clear-cutting of the national forest began in November 2008, she joined dozens of activists who traveled to Utrish to shield the trees with their own bodies. “I did everything with my son in a sling. When it got cold, family members would take him while I was at rallies or pickets.” Five years later, at the hearing in Berezniki, having involved her toddler son in political activities would be cited as one of the reasons to deny her early release.
———
EVENTUALLY MARIA DID DECIDE to go to college, and the college she chose, the Institute of Journalism and Literature, was a tiny, almost quaint private undertaking, unknown to virtually anyone who did not study or teach there. I had been an editor actively recruiting young journalists in Moscow for years, and I had never heard of it, nor had anyone I asked. Its workshop-based system drew the kind of kids Maria had been: the ones who had spent their high school years sitting in a corner with a book. The institute offered a scheduling option perfectly suited to working people or young mothers: attending classes on weekends only. Maria spent the week with Philip and doing her activism, and the weekends, when her mother could take the baby, at seminars at the institute, only about a block from her old Arbat haunts. This was the first school where she actually made friends; by her second year there, a tight group had formed. They studied together and, in the evenings, attended any of the many readings that constituted Moscow’s poetry renaissance: by the mid-naughts, the city had more working, walking, and reading poets than it had had in decades. An annual poetry festival in May saw lines snaking down the block from any of several cafés that hosted readings. Most of the city, of course, was entirely unaware of the poetry or the poets: the reading and writing community was small but loyal and fiercely active. Maria and her friends represented a minority faction in the audience: people who were not poets themselves and did not know most of the poets personally.
Most members of the group planned a career in writing. One of Maria’s closest friends, a quiet, diminutive young woman named Olya Vinogradova, got a job writing book reviews for Moscow’s central children’s library. “I thought she would make a very good journalist writing about social issues,” Olya said of Maria. “She is very good at getting into places. But she really was undetermined, because—this would sound weird if not for what has transpired—she had this idea that she would change the world. She was always saying, ‘What is the point of all these prose exercises, how do they contribute to world change?’” Institute friends were sharply aware of Maria’s activism but foggy on its substance: Utrish seemed important but far away, and anyway, soon enough Maria seemed to start shifting focus. For all her passion and ability to “get into places,” she was no proselytizer, so aside from the fact that she was now concerned with both electoral politics and contemporary art, her institute friends knew almost nothing.
Maria had a bit more time now: when Philip was four or so, Nikita stopped drinking. He had had dry spells before, and she had always made use of them to get time for herself, but now he not only could pitch in with child care but craved time with Philip, because it turned out he was good at being the father of a small boy. They even went to a fitness club together three times a week: Nikita did yoga with the zeal of an addict, and Philip joined in kids’ activities. Nikita was not nearly as good at being a companion for Maria, nor did he really try: their relationship maintained its drifty rhythm, but the distance between them grew larger.
“She often tried to tell me something, but I wasn’t really interested,” Nikita told me with a kind of righteous evenness. “She had a lot of interests, while my internal resources were few. There was Utrish, then there were birds, some sort of ecocamp for migratory birds, then soap-making and anarchists. Then Putin showed up, and this really was incomprehensible. I mean, look at it from my point of view: I had only begun my recovery, and I was paying attention to my immediate surroundings—that would be Philip. Philip was real, while with Putin I wasn’t so sure. Maybe he was a doll of some sort. So by the time all those protests began, I had completely lost interest. And anyway, I didn’t know her friends, so it’s not like I listened to her when she told me where she was going and with whom.”
“I was always an outsider everywhere,” Maria wrote in her first letter to me, talking about the schools she had attended. By the time she was in her early twenties, she had, like many people who perpetually feel like outsiders, perfected the art of compartmentalizing her life. She made little effort to talk politics or literature to her mother or Nikita (Natalya and Nikita, meanwhile, had perfected the art of living as strangers under one roof). She kept politics largely out of conversations with her institute group: they discussed poetry. And she fell behind on her reading because it was not exactly compatible with her activism. “She had to cram Sartre when she needed to at the institute,” Olya told me, apparently ashamed to be disclosing her friend’s embarrassing circumstance. “She lacks the concentration
necessary for reading: it’s easier for her to watch movies.” What was worse, N told me, Maria persisted in her unself-conscious admiration for Aronofsky’s sentimental Requiem for a Dream.
Maria found the time and concentration to catch up on her reading in jail. Which was part of how she came to be quoting Heidegger, Martin Luther, and French student activists to an indifferent court in the faceless town of Berezniki.
PART 2
Prayer and Response
SIX
A Punk Prayer
THE FLOODGATES OPENED after December 5. It was like everyone had found his long-lost family, like daylight had broken after years of polar night. Opposition groups that had hobbled along with a dozen members on a good day now found they had hundreds and even thousands of volunteers. An ad hoc coordinating committee sprang up and people from opposite sides of the political spectrum sat down at the same table to try to channel the wellspring of human energy. People who had never thought of themselves as activists joined them, and everyone used the informal pronoun to address everyone, because everyone felt part of one great big impending revolution.
Pussy Riot did not know where they fit in at first, but then very soon they did. The day after the big December 5 protest, they went out into the street to protest again—because what else would they do? Several hundred people gathered to protest the previous night’s arrests. Most of them got arrested. This was the first time Nadya and Kat spent the night at a police station. A huge room with school desks was filled with detainees. In the morning, they were released, and they would not even have to go to court: the courts were choking on administrative arrests.
By the time they left the police station, it was clear that their next action would be where the action now was, at Special Detention Center Number One, where several dozen mostly young men were serving ten- and fifteen-day sentences in the aftermath of the protest. They included anticorruption blogger Alexei Navalny and a couple of other high-profile activists as well as men like Petya, who had been in and around the fight for several years, and other men who had stepped into the street for the first time. Petya had called and asked for food and Nadya and Kat went and stood in line at Special Detention Center Number One with a care package for him, which was a bit pointless because by that time Navalny’s supporters had brought enough chocolate and tangerines to last the opposition all winter.
Inside Special Detention Center Number One, the revolution was in full swing. One large cell had set up a round-the-clock webcast of their detention, which was filled with passionate discussion of the future of protest and the motherland. Another cell was making banners out of bedsheets and hanging them out their grated windows. 15 DAYS OF FREEDOM read one, and to those looking from the outside, it did seem like the men had found liberty in their sentences.
Petya was in a cell with Navalny and many other men, and at one point someone—probably someone who had read memoirs of Stalin-era camps—suggested each of them deliver one lecture in his area of expertise; it would make the time go faster and each of them would come out of jail knowing more than he had going in. Lectures on business administration, tax law, and revolutionary philosophy went well, and then it was Petya’s turn. He would speak on contemporary art. He got a late start—bad luck, and supper was delivered late, and Petya always got a late start on everything—and as soon as he began, the entire cell fell asleep. Except Navalny: Navalny stayed up for the duration of Petya’s mistimed three-and-a-half-hour lecture, winning his political and personal support for all eternity.
Pussy Riot cased the joint. There was not much traffic behind the building, and there were garages there, low enough for the women to be able to climb up on the roof using the same ladder they had used for the “Kropotkin-Vodka” actions.
There were three of them on December 14. It so happened that no one except Kat and Nadya could make it that day, and they had left it pretty late—some of the men would be released the next day—but a woman came out of nowhere and said she could sing. She also said she was an anarchist, she would never tell them her real name, and she played the guitar. It was all true. They called her Seraphima.
When they mounted the garage, a traffic police car pulled up. An officer with a megaphone emerged and asked them to climb down. They pulled their ladder up onto the roof, threw off their coats to expose their neon-colored dresses, took out their microphones and their instruments, unfurled a large banner that said FREEDOM TO PROTEST, cast it over the fence so it hung on the barbed wire, lit three smoke bombs, and sang and shouted:
Time to learn to occupy squares,
Power to the masses, fuck the leaders.
Direct action is the future of humankind.
LGBT, feminists, stand up to the fatherland!
Death to the jails, freedom to the protests!
Make the cops work for freedom,
Protests serve to improve the weather,
Occupy the square, make the takeover peaceful,
Take all the guns away from cops.
Death to the jails, freedom to the protests!
Fill up the city, the streets, and the squares.
Lots to do in Russia, forget eating oysters.
Open the doors, throw off your epaulets,
Come and taste freedom with us.
Death to the jails, freedom to the protests!
The windows of Special Detention Center Number One filled up with faces. The second time Pussy Riot called out “Death to the jails!” the building roared “Freedom to the protests!” in response. The men rattled the bars on their windows, and it looked like the special detention center was going to explode. The cops who had gathered by the garage turned their backs on the performers and went into the building, closing the door behind them. Singing in broad daylight, performing an entire song in one go, to an audience that was not only captive but receptive, Pussy Riot felt like performers for the first time. At the end, they joined the inmates in chanting “The people united will never be defeated!” Then they lowered their ladder and climbed down. No one tried to detain them; they put on their coats and went to their rehearsal space to edit the video.
They put up the clip that evening; the timing was good, but the clip itself was not. It felt raw, and not in a good way. It did not look like video art; it looked like an amateur video of three girls singing on a garage roof. At the end, their captive audience applauded and Kat, Nadya, and Seraphima took a deep, enjoyable bow and Kat blew a two-handed kiss. This was a performance rather than performance art. Maybe their mistake was in recording a single performance rather than a series before putting together a clip. Pussy Riot had declared seriality as one of its core principles, and at the age of two and a half months the group was too young to start screwing with its own foundation.
Truth be told, the crisis went deeper. In the space of two weeks, protest had gone mainstream in Russia, taking Pussy Riot with it. Creative direct action was not enough if everyone was doing it. And everyone was; there was even a clearinghouse for direct action now, with hundreds of people coming to weekly meetings to propose dozens of actions, find collaborators, and start to organize on the spot. (I started the Protest Workshop, as it was called, and facilitated its meetings from December 2011 through June 2012.) These included flashmobs on the Metro, performative acts of art, and small-scale, unsanctioned protests. What Pussy Riot had just done seemed to fit right in with the rest. Telling themselves they had been visionaries and had done it first seemed like cold comfort, and seriality alone was not going to save them from the predicament of having gone mainstream. Pussy Riot decided to take a creative hiatus until after the New Year.
———
WITH THE REVOLUTION UNDER WAY, people were finding their way to like-minded people. A woman who had taken part in a couple of Voina actions called; she was back after living abroad and was looking for work and calling everyone she knew to ask for leads. But she immediately agreed that an all-girl punk band sounded better than work. And when she came to a rehearsal, she said it f
elt right, it felt like her thing. They called her Seraphima because they had liked the first Seraphima, the anarchist who had never told them her name.
Petya met a woman at the Protest Workshop; they had both come to a meeting with their kids and struck up a conversation. The woman was smart, well educated, blond, and beautiful, and they decided her name would be Terminator.
N was around again, going by the nickname Morzh (“Seal”), and one day she brought her old school friend Maria, who everyone thought looked a little out of place with her hippie dresses and coquettish hats, but by the end of the conversation it was clear she would change the world.
There remained the question of how to change the world, or at least where to begin—or to resume—the process. With protests flaring up all over the city and administrative arrests becoming a daily occurrence, the location itself had to impress the imagination. Petya suggested the Duma, the Russian parliament. Then Terminator showed up and suggested the Duma. Like several other newly minted activists, she had just gotten a job as an unpaid aide to one of the opposition deputies, so she had a pass to the Duma and the ability to get more. The idea was to have Pussy Riot take up position in one of the press or spectator boxes in the main hall—they would get in posing as college students on a tour—then whip out climbing equipment and rappel down into the hall, their guitars strapped to their bodies, and singing. They did not know what they were going to sing, but at this point it mattered less than that everyone be trained in technical climbing. “I like being in a band,” they started saying. “You get to learn to climb mountains.”
