by Masha Gessen
They recalled a cathedral near the contemporary arts center they frequented. It was appropriately grand and at the same time appropriately quiet, almost obscure. In fact, the Cathedral of the Apparition was the senior Orthodox church in Moscow, and the patriarch led important services there on occasion, but Pussy Riot did not know this. They knew that it contained enough gilt and opulence that in a fast-paced clip, if they interspersed the footage, it would pass for the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, just shot from a different angle.
Six Pussy Riot members took a mic with a stand, a flood-light—they had this idea of creating an illuminated-stage effect—and a couple of videographers and went to the Cathedral of the Apparition. They set up, only now discovering that the battery for the floodlight was backbreakingly heavy. They performed the moves they had choreographed and rehearsed for this song: frenetic dancing with kicking and boxing moves for the fast parts, kneeling and frantic bowing for the liturgical-chant parts. A woman appeared out of nowhere and grabbed the floodlight; she seemed to think that taking it away would get Pussy Riot to stop. They wrestled for the light. Pussy Riot won and left.
It did not feel great; there was none of the exhilaration they had felt during their previous filming sessions. They told each other this had been a technical day and they had accomplished what they needed.
———
MORZH COULD NOT SLEEP. This felt like too much. “I had had conflicting feelings about this from the beginning,” she told me a year later, meaning Pussy Riot in general. “This was Nadya’s project. I wasn’t generating any ideas, I was just a participant—but the consequences could be serious.” The group required total commitment: to be Pussy Riot you really had to live Pussy Riot. Otherwise, you felt like an extra in Nadya’s show.
Plus, she did not really get this action. It seemed too simple somehow, more of a prank than art—and at the same time like they were protesting against the Church itself. In their early brainstorming sessions, they had discussed trying to fly the rainbow flag during the action—this had seemed fittingly spectacular and layered to Morzh—but Nadya had nixed the idea. So what was it about, then? Nadya had not made a very good case for needing to illuminate the obvious: the relationship between the Church and Putin. At eight in the morning, having slept not a wink, Morzh texted Nadya: “I can’t do it.” Nadya texted back: “Ok.”
———
THE REMAINING FIVE of them gathered at a café not far from the cathedral, drank coffee, and talked, with long uncomfortable pauses. Kat did what she always did, in summer or in winter: she ordered a cup of café glacé and ate the ice cream, leaving the cold, milky coffee. For no reason they could pinpoint, they talked about calling off the action. But since they could not have explained such a decision even to themselves, as it got closer to eleven o’clock, they settled the bill and walked over to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.
A high-pitched sound greeted them as they entered: eeeeeeeeeee. They all turned toward the source of the sound, which was just behind Nadya. “Whatever,” said Nadya, and nonchalantly took off her backpack, opened it, and turned off the amplifier that had turned itself on. She put the bag back on, and all of Pussy Riot turned their heads to survey the cathedral. Something was wrong.
In the middle of the vast space, a small crowd lingered; about twenty people, most of them with cameras. Videographers. But Pussy Riot had told only three or four trusted documenters about the action and had given them strict instructions to keep their cameras concealed until the performance began. These were not videographers; they were journalists. There had been a leak.
The good news was, the guitar was inside. Because they had discovered that a woman could not enter the cathedral carrying a guitar case, Pussy Riot had asked a male friend to carry it in and leave it lying on a bench. It was waiting for them now. Picking it up, Kat discovered that whoever had packed it had gone to great lengths to disguise the fact that the package contained a guitar; it would take a while to unwrap it. Still, once Kat picked it up, the countdown began. They were now five women with a guitar, and they did not have much time to make their move.
Pussy Riot approached the elevated platform. Two men suddenly emerged from behind the altar and started rolling up the rugs on the platform. A security guard looked on. Something was definitely wrong. “Should we call it off?” one of the group whispered. “What are we doing?” whispered another a few moments later.
And then the cathedral was empty. The men with the rugs disappeared. The security guard walked off. The journalists did not seem as numerous as they had before. It was dim and very very quiet. Pussy Riot moved in.
Nadya commanded Kat to go first because she had to unpack the guitar. She did as she was instructed, and she put it on, and then she felt someone grabbing her. He pulled off her red balaclava, and she looked up: it was the security guard from a few minutes earlier. He carried her out of the cathedral and planted her just outside the door. As they exited, Kat heard the music begin:
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, chase Putin out,
Chase Putin out, chase Putin out.
Black robe, golden epaulets
All the parishioners are crawling to bow
The phantom of liberty is up in heaven
Gay pride sent to Siberia in a chain gang
Head of the KGB, their chief saint,
Leads protesters to jail under guard
So as not to offend the deity,
Women must give birth and love
Shit, shit, holy shit!
Shit, shit, holy shit!
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, become a feminist
Become a feminist, become a feminist
The Church sings the praises of rotten dictators
Black limousines form the procession of the Cross
A missionary is coming to your school
Go to class and bring your money!
Patriarch Gundyayev[3] believes in Putin
Bitch, better believe in God instead
The Virgin’s Girdle can’t replace the demos
The Virgin herself is with us in protest!
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, chase Putin out,
Chase Putin out, chase Putin out.
The “holy shit” line had been suggested by Andrei when his daughter told him they would be doing an action at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. He would be very proud of this for years to come.
SEVEN
Unmasked
THIS ONE REQUIRED a longer wind-down period. Kat had lingered just outside the entrance to the cathedral, and when she heard the guards radioing for police, she thought she should leave. She saw one of the other women walking out, and they fell into step, followed by the others. They walked across the plaza in front of the cathedral, down a couple of steps to the sidewalk, then picked up the pace, ran across the street and on and down into the Metro. At the next stop, they met up with two of the videographers, who handed over their memory cards. The videographers trailed along with the group for another stop or two and then everyone got off and went to a café. They grumbled about how poorly the action had gone. Nadya was cursing. A couple of photographers showed up, making the women tense. If things had gone right, the photographers would have had no way of finding them right now.
Then someone saw a Tweet: “Pussy Riot had an action today, titled ‘Holy Shit.’” This had never happened: they had never been exposed before they were ready, never lost control over their timing and orchestration. It was particularly upsetting because it was already clear that they did not have enough quality footage to put together a clip. To try to regain control, they called Mitya Aleshkovsky, an activist photographer who had said he had decent still shots despite the bad light, and asked him to publish the photographs with the correct title of the piece: Mother of God, Get Rid of Putin. And since it was clear that they needed to do further damage control, Nadya, Kat, and Maria went to an apartment—a semi-abandoned flat they had come to consider their headquarters—to see what they could salvage of
the video footage. And also, perhaps, because they felt the need to be with each other. Something felt off among them, and each of them sensed it, the way each partner in a romantic relationship senses when it has started to crack, even though neither can say what went wrong and when. Whatever they had had during the Red Square action, that sense of lightness and righteousness, had left them; a sour sort of anxiety had set in. And just like lovers sensing those cracks often do, in their anxiety they clung together.
Looking at the video footage did not make them feel any better. A couple of the videographers had violated a cardinal Pussy Riot rule: they kept filming even after Kat’s balaclava was off—which should have been their signal to turn their cameras off or away from her. Aside from the fact that Kat could be identified if an unedited copy of the video got out of Pussy Riot’s hands, this also meant that the operators had not been filming the other four women while their cameras were trained on the unmasked Kat—missing a chunk of the too-brief performance. Nadya grew progressively angrier and kept cursing. Maria shifted into her we-can-do-it mode and forced them to finish editing the video. They needed nearly two minutes of video to fit the entire song, and even with the footage filmed at the Cathedral of the Apparition, they had to use the same sequences several times over and resort to including bits where the guards were stopping them or church employees were waving their hands at the camera. They all agreed it was the worst video they had ever published.
Publish it they did, though, with some explanatory notes. “Last Sunday Seraphima returned from church and demanded that all the Pussy Riot soloists urgently learn Byzantian Znamenny chant,” they wrote, referring to a part of the Russian Orthodox liturgic tradition. “‘During Morning Prayer today, I realized what we need to ask of the Mother of God and how to do it so that something might finally change in our spiritually bereft land,’ Seraphima told us…” A detailed explication of the lyrics followed. “‘Since peaceful demonstrations give no immediate result despite being hundreds of thousands strong, we will address Mother of God herself before Easter and ask her to get rid of Putin as soon as possible,’ Seraphima, the most religious of the punk feminists, told the rest of the team as we headed toward the Cathedral on the cold February morning.”
The video was up just after 7 p.m. They waited for the storm. Moskovsky Komsomolets, a popular tabloid, called first. Pussy Riot answered a couple of questions and then the journalist said, “You did good, girls! Everyone is going to be on your case now, but we support you.” And for a little while, it felt better. Some more journalists called. Pussy Riot walked down to the corner to don their balaclavas and give a couple of on-camera interviews without giving up the exact location of their headquarters. Then they occupied themselves with getting their equipment—an amplifier, a guitar, and a microphone—out of captivity; security guards had taken them when they broke up the show and now they were apparently with the police. Pussy Riot hatched an insane plan. They forged a couple of loan contracts and dispatched a male friend to the police station to tell his tale: he had loaned the equipment to a virtual stranger, someone who had approached him on the Metro.
Absurdly, it worked. The police fingerprinted the man and then gave him the equipment. He brought it back to headquarters, and they celebrated. “We were euphoric,” Kat told me. “Despite the fact that the clip didn’t work out, this felt like a victory. And we even decided to set up some interviews for the next day.”
———
THE FOLLOWING DAY, they set up meetings at the Zverev Center of Contemporary Art, an off-the-beaten-path shared work and exhibit space. The journalists seemed interested in the group in general, asking only a couple of questions each about the latest action. It was just the three of them—Maria, Nadya, and Kat. Kat had brought food. Maria had brought a camp stove, which amused the journalists. They talked to the journalists and to one another and drank tea in their balaclavas. It felt normal, as long as one thinks that using a camp stove indoors is normal. In the afternoon, they went home.
Maria picked up Philip from Nikita and took him to a playground in the neighborhood. It was late February, and it still got dark early, so they didn’t stay long. They had barely stepped out of the tiny creaky elevator on their floor when they saw nine men crowded in the hallway, eight of them wearing civilian clothes and the ninth, her neighborhood cop, looking terrified.
“Please proceed with us. We need to talk with you,” said one of the suits.
“I am not proceeding anywhere,” Maria responded in her high-pitched voice. “I have my son with me. You’ll have to serve me with a summons.” And, back held straight, she marched into her apartment.
Nikita had gone to work. He had a job he loved now, working with predators at the Durov Center, an animal circus. He was not supposed to use his phone while he was feeding the tigers—if he did not want to be eaten himself, that is—but he did look at it when Maria’s message came in, and then he wished he had not. The message said she needed to go into hiding “possibly for as long as a month” and he would have to take care of Philip.
———
NADYA, KAT, MARIA, PETYA, and one of the other participants in the cathedral action gathered late that night. Petya said he knew a lawyer. Nikolai Polozov had given him his card in late December, when the authorities had attempted to have Petya forcibly drafted. Polozov had shown up at the draft office where Petya had been delivered but was not actually allowed to enter and help; Petya had fought off conscription on his own. Now Polozov entered. He was a paunchy, balding man with glasses and a beard—he looked like a lawyer, in other words, and he talked like one as well. He said they should lie low. He said no charges had apparently been filed. He said that if charges were filed, he would help. Meanwhile, they left town.
Sort of. They left Moscow city limits. They knew other people generally left the country if they were hiding from police—Kiev was a favored destination because you did not need a visa, you could get there by train, and people spoke Russian. But that was for serious people in real trouble, not for intellectual pranksters who presented themselves as silly young girls. For them, the Moscow suburbs—atavistically rural, eerily quiet, apparently cut off from civilization—would be enough. In other words, they came up with an escape plan that served the purpose of displacing Pussy Riot but didn’t necessarily get them out of sight of police and security services.
Which conducted a search of Nadya’s dorm room that night. She had not lived there since before Gera was born, and the room had gradually turned into a storage unit for everything from Voina props and rally banners to compact discs and underwear. In the roughly seven hours that the search team spent there, they managed to turn the varied contents of the room into an undifferentiated pile in the middle of the floor.
Petya would learn this seven months later, when he would finally be given access to the room, which had been sealed as evidence until then. For now, the five of them found themselves in the white expanse of Moscow suburbs. Petya was high on their predicament and overproducing ideas; he had talked to someone who said he could arrange safe haven for Pussy Riot members in the Perm region in the Urals. The women brushed him off and grew increasingly annoyed. They took long walks. They took turns sliding down a snowy hill. They semi-adopted a stray dog. If they were trying to make themselves feel like carefree kids, they failed; they felt ridiculous. There was no evidence that anyone was actually looking for them. All they had done was fail to stage a performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Why were they fooling themselves into thinking they needed to waste their time way out here?
Especially when stuff was going on in Moscow. The presidential election was less than two weeks away. On Sunday, February 26, protesters planned to come out onto the Garden Ring—the avenue that circles central Moscow—and form an unbroken “white ring” to symbolize their demand for fair elections. Members of Pussy Riot should be among them, not in this bland and silent snow-whiteness.
———
IT WAS IN THE EARLY
MORNING HOURS OF FEBRUARY 26, the day known in the Orthodox tradition as Forgiveness Sunday, that charges were filed in the case of unnamed women who had attempted to stage a performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, thereby assaulting the feelings of Orthodox believers.
Maria texted Nikita from an unfamiliar number, giving him Polozov’s number and instructing him to get information by calling it. Nikita called and asked what was going on.
“Who are you?” asked Polozov.
“I’m freaking Nikita,” said Nikita.
“How do I know you are not the security services?” asked Polozov, reasonably enough.
Nikita texted Maria. Maria informed Polozov. Polozov called Nikita back and told him about the charges.
“What should we do?” asked Nikita. He meant himself and Philip, and he meant the question literally.
“Pray,” said Polozov.
———
THEY MOVED TO ANOTHER PLACE in the suburbs. They realized they had to, because one of them had forgotten to use TOR, an anonymity protocol, when logging on to a Russian social network. Or perhaps they just needed to feel like they were doing something in response to the news of the charges. Then the other participant who had come with them left, so it was just Nadya, Maria, and Kat. Petya was drifting in and out.
After a couple of days, they decided to reenter the city. It was a strange city now, one where they could not go home. They oscillated between feeling scared, paranoid, energized, and just plain silly. Who could still be looking for them a week after the action at the cathedral? And if they were still looking, how long would they keep at it? Another week? A month? Longer? Polozov had said they should lie low until the presidential election. That was scheduled for March 4, ten days after they went into hiding.
