by Masha Gessen
Journalists kept e-mailing Pussy Riot and asking for interviews. The three of them would go to cafés in the center of Moscow with their laptops, answer e-mails, and set up a secure Skype connection. Then they would go into the bathroom, a laptop and three balaclavas in hand, crowd around the toilet, put on their balaclavas, and answer questions.
“What is your ultimate goal?”
“We have several of them. For example, we demand freedom for political prisoners. We heard some officials called for our imprisonment after the performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. But we only wanted to stress there is far too much communication between the Church and the government. Our patriarch is not ashamed to wear a forty-thousand-dollar watch, and this is intolerable when so many families in Russia are on the edge of poverty.”
“What do you think needs to be changed immediately in Russia?”
“We must reform the judicial system first. Democracy is impossible without an independent judiciary. Education reform and cultural reform are also needed. Putin pays attention to anything but culture—museums, libraries, cultural centers are in awful condition.”
They sounded less like punks than like thousands of other members of the protest movement. It felt like the right line to take, with the election less than a week away and the anticipation of change stubbornly hanging in the air.
One time a waitress ran after them when they left a café. In her hands she had a balaclava they had left in the bathroom.
Evenings were the most difficult time. They were one another’s household for now, and they needed to negotiate when and where this household changed locations. Petya’s frequent appearances annoyed Kat, who felt he was careless about security; he kept his iPhone turned on all the time, while the women were religious about never using their old phones and switching cheap, effectively disposable ones every couple of days. But separating from one another felt unsafe as well, even if this fear itself felt absurd—and was illogical on the face of it. One evening Maria went to a reading given by one of her institute instructors, a neoromantic poet. Her friends already knew she was not living at home or using her phone. They went out for coffee after the reading, and she told them not to worry about her. They did not; they knew she could handle all sorts of frightening situations, like hitchhiking alone, for example.
The three of them went to stay at N’s, or Morzh’s, apartment. They discussed the issue of whether it was smart to stay with a Pussy Riot participant and decided that, since she had not been at the cathedral, it was all right. Perhaps they were just tired of strangers and strange homes: at N’s place they could pretend they were just staying over at a friend’s. It was a place out of time and space. On the eighth floor of a standard edge-of-Moscow concrete block, it had been remade with textured floors in zebra patterns, divided into sectors by pipes. A fur-lined corner in one room had an irregularly shaped built-in bed. N told Nadya she and Petya could take the bed and Kat and Maria could sleep on the floor in the same room, while N and her boyfriend slept in the smaller room, with the sound studio and all the vintage bicycles.
Petya was not there yet, and N put on a movie by Alexander Sokurov, a difficult Russian director; she was still working to reform Maria’s taste in film. Halfway through the movie, Petya arrived with the news that the editor of a radio station that had aired an interview with Pussy Riot had been visited by investigators who had tried to cajole and coerce him into disclosing what he knew of the group’s location. This was frightening. Really, it was the first truly scary sign since all those plainclothesmen had greeted Maria eight days before. (They did not yet know that Nadya’s dorm room had been searched, or that the police had come to Kat’s house as well—Kat had tried calling home once but no one had answered the phone.) They wondered if they should bolt. But then Petya said he had brought a napoleon cake, and they all crowded around the Formica table in the tiny kitchen, looking out over the black expanse of nighttime winter sky, pierced by tiny rectangles of illuminated windows, and they felt better.
———
THEY LEFT N’S HOUSE the next day. Petya had given them the keys to a friend’s apartment not far from the center of town. Of all the strange places they had stayed in the last week, this one was the strangest. It was in a pompous Stalin-era seven-story building with bay windows that looked across a busy avenue at the Moscow Hippodrome, a den of gambling, corruption, and horsiness that had miraculously survived there for nearly two centuries, through a succession of czars and other tyrants. With a quadriga atop the main building and a horse-topped weathervane on a tower, it looked like a slightly worn fairy-tale castle. The interior of the apartment, whose owner apparently lived abroad, was like nothing Nadya, Maria, or Kat had ever seen. It had an apparently endless number of rooms, two bathrooms, and a Jacuzzi. They spent the night there feeling lost in all the space.
The following day Petya arrived. His presence made Kat nervous again; his phone was on, and he was talking some kind of nonsense about celebrating Gera’s fourth birthday the following day and maybe bringing her here or taking Nadya to her, and it was obvious to Kat that he was going to get them caught. This was all the more upsetting because, if Polozov could be believed, this might be the last day Pussy Riot had to be hiding: the election was tomorrow. They fought, and then they tried to find solace in their laptops. But there was a problem with one of the external hard drives, and to everyone’s relief, Petya and Nadya resolved to go out to an electronics marketplace to try to get the thing fixed.
They stepped out. Begovaya (“Racing”) Street, usually one of the most congested in Moscow, was almost empty on a Saturday afternoon. They looked left: the television tower, miles away, was clearly visible, but otherwise, there was not a soul or a suspicious vehicle in sight. They looked right: all clear as well. They headed right, in the direction of Moscow City, five high-rise towers in various stages of construction with a stairway-shaped, copper-colored one rising above the rest.
They passed a bank with a mortgage center, an Apple-authorized computer-repair shop, an old-fashioned Soviet-style art gallery with a mixture of sculptures and gaudy decorative objects such as plates, vanity tables, table lamps, and dolls in the display window; cheap 1980s-style light fixtures visible behind the mess of objects made the place look comically confused. They passed a cell-phone store on the right and, on the left, a flower shop and a sex shop with an illuminated, red-heart-shaped “24” sign. A newly built office tower stood at the end of the block, where the street gave way to a highway. They entered a narrow passageway that separated the tower from the road. The highway rose, forming a barrier on the left, steel bars cordoned off the tower on the right, and an arched, semitransparent roof made the passageway almost fully enclosed. The path was semicircular, so Petya and Nadya could not see more than fifteen feet ahead or behind them; they seemed to be completely alone.
They heard the stampede before they saw anyone. It sounded like a herd of horses had escaped from the hippodrome. It turned out to be a herd of men in suits and dress coats. Petya had enough time to think the scene would look good in a spy movie before about half a dozen of the men grabbed him and carried him forward. While four of them lifted him off the ground, two others forced his head down toward his chest so he could not see what was happening to Nadya, though he guessed that what was happening to her was the same thing that was happening to him.
The two groups of men ran for about a hundred yards, holding Petya and Nadya aloft, into an underpass that led to the Metro. Petya and Nadya were thrown against a marble wall and held pressed to it for a couple of minutes before being carried again—this time into a glass enclosure in the Metro lobby. It said POLICE in yellow-on-blue block letters on this structure, and there were a couple of transit cops inside. The men in suits shoved their IDs under the cops’ noses, and the cops vanished.
There was a gray laminate desk in a corner, with two video screens sitting on top of it; three mismatched office armchairs; and an unusually deep but short bench that w
as bolted to the floor. Petya and Nadya were placed on the bench and the men in suits stuffed themselves into the space, which was large enough to accommodate perhaps six people comfortably.
They sat in silence for about twenty minutes. A man appeared, took a look at the detainees, and pronounced his verdict: “Verzilov and Tolokonnikova.” He left. The rest of them stayed another two or three hours. Outside the glass, a trickle of people was coming in and out of the Metro. Past the turnstiles, a decorative tableau was visible: two copper horses with jockeys, a group of spectators, and an inappropriately heroic-looking race caller with a flag that looked more like a shovel in his hand.
This new period in Petya’s, and Nadya’s lives—as well as the lives of Maria and Kat and their families—would be characterized by endless, helpless, and often useless waiting. They waited inside a police car for about four hours. More men in suits appeared once in a while, looked at Petya and Nadya, and nodded. It was midnight by the time they were taken to a police precinct in central Moscow, where they were led to a block of offices in the basement. The place was buzzing as though it were a weekday afternoon and not the wee hours of Sunday morning. Polozov arrived, bringing Violetta Volkova with him. More and more police detectives kept showing up. Petya and Nadya were taken into separate rooms, and then into different separate rooms, passing each other in the hallway a couple of times. They were asked the same asinine questions by a succession of men.
“Who is the group’s director?”
“Who is the group’s producer?”
“Who is its costume designer?”
They kept saying, “I don’t know.”
Petya was asked, “What kind of music does your wife like?” and “Have you heard her sing lately?” Petya pleaded Article 51 of the Russian constitution, which guarantees the right to refuse to testify against oneself or one’s immediate relatives. On one of the desks in one of the offices, he spotted a thick pile of documents showing that he had Canadian citizenship.
Around six in the morning, the police led both Petya and Nadya out into the hallway. Kat and Maria were there. One of the suits said Nadya and Maria were under arrest and Petya and Kat were free to go “for now.”
———
KAT AND MARIA HAD LEFT the apartment for no particular reason. They always just did; they would have taken the Metro a couple of stops into the center of town and then one of them would have suggested a café and the other would have agreed. When they were pushed up against the steel-bar fence in the same passageway where Petya and Nadya had been grabbed a couple of hours earlier, the men had asked Kat who she was. It appeared they had a visual ID on Maria and not on Kat. Coincidentally, Maria had her internal passport in her bag and Kat did not. So Kat said she was Irina Loktina, a name she had used during her previous detentions, and decided to pretend she did not know Maria. She stuck to her story at the police precinct, even when an investigator discovered a folder on her laptop called “Pussy Riot Songs.” She stuck to her story when one of the investigators threatened to rape her, and later, when he started twisting her arms. He stopped quickly, as if realizing the maneuver was absurd, and resumed threatening her with rape. Then he fell asleep, and she and Maria sat together in the basement hallway of the police precinct, listening to him snore.
In the end, the police kept the laptop and told Kat she was free to go—for now. Polozov drove her to the building across from the hippodrome.
“You have a choice,” said Polozov as he let her out of the car into the still-dark morning. “You can hide or not hide.”
“I’m not going to hide,” said Kat. “It doesn’t make sense anymore.”
“All right,” said Polozov. “Although if I were you, I’d hide.”
The polls were opening all around Moscow. Putin would be reelected president. Kat went upstairs to the most opulent apartment she had ever seen, retrieved the towel and change of clothes she had left there, stuffed them into her backpack, and went home. It was not that it no longer made sense to hide; if anything, now was exactly the time to stay away from the Samutsevich residence. It was just that she had no one to hide with. It would be the loneliest two weeks of her life.
EIGHT
Detention
Undated (early March)
Olya,
I have not yet seen your letter, though I know there is one. My lawyer will come tomorrow and give it to me, and I will hand over this response, which I am writing half blind.
Maria meant that she was writing the response without having seen her friend’s original letter.
I spent the last three days in quarantine, a very cold cell where everyone lands upon first coming to pretrial detention. It is a museum of conceptual art. The windows are caulked up with bread crumbs; there are many many many bread crumbs and it’s not clear what holds them there. There are 12 beds and they are welded to the floor. There are six bedside tables and they are welded to the floor. It is cold all the time. We slept in our overcoats and fur coats and the cold still woke us up.
Do you remember the museum in Vilnius?
They had gone to the Genocide Museum in Vilnius together. The building had housed a succession of exterminating governments’ courts and police headquarters—the Russians, the Germans, the Soviets, the Nazis, and the Soviets again, with a KGB prison in the basement. The prison’s nineteen intact cells form part of the permanent exhibit; among them is a cell where the floor is a pool of freezing water and the prisoners had to balance on a tiny round platform in the middle until they nodded off and fell into the water.
This place is like that museum, only more frightening. But this fear mixes with incredible beauty—if only you can keep looking at all times, if you can keep letting it all in—you will feel a force capable of knocking out all the glass windows, twisting the rusty grates, turning to dust the concrete flooring of the inner courtyard where we are taken for an hour a day and where the snow shines for a few seconds after it falls through the squares of the ceiling grate and then mixes with the gray-brown mass underfoot, spotted with cigarette butts.
I am reading a book by Kuprin. It was the only thing here. You cannot have your own books in pretrial detention, and the library is a myth: to get anything out of it, you have to go through utter hell. That is exactly what I am planning to do in the next few days, and I hope to succeed.
Forgive me for such an apolitical letter. There was a lot that was good. Really. Really, really. I guess someone else is fated to get a letter full of joy and calls to action. I miss you. I miss you a lot. A lot.
Inmates had the right to correspond by e-mail—as long as family or friends initiated the correspondence and paid for their own letters and those they got in return; the rate was fifty rubles, or just under two dollars a page. E-mail was read by prison censors. The other way to correspond was to pass paper letters through the defense attorney; this was officially forbidden but tacitly tolerated, for the most part. Maria used this uncensored route to correspond intensively with Olya Vinogradova, her institute friend.
March 28, 2012
Dear Olya,
First of all, please forgive me for writing about food so much in my previous letters. It’s just that I was embarrassed that the girls, my cellmates, were always treating me and I had nothing to offer them. Yesterday volunteers sent so much food that all of us in this cell are set for at least two weeks. Thank you so much!
As soon as word of Nadya’s and Maria’s arrests got out, a spontaneous ragtag support group formed; it would stay together for much of the next couple of years, with friends and strangers collecting money, food, and paperwork to help the inmates. Once friends published the lists of foods the inmates needed, there was a rush on the pretrial detention facility’s online store, with people ordering food to be delivered to Maria’s and Nadya’s cells. It was particularly important in Maria’s case since she was a vegetarian and could not eat most of what was delivered to the cell from the kitchen.
I really do feel all right here, and I think that if I
have to spend half a year or a year behind bars, it will only make me stronger. There was a lot of misunderstanding at first, but now people support me even if they do think I am a little cuckoo. Among other things, the girls in the cell have been teaching me not to be naive and not to believe all the incarceration stories I hear. But I still believe everyone. I have always thought that all people are good and we need to separate their deeds (which are often not good) from the people themselves. To put it simply, everyone has a right to make mistakes. I know everything is not quite so simple and crude, but here, as I reiterate some basic things a hundred times over, I actually learn something.
“Half a year or a year” sounded unimaginable to Olya. Maria’s first arrest order was for two weeks, and this seemed like an impossibly long time. Then there was a hearing and the term of arrest was extended by a month, and this was shocking. In April, a judge ordered Pussy Riot held for another four months, and Olya started getting used to the idea that time behind bars could indeed be measured in months. By this time, the prosecution was talking about years.
Spring came yesterday. Pigeons are cooing by our window. The sky is slightly overcast right now, but when the sun is out, its rays paint a grate on the floor, lighting up bright oranges against the squares of worn floorboards. We have so many oranges now! A huge pail full plus a bucket! We also have a lot of pears. And a box of apples and kiwi and a pile of cheese. The metal shelves on the wall are buckling beneath the weight of all the cakes.
Continued on March 29, 2012:
Today is Naked Thursday. Inmates must go out into the hallway wrapped only in sheets or bathrobes and line up so that the doctor can examine each of them in turn, looking for bodily injuries. Cell #210 is different because I live here, so everything that the staff does with us must be recorded on video; the camera is either affixed to the breast pocket of one of the staff or held by hand, but it is always trained on me. For this reason we do not go out into the hallway naked; instead the doctor comes in and makes a notation on a piece of paper, indicating that no injuries were found on any of the bodies.
