by Masha Gessen
“I’ve said everything I had to say. I have nothing to add, I’m sorry.”
“The charges are not fully formulated,” said Kat, standing up.
“All right, so that’s what you think. Do you plead guilty? Tolokonnikova?”
“No, I do not plead guilty. Can I explain?”
“You’ll explain later.”
“But I want everyone to understand.”
“You have pled not guilty. Sit down. Samutsevich, do you plead guilty? Stand up and respond.”
“No, I do not.”
“Alyokhina, do you plead guilty to the charges?”
“I can’t plead, I don’t understand the charges.”
Pause.
“You are college-educated! You know Russian.”
“First of all, I have not yet finished college. Second, I am being educated as a journalist. I am not a lawyer. I don’t understand what I am being accused of. I can’t plead guilty or not guilty. I don’t understand.”
“Prosecutor, please be so kind as to outline the charges again. They don’t understand.”
“The defendants are being charged with committing an act of hooliganism, which is a rude disruption of the social order showing a clear disregard for society, committed for reasons of religious hatred and enmity, for reasons of hatred toward a particular social group, committed by a group of people as a result of a conspiracy…”
“The prosecutor has mentioned that I have three defense attorneys to help me understand the charges. But I was denied the opportunity to meet with them prior to trial. As a result, I do not understand. I insist that they be allowed to explain the charges to me.”
“Calm down, we are talking about something else.”
“This is very important for me to say.”
“Do you plead guilty to the charges?” the judge screamed.
“I don’t understand the charges.”
“The charges were perfectly clearly, eh, er, rendered. All right, please, Tolokonnikova, do you want to comment on the charges?”
Nadya quickly summarized the commentary Volkova had read into the record a couple of hours earlier. She said she felt no hatred for anyone. She also admitted she had been in the cathedral performing, but this had had nothing to do with hatred. “I do not really understand what I am doing in court, facing criminal charges.”
Kat followed suit, in her characteristically indirect way: “I admit the occurrences in the cathedral, and I admit that I participated,” she said, but she had never experienced hatred or enmity based on religion or membership in a social or ethnic group.
When the judge asked Maria whether she wanted to comment on the charges, Maria finally entered her plea:
“I plead not guilty to the crimes described in Article 213, Part 2. I also believe that in reviewing a case filed under this article, ideological aspects are as important as facts, because the arguments rest on motivation and the motives of our actions stem from our ideologies. The prosecution is trying to play down the political and creative components, which are in fact key here. I am also grateful to our lawyers for making sure our comments were sounded out here today. Contrary to what we have already been accused of, they were not written for the media. They were written so that believers, including those identified as victims here today, would hear us. I realize this is difficult within the framework of a court hearing, but there is something greater, and in the space of this greatness, where there is neither slave nor free, we shall hear one another.”
The judge surely did not hear Maria quoting Galatians, but she did hear her letting the court off the hook by pleading not guilty—not to the charges she claimed not to understand but to the crime described in the article of the criminal code that was holding her here: felony hooliganism.
The lawyers were much less articulate. Polozov said the charges were absurd. Feigin started saying the charges characterized their author as incompetent. The judge interrupted him, asking him to stick to the topic at hand. “Don’t tell me what to do,” said Feigin.
It was four in the afternoon on the first day of hearings, and the tone and pattern of the trial had been established: it would be a Soviet political trial repeated as farce. About a dozen trials of groups of Soviet dissidents took place from the early 1960s until the mid-1980s; the transcripts of these trials formed an important part of the dissident literary canon, and the experience of these trials was, for a long time, the Soviet Union’s only living memory of something that resembled public political debate.
Each participant in a Soviet political trial had a clearly defined role. It was the prosecutor’s job to present the state’s position, which amounted to creating a legal pretext for jailing people for exercising rights guaranteed to them by the Soviet constitution. For example, when seven people were tried for staging a demonstration in Red Square (in the very same spot where Pussy Riot performed forty-four years later), they were charged not with demonstrating—for the right to public assembly was guaranteed to Soviet citizens—but with disrupting traffic, no matter that it had been a Sunday, there had been no traffic, and Red Square had been closed off to cars that day anyway, to facilitate pedestrian access to the Lenin Mausoleum. So was Pussy Riot charged not with praying or even dancing in a church but with committing an act of hooliganism and hatred toward Orthodox believers.
The judge in a Soviet political trial played the role of a bureaucrat with a rubber stamp; his job was to facilitate a smooth and speedy hearing, denying most motions filed by the defense, and to issue a preordained verdict when the time came. There were trials the KGB wanted finished quickly, and in these cases, it was the judge’s job to stretch the workday, compress the cross-examinations, and eliminate as much of the procedure as his idea of process would allow. The role of the judge had not changed in half a century.
Defense attorneys in a Soviet political trial, if they did not want to be disbarred, had to distance themselves from their clients. Traditionally, in their closing arguments they would state that they did not share the defendants’ political views and condemned them as anti-Soviet and immature—while also arguing that the defendants should be acquitted and released. To this end, they made a close study of all the evidence and made painstaking legal arguments—despite knowing the sentence had been written before the trial ever began. The defendants themselves, on the other hand, had a choice to make: they could either engage with the court, making arguments and helping their lawyers poke momentarily satisfying but useless holes in the prosecution’s case, or they could refuse to recognize the court’s authority altogether and use the court hearing solely to try to make a political speech. Anatoly (Natan) Sharansky, given a chance to make a final statement to a Moscow court, turned to his brother and dictated a speech for distribution in samizdat, then turned back to the court to say, “And as for this court, I have nothing to say to it.”
The motivation of Pussy Riot and their lawyers was exactly the same as that of their predecessors half a century earlier: they aimed, on the one hand, to act as one would in a courtroom, and a country, where laws were meaningful and respected, and on the other hand, they wanted to use the forum of the court to make political declarations that would be heard. Except that, as if they had heard only a distorted account of the traditional division of labor in Soviet political trials, defense and defendants switched roles. By accident and as a result of poor communication rather than by prior arrangement, it was the lawyers who demonstratively refused to recognize the court, while Maria spent her time detailing exquisite if futile legal arguments.
———
IF THIS HAD BEEN A NORMAL TRIAL, the judge, having finished with the preliminaries at four in the afternoon, would have broken until the following morning. But this was not a normal trial; this was a fast one. The judge announced a thirty-minute break. Victims’ testimony would follow.
The first victim was Lyubov Sokologorskaya, a fifty-two-year-old woman with a tired, apologetic face. After eliciting her identifying information, the judge s
tarted the questioning rather than allowing the prosecution to proceed.
“Tell me, please, are you an Orthodox believer and an Orthodox Christian?” asked the judge.
“Yes,” Sokologorskaya said apologetically. “I try to observe all the rituals. I have been fasting as prescribed for several years.”
“Tell me, please, what in your understanding and in that of your religion, is God?”
The defendants gasped. Having read the prosecution’s case, they had realized that the trial would focus not on their actions but on their attitudes toward religion. And after the probable-cause hearing, they had a bad feeling about its likely trajectory and about their lawyers’ level of expertise. But nothing had prepared them for such an opening.
“In my religion, God is all that is, and we are all in His image and likeness,” responded the victim. “These are not idle thoughts on my part. I have examined myself and learned how a person can change for the better if he strives. I am deeply convinced that God the Lord is the source of all change.”
“The source of all change?” echoed the judge.
“Is God the Lord. I can explain.” She cleared her throat. “Where our Orthodox religion is concerned, God’s mercy is in the sacrament of repentance for all the sins we commit. This is the exact opposite of self-love. In other words, it’s being liberated of all the passions with which we are contaminated.”
“Tell me, what does the place where the sacrament happens mean to you?” Now it was the prosecutor speaking. “I don’t mean only the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.”
“We can’t hear the prosecutor at all!” Maria shouted. “We are behind bulletproof glass.”
No one seemed to hear what she said, though her words, carried by the microphone in their stall, were audible to everyone in the courtroom.
“What does the cathedral mean to you?” the prosecutor continued. “What do its walls mean to you as an Orthodox believer?”
“Actually, I would like to begin by stating that the Church, in our Orthodox religion, is the union that Jesus Christ led when He came onto this earth as God who was personified in the human image. This is the essence of Orthodox faith.” What she meant was not entirely clear, but this did not discourage the judge from questioning her further.
After some more theological fumbling, the judge finally asked Sokologorskaya to describe what happened on February 21. Sokologorskaya said she came to work that morning, performed her usual duties of lighting oil lamps and cleaning candle holders and other ritual objects, and saw visitors enter the cathedral starting around ten in the morning. Those who came in an hour later made her suspicious. She described seeing Nadya, Kat, and someone she could not identify forcing open a gate to the soleas, the elevated platform surrounding the sanctuary. “I especially would like to underscore that to open this gate they had to use their bodies—I will show this now here at the podium—like so, they had to shove aside the ark which housed part of the Lord’s robe. This is probably the first pain I felt. This ark had not been on display there for very long, and everyone approached it with reverence, one by one, and people would line up for the chance to pay their respects to it. So this was a show of disdain, at least for the Russian-speaking people, and every time I think about it, a bitterness wells up.”
Haltingly Sokologorskaya described seeing the group force open a second gate and run up on the soleas. “I finally went up to the barrier and rose on the first two steps—and then I could not take another step; I could not step onto the soleas. This may mean nothing to other people, but I was like a pillar on those steps.”
“God wouldn’t let her up there,” a chorus of whispers in the courtroom explained.
“Please tell me, did you try to use words to explain to them that parishioners of the female sex cannot go up on the soleas?” the judge asked helpfully.
“I told them, I begged them, I pleaded.”
“Did they listen to you or did they ignore you?”
The defense might have objected that the witness was being led, but it was the judge doing the leading.
“They absolutely ignored me. More than that, the actions they undertook after that showed just how much they ignored me.”
“Did you try to stop them physically? Did you try to use your hands or body to shield the sanctuary?”
“I had tried to do it at the first gate, but they closed it in front of me. I tried to grab them, tried not to let them in, but one of them slipped away, she waved me off, she was sly.”
“Please tell me, after this group of girls stepped onto the soleas, onto the pulpit, how did events develop and what was the reaction of other people present in the cathedral?” The judge continued calmly and with great care to steer her nervous witness.
“At the first moment my inner reaction was, ‘What are they planning to do next?’… The most frightening and unpleasant part of the situation was feeling, yes, that I was being held still by the Lord and I cannot raise my foot and take even a single step… The most frightening thing would be if, God forbid, they try to force their way into the sanctuary—well, then I wouldn’t just stand there! Let me explain something to you. The Lord’s gate, the gate to the Kingdom of the Lord, is the actual gate to the sanctuary. When a cathedral is built, the sanctuary is blessed first, along with everything inside it. In fact this is the place of Christ’s presence. And as far as we Orthodox Christians are concerned, Christ has risen… Moreover, at that moment the sanctuary housed a nail with which Christ had been nailed to the cross. And when people come to the cathedral, I tell them about this with special trepidation, I tell them that this is God’s trace on this earth. This very nail was used to nail the demigod who is everything and everyone for us Orthodox believers. So this was another relic. Plus there was the Lord’s robe, which had been given to us by a member of the Muslim faith. He had acquired it in his battles way back when and then he gave it to us in the seventeenth century, when the Romanov dynasty ascended to the throne.”
The defense appeared to be in a stupor while Sokologorskaya continued to cite random episodes of Russian history, returning periodically to the unremitting heartache caused by Pussy Riot’s action. Finally, when the victim seemed to run out of breath, the judge asked her to return to the story of what happened in the cathedral on February 21. Sokologorskaya looked confused.
“What were they wearing?” asked the prosecutor. “Was their clothing the sort that would be permissible in church?”
Sokologorskaya responded by telling the court the group apparently had a leader and she thought it was Tolokonnikova.
“The clothing that remained on them—how would you describe it?” The judge would not abandon her efforts to get the testimony she needed. “Was it modest, vulgar, permissible in a church?”
“The clothing they had on was not permissible for being in a church. It was vulgar. One of the unidentified persons even had a bare shoulder. I quickly thought, ‘Oh my God, make it so they don’t strip!’”
“Please tell us what they did then,” asked the judge.
“They began to don masks with slits for the eyes and mouth. I was caused further anxiety by the fact that a guitar was being taken out.”
“A regular guitar?”
“No no no, not a regular guitar. It was an electric guitar.”
“Were they standing still?”
“They began bodily movements and those shouts.”
“Please describe their bodily movements.”
“I am not going to look for a description now. As far as I am concerned, these were devilish jerkings.”
“Were they jumping and skipping?” asked the judge.
“They were jumping and skipping and making arm movements with their hands in fists. They raised their legs so high that you could practically see everything below the waist. Doing this in front of the sanctuary, at the Lord’s gate, at the pulpit, this sort of jumping—how can anyone say this was just a small ethical transgression? And I felt like they were showing off to one ano
ther, to see who can raise her leg higher.”
“Please tell us, were these actions accompanied by shouts of any sort that were of an offensive and sacrilegious nature with regards to the Orthodox faith, Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, the Russian Orthodox Church, and Russian saints?”
“That was their whole nature. It was offensive. There was no other nature to them.”
“Please tell us, did the actions of the defendants and of unidentified persons cause moral damage to you?”
“They caused huge moral damage to me. The pain will not go away.”
“In your opinion, did their video clip offend the feelings and souls of believers? Did it provoke them to retaliate in kind, and did it, as well, provoke those who are not Orthodox believers to view the Orthodox negatively?”
By Russian law, a witness or a victim of an alleged crime can testify only to the facts; witness opinions must be disallowed when offered and must never be solicited. But those who testified as witnesses against Soviet dissidents were often asked to render their opinions on the anti-Soviet nature of actions or materials attributed to defendants—and their opinions, scripted by the KGB, often made it into the wording of the courts’ verdicts.
“It did both,” Sokologorskaya obliged, adding that the impact was exacerbated by timing: it had been the week before Lent.
“And if we abstract ourselves from what happened in the cathedral, in your opinion, would this kind of behavior be acceptable from a moral standpoint in any other public space, or are these immoral acts of hooliganism?” the judge asked the candle lady.
“Naturally and without a doubt, this kind of behavior would be unacceptable anywhere. From my point of view, it is simply immoral.”
At length the judge, having preempted the role of the prosecution, invited the defense to cross-examine the witness.
“You said you heard what the participants said, but you cannot repeat it because of your religious convictions,” said Mark Feigin. “Is this correct?”
“Yes.”
“In that case, I am going to read out several phrases myself and you’ll tell me whether you heard them. Did you hear them sing ‘Mother of God, chase Putin out’?”
