Words Will Break Cement

by Masha Gessen

For its last witness, the prosecution called Stanislav Samutsevich. “I refuse to answer questions about my daughter,” he said immediately, but the judge did not let him leave the stand. The prosecutor badgered him. “Did she go to the Rodchenko School? Did she meet contemporary artists there? Did she share their views? Did Tolokonnikova get her involved in various groups?” Stanislav looked pained and refused to answer. The prosecutor read aloud the testimony Stanislav had given back in March: “Tolokonnikova got her involved in the feminist movement. I told Katya that women already had all the rights, but she would not listen to me… I have banned Tolokonnikova from our home. I believed it’s Tolokonnikova’s fault that Katya took part in the action at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior… Sometimes I felt like she was under a spell. She did not want to listen to logic, she lived in a made-up world. But I am sure my daughter did not use drugs or alcohol; she was under the influence of Tolokonnikova.”

  “I was upset,” said Stanislav. “I wanted to make things better for my daughter… I said many things that aren’t true. Please don’t take my testimony into account.”

  That evening the judge read aloud the conclusions of a committee of psychiatrists and psychologists who had examined the defendants. They had found them sane and fit for trial but had nonetheless diagnosed each with a personality disorder. Maria, they said, suffered from emotional distress brought on by her desire to protest. Nadya and Kat were both labeled with something called “mixed personality disorder.” Nadya’s symptoms were her “active position in life” and “heightened ambitions,” while Kat exhibited an abnormal “insistence on her own point of view.”

  They left the courthouse at ten.

  President Putin spent that day in London, meeting with the British prime minister and confronting questions, protests, and letters in support of Pussy Riot everywhere he went. He finally made a statement: “If those girls had defiled something in Israel, they’d have to deal with burly guys over there,” he said wistfully. “They wouldn’t have gotten out of there alive. Or if they’d gone to the Caucasus, even closer to home. We wouldn’t have even had time to arrest them. But I still don’t think they should be judged too harshly. I hope that they draw their own conclusions.” The more optimistic among Putin’s listeners concluded that Pussy Riot would get a suspended sentence; the more realistic thought this meant they might get less than the possible maximum of seven years.

  ———

  ON DAY FIVE, the prosecutor began opening evidence boxes. He pulled out a yellow dress and a blue balaclava and then a black one. To show the court that the masks had slits, he pulled one of them onto his rubber-gloved hand. A journalist was removed from the courtroom for smiling.

  That afternoon three men in balaclavas showed up on the roof of a storefront across the street, level with the courtroom window. They chanted, “Free Pussy Riot!” Three policemen climbed up there, but the roof was too small for them to risk a scuffle in trying to force the men down. While the policemen huddled at one end of the roof, trying to figure out what to do, the masked men began singing “Mother of God, chase Putin out.” Everyone in the courtroom was transfixed on the roof across the street. “If you want to look, leave the courtroom,” a marshal barked. But Nadya, Maria, and Kat stretched to get a better look; no one was going to kick them out of the courtroom for rubbernecking. They were smiling, too.

  An hour and a half later, a crane finally took the men down.

  That day, the defense called Maria and Kat’s professors to testify to their character. Both said they were wonderful young women who harbored no hatred toward the Russian Orthodox religion. The defense called Olya Vinogradova to the stand.

  “We were going to school together,” said Olya. “We have been together for three years.” She smiled at her friend behind the Plexiglas.

  “You’ll do your laughing when you leave here!” the judge shouted. “This is not a circus or a movie theater.”

  “Don’t pressure the witness,” said Volkova.

  “I am giving you a reprimand,” said the judge.

  “I want one too!” said Feigin.

  “Reprimands for all the defense lawyers,” said the judge. “Enter it into the record.”

  Maria asked her friend to describe her political views: “What is my attitude toward the Putin regime?”

  “I am disallowing the question,” said the judge.

  “Why?” asked Maria.

  “We are examining your character.”

  “And my character can’t have an attitude toward Putin?”

  “It can, but… ” said the judge and trailed off.

  “Did I make any statements about any political figures, and if so, then what did I say?”

  “There you go,” said the judge.

  “I believe you made very negative statements about Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin,” said Olya.

  This was the only point in the trial when the defense managed, for a moment, to focus attention on the political nature of Pussy Riot, if not on the political nature of the action itself. The rest of the time the court successfully obscured the content of the song, as though Pussy Riot had indeed defiled the cathedral by asking the Virgin Mary to become a feminist. Those who knew of Pussy Riot only from the trial or from state television could be forgiven for not knowing this had been an action against Vladimir Putin; the court had managed even to play the recording in such a way so as to skip the refrain every time so that the Mother of God was never asked to get rid of the president.

  They left the courthouse after ten that evening.

  ———

  SATURDAY AND SUNDAY in pretrial detention felt almost like a vacation. The routine resumed on Monday, Day Six of the trial: up by five, in the courtroom by ten, out at ten, in their cells at two. On Monday morning, Volkova tried to engage the court in a discussion of the term shoulder. The prosecution claimed Pussy Riot members’ shoulders had been exposed, but that would only be true of their shoulders in the anatomical sense, meaning the upper arms, and not shoulders in the vernacular sense, meaning the shoulder joint, anatomically speaking.

  “If you look at me, your honor, I will show you what I mean.”

  “I am not looking at you!” screamed the judge, who lost her composure repeatedly that day. It seemed that while the defendants had gotten their second wind, the judge’s nerves had been entirely worn out by the grueling hearing regimen.

  The defense kept filing motions to call its witnesses; the judge kept shooting them down. Around eight in the evening, when yet another of these motions came up for discussion, Maria lashed out at the judge: “It seems to me you keep forgetting that this concerns us personally. We were brought here by force. And I have only one desire: I want to rest and I want to have a confidential meeting with my attorney, and I keep trying to ask for this for a week and a half. I absolutely cannot concentrate in order to write my closing statement. I have to write my testimony at night. I want to draw attention to this!”

  “Are you done?” asked the judge.

  “No! I also want to say that the things the prosecutor says make me suspect he is a provocateur. And I can’t even respond to him because I don’t have that right.”

  “You want to talk about it?” asked the judge.

  “Yes!” said Maria. “It hurts being unable to say anything!”

  The judge said it was now Kat’s turn to speak.

  ———

  ON DAY SEVEN, the prosecutor gave his summation.

  “The defendants’ claims that their action was politically motivated are specious. Not a single politician’s name was pronounced in the cathedral. An analysis of the song showed that the phrase ‘Mother of God, chase Putin out!’ was inserted artificially and the true purpose of the lyrics was to insult the feelings of Orthodox believers. Putin’s last name was included for the sole purpose of creating a pretext for publicizing the action as a protest against the authorities.” He asked for three years behind bars for each of them.

  “I am incredibly ashamed
to be listening to the prosecutor’s speech,” said Volkova in her own summation. “It’s like we are not in Russia in the twenty-first century but have gone through the looking glass. It’s like all of this will fall apart and the three imprisoned girls will go home. In what legal book did the prosecutor find such terms as ‘blasphemy,’ ‘sacrilege,’ and ‘legs hiked up in a vulgar manner’?… The girls have been in jail for many months. They have not seen their families, their children, they have not seen the light of day, they have been tortured. And what are they accused of? They stood in the wrong place, they prayed the wrong way, they crossed themselves too fast and in the wrong direction, they turned their behinds to the sacred nail—and they ruined the foundation of foundations!”

  “The girls are being asked not just to apologize—for they have apologized,” said Feigin. “They are being told to lick the judge’s boots, to humiliate themselves, to cry, to give the state the opportunity to rip them to shreds. Nothing has changed since the Soviet period: a defendant can hope for forgiveness, for humanity, only once he is destroyed.”

  Polozov lectured the court on the Russian constitution, listing those of its articles that had been violated during the course of the trial, starting with Article 13—guaranteeing a variety of ideologies and banning a single, state-enforced ideology—and ending with Article 123, which guarantees equal treatment for both sides in court hearings.

  That night, Madonna performed in Moscow. At one point, she turned her back to the audience and pulled off her jacket, exposing the word PUSSY over the black strap of her bra and the word RIOT beneath it. She then pulled on a balaclava. Petya and Tasya had VIP seats. Tasya was filming. “Imagine them getting real jail time after this,” said Petya. “Just imagine!” They both laughed so hard Tasya’s camera shook.

  ———

  THEY HAD BEEN TALKING about their closing statements. Rather, Nadya and Maria had been talking—and writing. Nadya had spent at least several of their short nights writing. She showed Maria entire notebooks she had filled with theses and with passages she had copied out of the New Testament. Maria wrote right after returning from court but still tried to get some sleep. When Maria asked her if she had written much, Kat said, “Nah, just a few words.” She told herself she was not going to kill herself over the closing statement. She would write at night if she felt up to it, until sleep took over, or in the morning, in that no-man’s-land period after she was taken out of her cell but not yet placed in the transport.

  Once, Kat heard Nadya rehearsing her speech. She found this odd and slightly irritating: Didn’t responding to this rigged, empty ritual so earnestly only validate it? Didn’t engaging the religious argument legitimize the very idea that religious issues could be taken up in court? But Nadya was determined to accomplish something for which she had never before striven: she wanted, desperately, to be understood.

  On Day Eight, Nadya was the first to make her closing statement.[5] She was wearing a blue T-shirt emblazoned with a yellow fist and the words NO PASARAN.

  In the great scheme of things it’s not the three Pussy Riot singers who are on trial here. If it were, what happens here would be of no consequence whatsoever. But it is the entire Russian state system that is on trial here, a system that, to its own detriment, is so enamored of quoting its own cruelty toward the human being, its own indifference toward his honor and integrity—all the bad things that have ever happened in Russian history. The process of imitating justice is beginning to resemble closely that of Stalinist troikas, I am very sorry to say. We see the same thing here: the investigator, the judge, and the prosecutor make up the court. And on top of it and above it all stands the political demand for repression, which determines the words and actions of all three.

  Who is responsible for the action in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior occurring and for the fact that this trial followed the concerts? It is the authoritarian political system. Pussy Riot does opposition art. In other words, it’s politics that uses forms created by artists. In any case, it’s civic activity that occurs in conditions where basic human rights, civil and political liberties are repressed by a corporate system of state power. Many people who have been having their skin stripped off by the systematic destruction of liberties since the beginning of the 2000s are starting to riot. We were seeking true sincerity and simplicity and we found them in the holy-fool aesthetic of punk performance. Passion, openness, and naiveté exist on a higher ground than do hypocrisy, lying, and false piety used to mask crimes. Top state officials go to church wearing the correct facial expression, but they lie, and in doing so they sin more than we ever did.

  We staged our political punk performances because the Russian state system is so rigid, so closed, so caste-based, and its politics so subservient to narrow corporate interests, that it pains us to breathe the very air in this country. We cannot abide this at all, and it forces us to act and live politically. The use of force and coercion to regulate social processes. A situation where key political institutions, the disciplinary structures of the state—the uniformed services, the army, the police, the secret police, and the corresponding means of ensuring political stability: prisons, preventive detentions, the tools of exerting rigid control over citizens’ behavior.

  We also cannot abide the forced civic passivity of the majority of the population as well as the total domination of the executive branch over the legislative and judicial ones.

  In addition, we are sincerely irritated by that which is based on fear and a scandalously low level of political culture, and this level is intentionally maintained by the state system and its helpers. Look at what Patriarch Kirill says: “The Russian Orthodox do not go to demonstrations.” We are irritated by the scandalous weakness of horizontal links in society.

  We object to the manipulation of public opinion, carried out with ease because the state controls the vast majority of media outlets. Take, for example, the blatant campaign against Pussy Riot, based on the perversion of all facts, undertaken by the mass media with the exception of the very few that manage to maintain independence in this political system, is a good example.

  Nonetheless, I am now stating that this situation is authoritarian: this political system is authoritarian. Nonetheless, I am observing a sort of crash of this system where the three Pussy Riot participants are concerned. Because the result for which the system was aiming has not come to pass, unfortunately for the system. Russia has not condemned us. With each day more and more people come to believe in us and to believe us and to think that we should be free and not behind bars. I see that in the people I meet. I meet people who represent the system, who work for it. I see people who are serving time. And with every passing day there are more of them who wish us luck and wish us freedom and say that our political act was justified. People say, “At first we had doubts about whether you should have done what you did.” But with every passing day there are more and more people who say to us, “Time has shown that your political act was right. You exposed the sores of this political system. You struck the serpent’s nest that has now come back to attack you.” These people are trying to do what they can to make our lives easier, and we are very grateful to them for this. We are grateful to the people who are speaking out in support of us on the other side of the fence. There are a huge number of them. I know this. And I know that at this point a huge number of Orthodox believers are speaking out on our behalf, including praying for us, praying for the members of Pussy Riot who are behind bars. We have seen the little book these Orthodox believers are handing out, a little book that contains a prayer for those who are behind bars. This one example is enough to show that there is not one unified group of Orthodox believers as the prosecution is trying to show. It does not exist. And more and more believers are now taking the side of Pussy Riot. They think that what we did should not have brought us five months in pretrial detention and certainly should not bring three years in prison as Mr. Prosecutor would have it.

  With every passing day people
understand more and more clearly that if the political system turns all its might against three girls who spent a mere thirty seconds performing in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, that means only that this political system is afraid of the truth, afraid of the sincerity and directness that we bring. We have not lied for a second, we have not lied for one single moment during this trial. Whereas the opposite side lies excessively, and people sense this. People sense the truth. Truth really does have an ontological, an existential advantage over lies. The Bible addresses this. In the Old Testament, for example, the way of truth always triumphs over the way of lies. And with every passing day, the way of truth is triumphing more and more, despite the fact that we are behind bars and will probably remain behind bars for a very long time to come.

  Madonna had a concert yesterday, and she performed with the words PUSSY RIOT on her back. More and more people are realizing that we are being held here illegally and on the basis of thoroughly falsified charges. I am struck by this. I am struck by the fact that truth really is triumphing over lies even though physically we are here. We have more freedom than the people who are sitting opposite us, on the side of the accusers, because we can say what we want and we do say what we want. Whereas the people over there [Nadya pointed at the prosecutor], they say only that which political censorship allows them to say. They cannot say the words “‘Mother of God, chase Putin out,’ a punk prayer,” they cannot utter those lines in the punk prayer that have to do with the political system. Maybe they think that it would be good to send us to jail because we have spoken out against Putin and his system. But they cannot say that because they are forbidden. Their mouths are sewn shut, and here they are nothing but puppets, unfortunately. I hope that they realize this and that ultimately they too will choose the way of truth, the way of sincerity and freedom, because it exists on higher ground than rigidity and false piety and hypocrisy.

  Rigidity is always the opposite of the search for truth. And in this case, at this trial, we see people who are trying to find some sort of truth on one side and, on the other side, people who want to shackle those who seek the truth. To be human is to err; humans are imperfect. Humans are always striving for wisdom, but it is always elusive. This is exactly how philosophy came to be. This is exactly why a philosopher is a person who loves wisdom and strives for it, but can never possess it. This is exactly what makes him think and act as he does. And this is exactly what moved us to enter the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. And I think that Christianity, as I have understood it studying the Old Testament but especially the New Testament, it supports the search for truth and the constant overcoming of one’s self, of what you once were. There is a reason Christ was with the fallen women. He said, ‘Help must go to those who have made mistakes, and I forgive them.’ But I see none of this in our trial, which purports to represent Christianity. I think it’s the prosecution that is affronting Christianity!