Words Will Break Cement

by Masha Gessen

  The victims’ lawyers are starting to disown them. That’s how I see it. Two days ago attorney Taratukhin gave a speech in this courtroom in which he said that people should understand that the lawyer does not by any means feel solidarity with people he represents. Apparently the attorney feels ethical unease at representing people who want to see three Pussy Riot participants go to jail. I don’t know why they want to see us go to jail, but that’s their right. I am just pointing out the fact that the attorney seems to feel shame. Hearing people shout “Shame!” and “Executioners!” at him has touched him after all. An attorney always has to stand for truth and goodness triumphing over evil and lies. It also seems to me that a higher power may be directing the speeches of our opponents: the lawyers keep misspeaking or making mistakes. They keep calling us “victims.” They’ve all done this, including attorney Pavlova, who has a very negative view of us. And yet a higher power of some sort is forcing her to say “victims” about us, not about those whom she is representing. About us.

  But I wouldn’t affix any labels here. I don’t think anyone here is winning or losing; there are no victims and no accused. We need to find a point of contact finally, start a dialogue and commence a joint search for the truth. Strive for wisdom together, be philosophers together rather than simply stigmatize and label people. This is the last thing a person should do, and Christ condemned it.

  Here and now, in this court, we are being desecrated. Who would have thought that man and the state system he controls could commit utter, unmotivated evil over and over again. Who would have supposed that history, including the recent frightening experience of the Stalinist Great Terror, has taught us nothing. I want to cry looking at the way the methods of medieval inquisition take center stage in the law-enforcement and court systems of the Russian Federation, of my country. But ever since we were arrested we have lost our ability to cry. Back when we could stage our punk performances, we screamed as loud as we could and knew how to, about the lawlessness of the regime. But they have stolen our voices.

  Throughout this trial, they have refused to hear us. I mean, hear. To hear is to listen and think, to strive for wisdom, to be a philosopher. I think every person should, in his heart, strive for this—not just the people who happened to major in some kind of philosophy. That means nothing. Formal education by itself means nothing, though attorney Pavlova keeps trying to accuse us of being insufficiently educated. I think that striving is the most important thing, striving to know and to understand. This is something a person can achieve on his own, without the help of an educational institution. No degree, no matter how advanced, can ensure this quality. A human being can possess a lot of knowledge but fail to be human. Pythagorus said that extensive knowledge does not breed wisdom.

  I regret that we have to state this here. We serve merely as decorations, as inanimate objects, as bodies delivered to the courtroom. If our motions are even considered—and then only following days of requests, arguments, and struggle—they are invariably denied. But, unfortunately, regrettably for us and for this country, the court listens to the prosecutor, who misrepresents our words and statements over and over again with impunity, rendering them meaningless. The basic principle of equal justice is violated openly—indeed, this seems to be the point.

  On July 30, on the first day of the trial, we presented our reaction to the charges. Our words were read aloud by attorney Volkova because the court would not then let us speak. This was our first opportunity to speak after five months in captivity. We had been in captivity, we had been behind bars, unable to do anything: we could not make statements, we could not make films, we did not have access to the Internet, and we could not even deliver a piece of paper to one of our lawyers because this is not allowed. On July 30, we spoke out for the first time. We called for contact and dialogue rather than confrontation. We extended a hand to those who have chosen to see us as the enemy. We were laughed at, and the hand we extended was spat upon. We were sincere in what we said, as we always are. We may be childishly naïve in insisting on our truth, but we nonetheless regret none of what we said, including what we said that day. And even as we are spoken ill of, we will not speak ill in return. Our circumstances are desperate, but we do not despair. We are persecuted, but we have not been abandoned. Those who are open are easy to humiliate and destroy, but “when I am weak then I am strong.”

  Listen to us. Listen to us and not to Arkady Mamontov[6] when he speaks about us. Do not distort every word we say, and let us seek a dialogue, a point of contact with the country, which is our country too and not just Putin’s and the patriarch’s. Like Solzhenitsyn, I believe that in the end, words will break cement. Solzhenitsyn wrote, “So the word is more sincere than concrete? So the word is not a trifle? Then may noble people begin to grow, and their word will break cement.”

  Kat, Maria, and I are in jail. We are in a cage. But I don’t think that we have been defeated. Just as the dissidents were not defeated. They were lost in psychiatric wards and the jails, but it was they who pronounced the regime’s verdict. The art of creating the image of an era knows not winners and losers. The same way as the OBERIU[7] poets remained artists, truly inexplicable and incomprehensible, even after being purged in 1937. [The poet] Alexander Vvedensky wrote, “The inexplicable pleases us, and the incomprehensible is our friend.” According to his official death certificate, Vvedensky died December 20, 1941. Cause of death is not known. He may have caught dysentery in the prison transport, or he may have caught a bullet from one of the guards. It happened somewhere along the railroad line from Voronezh to Kazan. Pussy Riot are Vvedensky’s students and disciples. We consider his principle of the bad rhyme to be our own. He wrote, “It happens that two possible rhymes come to mind, a good one and a bad one. I choose the bad one. It is sure to be the right one.”

  “The incomprehensible is our friend.” The OBERIUs’ elevated and refined pursuits, their search for thought at the edge of meaning, ultimately cost them their lives, taken by the senseless and truly inexplicable Great Terror. They paid with their lives to show that they had been right to believe that senselessness and lack of logic expressed their era best. They made art into history. The price of taking part in making history is always disproportionately large for the individual and his life. But it is also the meaning of human existence. “To be poor but enrich many. To have nothing but possess everything.” The OBERIU dissidents are considered dead, but they are living. They have been punished but not killed.

  Do you happen to remember why the young Dostoyevsky was sentenced to death? He was guilty only of having immersed himself in socialist theory. A group of freethinkers who gathered at Petrashevsky’s apartment on Fridays discussed the work of George Sand. Toward the end of these Friday gatherings Dostoyevsky recited [literary critic Vissarion] Belinsky’s letter to Gogol, filled, according to the court’s conclusion, with—and here I want you to pay attention—“impudent statements against the Orthodox Church and the executive power.” Dostoyevsky prepared to die. He spent, as he later wrote, ten “terrible, endlessly frightening” minutes waiting to be executed. Then his sentence was commuted to four years of hard labor followed by military service.

  Socrates was accused of exerting a bad influence on young people with his philosophical discussions and of failing to recognize the gods of Athens. Socrates had a strong sense of an inner divine voice and he was by no means an enemy of the gods, as he stated repeatedly. But what did it matter, when Socrates annoyed the influential citizens of Athens with his critical, dialectical, and unbiased thinking? Socrates was sentenced to death. He declined his students’ offers to help him escape and coolly drank the horn of poison, of hemlock, and died.

  And have you perhaps forgotten how Stephen, the disciple of the apostles, ended his earthly life? “Then they secretly induced men to say, ‘We have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses and against God.’ And they stirred up the people, the elders and the scribes, and they came up to him and dragged him away an
d brought him before the Council. They put forward false witnesses who said, ‘This man incessantly speaks against this holy place and the Law.’” He was found guilty and stoned to death.

  I also hope that you all remember well how the Jews answered Christ: “It is not for good works that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy.” And finally we would do well to keep in mind the following characterization of Christ: “He is demon-possessed and raving mad.”

  I think that if the czars, the elders, the presidents, the premiers, the people, and the judges of this world knew well and understood the meaning of the phrase “I desire mercy, not sacrifice,” they would not judge the innocent. But our rulers are in a rush to judge, never to show mercy. We should, incidentally, thank Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev for another in a series of remarkable aphorisms. He defined his term as president with the slogan “Freedom is better than unfreedom.” Now Putin’s third term may come to be characterized by a new aphorism: “Jail is better than stoning.”

  I ask you to think carefully about the following idea. Montaigne expressed it in his Essays in the sixteenth century. He wrote, “It is putting a very high value on one’s conjectures, to have a man roasted alive because of them.” And should flesh-and-blood people be tried and sent to jail based merely on the prosecution’s suppositions, ones that have no basis in fact? We never have nor do we now have feelings of hatred or enmity on the basis of religion. As a result, our accusers have had to find people willing to bear false witness. One of them, Matilda Ivashchenko, felt ashamed and did not show up for court. That left the false testimony of Messrs. Troitsky and Ponkin as well as Ms. Abramenkova. There is no other evidence of enmity or hatred. If the court were honest and truthful, it would have to rule inadmissible the opinion of so-called experts, simply because it is not an objective scholarly text but a filthy, fraudulent scrap of paper that harkens back to the Middle Ages and the Inquisition. There is no other evidence that in any way points to motive.

  The prosecution shies away from citing Pussy Riot song lyrics, because they would present the most obvious evidence of the lack of motive. I am going to quote something I like very much. I think this is very important. This is an interview we gave to the newsweekly Russkiy Reporter after the performance at the Cathedral of Christ: “We have respect for religion, including the Orthodox religion. This is precisely why we are outraged that the great, kind Christian philosophy has been used in such a filthy manner. We are raging because we see the best and finest that exists today being violated.” We are still raging. And we feel real pain looking at all of this.

  Every single defense witness has testified to the lack of any expression of hatred or enmity on our parts, even when they were asked to speak only to our individual personalities. In addition, I ask you to consider the results of the psychological and psychiatric evaluation conducted at the investigator’s request in pretrial detention. The expert testified that the central values of my life are “justice, mutual respect, humanity, equality, and liberty.” This was his expert opinion. This was a man who does not know me personally. And I suspect that Detective Ranchenkov would have wanted the expert to write something different. But it seems that people who love and value the truth are in the majority after all. Just as the Bible says.

  And in conclusion I would like to quote a Pussy Riot song. Strange as it may seem, all of their songs turned out to be prophetic. Among other things, we prophesied that “the head of the KGB and the chief saint march the protesters to pretrial detention under guard.” But what I want to quote now is, “Open the doors, rip off your epaulettes, taste the smell of freedom with us!” That’s all.

  The courtroom applauded. “Respected audience,” said the judge with uncharacteristic deference but with a familiar note of irritation in her voice. “You are not in a theater. Alyokhina, please, you have the floor.” Maria, who was wearing a black dress, made her closing statement.

  This trial has spoken volumes. The regime will be made to feel ashamed of it for years to come. Its every step has been the quintessence of lawlessness.

  How did our performance, a small and somewhat absurd act to begin with, balloon into a full-fledged catastrophe? Obviously, this could not have happened in a healthy society. The Russian state has long resembled a body riddled with disease. This is the kind of disease that bursts loudly when you accidentally prick a boil. This is the kind of disease that is concealed at first but later always finds its way into conversation and finds resolution in it. Look, this is the kind of conversation of which the regime is capable. This trial is not merely a grotesque evil mask: it is the face of the state as it addresses the individual in this country.

  For an issue to become the topic of public discussion, something has to serve as the trigger. It’s worth noting that our situation was depersonalized to begin with. When we speak of Putin, we mean not so much Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin but the system he has created: a power vertical that requires the state to be managed personally at every level. And this vertical contains no mechanism whatsoever for considering the opinion of the masses. And what worries me most of all is that there is no mechanism for considering the opinions of young people. We believe that this system of management is ineffective and that this is clear in everything it does.

  I want to use my closing statement to describe my immediate experience of confronting this system.

  A person’s integration into society begins with the education system, and this system is designed to ignore individuality. There is no such thing as personalized education. Culture is not taught, nor is philosophy or the most basic of information about civil society. On paper, these classes exist, but they are still taught as they were in the Soviet Union. As a result, contemporary art is marginalized, the impulse toward philosophical thought is repressed, gender is stereotyped, and civil opinion is swept under the rug.

  Contemporary educational institutions teach people to live on autopilot from the time they are children. They never pose important questions, even taking age into consideration, and they impart cruelty and an intolerance for dissidence. A person learns to forget about his liberty starting at a young age.

  I have spent time at a psychiatric live-in facility for minors. And I can tell you with certainty that any adolescent who expresses dissident opinion more or less vocally can end up in a place like that. Some of the children arrive there from orphanages. If a child tries to run away from an orphanage, it is considered normal in our country to commit him to a psychiatric facility and treat him with the strongest of sedatives, such as aminazine, used to suppress Soviet dissidents back in the 1970s. This is particularly shocking considering these institutions’ general punitive trend and the absence of psychological help as such. All communication there is based on fear and the children’s forced subjugation. They become exponentially more cruel as a result. Many of the children are illiterate, but no one makes an effort to do anything about that. On the contrary, they do everything to quash the last remnants of any motivation to grow. The children shut down and stop trusting words.

  I would like to note that this approach to shaping children obviously stands in the way of affirming inner freedom, including the freedom of religion, and also that it is typical, unfortunately. The result is a sort of ontological humility, resignation as a state of being in society. This transition—this break, really—is remarkable, because if we look at it from the point of view of Christian culture, we will see that senses and symbols are being replaced by their very opposites. Thus humility, one of Christianity’s most important values, is reinterpreted not as a path to enlightenment and ultimately to liberation but, on the contrary, as a means of enslavement. To quote Nikolai Berdyaev, I would say that “the ontology of humility is the ontology of the slaves of God.” And not the sons of God.

  When I was an environmental organizer, I came to think of inner freedom as the foundation for all action. I also came to recognize the importance of action itself, action for the sake of action. I am still amazed that several
thousand people are needed to stop the lawlessness of one or a handful of bureaucrats in our country. I would like to note that this trial has clearly shown this. The voices of thousands of people all over the world are needed to prove the obvious: that the three of us are innocent. The whole world is talking about this! The whole world is talking about this in concerts, on the Internet, in the media. They are talking about it in the parliaments. The English prime minister greets our president not with talk about the Olympic games but with a question about why three innocent girls are in jail. This is a disgrace.

  I am even more amazed that people do not believe they can influence the authorities in any way. When I was organizing pickets and demonstrations, when I was collecting signatures and organizing the collection of signatures, I would often be asked, and asked with a sincere sort of incredulity, why anyone should care about a forest that may be unique in Russia, may be unparalleled, but still small, still just a spot on the map of the Krasnodar region? Why should anyone care that prime minister Dmitry Medvedev’s wife is planning to build a residence there and destroy the only juniper preserve in Russia? These people—