by Masha Gessen
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Copyright © 2014 by Masha Gessen
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First Riverhead trade paperback edition: March 2014
Riverhead trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-59463-219-8
eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-13594-9
Cover design by Alex Merto
Cover photograph by Denis Sinyakov
Book design by Tiffany Estreicher
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Footnotes
1
Translation by Bela Shayevich.
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2
Translation by Gregory Zlotin
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3
Patriarch Kirill’s worldly last name
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4
Denis Yevsyukov was a police major who, while intoxicated, opened fire in a Moscow supermarket, killing two people and wounding twenty-two in April 2009.
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5
Unlike some versions of Pussy Riot’s closing statements, these are the speeches as they were spoken during the trial, not as they had been written. I have translated them from transcripts prepared by Elena Kostyuchenko for Novaya Gazeta. I have intentionally kept the occasional repetitions, incomplete sentences, and ambiguous or factually incorrect statements (e.g., Putin does not hold international meetings daily or even weekly). These are the statements as Kat, Maria, and Nadya made them, sleep-deprived, drained, and almost entirely deprived of the benefit of one another’s intellectual or editorial input.
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6
A prominent television journalist who made three consecutive films about Pussy Riot, aimed to show them as heretics and enemies of the Russian state. The films aired on state television in prime time.
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7
The Union of Real Art, a collective of futurist artists, writers, and musicians in the 1920s and ’30s.
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8
Brodsky stood trial for the crime of “social parasitism” in Leningrad in 1964. His “so-called poetry” was judged not to be work and he served eighteen months in exile in the Far North.
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9
Chekists were members of the Cheka, the first incarnation of the Soviet secret police. The term has become generic for secret-police officers.
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10
This is an allusion to a line from Osip Mandelstam’s Stalin epigram, which is believed to have gotten the poet arrested and ultimately killed in prison. In the Mandelstam poem, Stalin enjoyed executions like one enjoys raspberries; in the Pussy Riot version, Putin had a bad taste in his mouth.
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11
A peaceful march with tens of thousands of participants on May 6, 2012, the eve of Putin’s inauguration for his third term as president, turned into a riot after the marchers were attacked by police. Hundreds of people were detained that day and soon released, but by the time this song was written, more than a dozen were facing charges and likely prison time in connection with the clashes.
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12
Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, once known as “the last dictator in Europe”—until Putin himself reached dictator status.
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13
No one else came either, but the defense attorneys would have been virtually the only ones in a position to demand a meeting with Maria. It is not, however, standard practice for defense attorneys to visit their clients while they are in transit.
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14
Merab Mamardashvili (1930–1990) was a Soviet Georgian philosopher.
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15
Books are brought separately from the rest of the package because they must be seen by the censor. The censor disallows any books in a foreign language or books with any handwritten marks in the pages, as well as anything deemed subversive or likely to aid in organizing an escape.
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16
Vladimir Gandelsman is a contemporary Russian poet.
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17
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
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18
The Russian word for piping is kant, as in the philosopher, which may be why Maria thought it sounded great.
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19
A reference to the way Russia was said to be governed during the four years Dmitry Medvedev held the office of president: believing the president was ineffectual and directed by Prime Minister Putin, political analysts referred to the regime as “the tandem.”
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20
The “local” is a fenced-off passageway between two areas in the camp.
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21
Throughout Russia, because of anomolously high temperatures.
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22
Translated by Bela Shayevich and Thomas Campbell.
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