Who is Pussy and Why is She Rioting?

Dr. Choi Chatterjee

Professor of History,

California State University, Los Angeles

I must confess to my initial feelings of disappointment when I was invited to write an

essay about Pussy Riot. I had recently finished an article analyzing the nature of female

friendships in Marina Goldovskaya’s luminous film about Anna Politkovskaya, A Bitter Taste of

Freedom, and I had hoped that the film would energize academic interest in Politkovskaya’s

short lived career as a brilliant war journalist, and an outspoken critic about Russia’s little

known, but deadly wars in Chechnya. But evidently I was mistaken. Politkovskaya’s old

fashioned and dissident- inspired diatribes against the Putin administration, and even her

shocking death at the hands of contract killers were easily swamped by the pyrotechnics that

ensued after the Pussy Riot video entitled a Punk Prayer, that implored the Virgin Mary to

become a feminist and “put Putin away,” went viral on the internet.1

The ease with which the young members of the conceptual art collective, Pussy Riot,

hijacked public opinion, and effortlessly garnered close attention from celebrities, journalists,

and ordinary people from around the world has been a real time lesson in media literacy to those

schooled in more earnest, academic, and let’s face it, more boring modes of feminist self-

expression. To have your name displayed on the evenly muscled back of Madonna, the original

material girl who made the Riot Grrrls possible, at a rock concert in Moscow might be

considered a dubious honor at best, but when Slavoj Zizek, the high priest of the post-Soviet

1 My sincere thanks to Ananya Chakravarti, Deborah Field, Ali Igmen, Lisa Kirschenbaum, Afshin Matin-Asgari,

Serguei Oushakine, Kathleen Sullivan, and Scott Wells for their excellent suggestions and comments. I also want to

express my gratitude to Irina Zherebkina for suggesting the topic and encouraging me to write in a new style.

intellectual left, anoints you as the representative of “an Idea,” you know that you have made a

serious dent in the global revolutionary consciousness.2

Two decades of extraordinary feminist initiatives in post-Soviet Russia that have tried to

counter rampant sexism in corporate and government institutions, raise the profile of women’s

achievements in the past as well as the present, and highlight their contributions to civil society

have caused barely a ripple in the journals, newspapers and the blogosphere. But a site specific

“guerilla performance” at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow that lasted barely forty

seconds and to my untutored eyes looked like little more than adolescents, faces thuggishly

covered in neon colored balaclavas, screaming, jumping, and punching the air has set off an

international media storm that is threatening to breach the ramparts of academia as well. While

few have praised the aesthetic or ideological implications of the Pussy Riot performance, either

as art or as politics, most of us are shocked by the severity of the sentence imposed on them.3

The performers are so heartbreakingly young, so stridently confident, and so very like the

students that populate our campuses. Two of them are also young mothers, and do they really

deserve prison terms for calling attention to the close collusion between Putin’s administration

and the resurgent Orthodox Church led by Patriarch Kirill who has obsequiously called Putin “a

miracle of God?” Traditionally in Russia the “Holy Fool” calls attention to abuses of power that

are plain for all to see but have become invisible through custom, usage, and political

camouflage. Are the Pussy Rioters Holy Fools, naïve and passionate, foolish in their haste to

point out the truths that everyone can see but few can recognize?

2 Slavoj Žižek, ‘The True Blasphemy’, Chtodelat news, August 7th, 2012, accessed 1 July, 2013, http://chtodelat.wordpress.com/2012/08/07/the-true-blasphemy-slavoj-zizek-on-pussy-riot/

3 Catherine Shuler, “Reinventing the Show Trial. Putin and Pussy Riot,” TDR: The Drama Review, vol. 57, no. 1, (Spring 2013): 71-17; Vadim Nikitin, “ The Wrong Reason to Back Pussy Riot,” August 20th, 2012, accessed 7 July, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/21/opinion/the-wrong-reasons-to-back-pussy-riot.html?_r=0

In late October 2012, after a spectacularly mismanaged trial, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova

(22), and Maria Alyokhina (24) were separated and sent to prison in labor camps in Mordovia

and Perm Oblast respectively. A third member of Pussy Riot, Yekaterina Samutsevich (29), was

freed on probation while two other members of the group fled Russia fearing arrest. To be

sentenced to two years of imprisonment at a labor camp on charges of “hooliganism motivated

by religious hatred,” in addition to their pre-trial imprisonment for five months seems a

preposterous price to pay for what seems to be little more than a sophomoric prank. In an

interesting twist in the tale while the Pussy Rioters chose to reveal the link between the sacred

and profane in Russian politics by staging an anti-Putin demonstration in the Cathedral, the

administration has charged them not with the crime of political opposition, but with inciting

religious hatred and defamation of the Orthodox Church. Russian religious leaders across the

country, including Patriarch Kirill I, have denounced the Pussy Rioters and demanded that they

repent and apologize. According to the Chief Rabbi of Moscow, Berel Lazar, “if we talk about

the sentence itself, I think it isn't that bad, because they did hurt believers' feelings. It's obvious

they were to be punished. It would be nice if they realize what they've done and apologize.”4 In

a masterly stroke the administration has deflected attention away from the political nature of the

Pussy Riot, a group that has been protesting against Putin’s authoritarianism for a few years, and

framed it as an anti-religious act. The state casts itself as the defender of religious faith and

traditions, an important political move in post-Soviet Russia where a population has bitter

memories of religious persecution from the Soviet past and fears anti-church campaigns.

4 If Pussy Riot not punished, thousands could have followed them - Russian Chief Rabbi. By: Interfax. Russia & FSU General News. 3/ 5/2013, p,1, accessed 21 July, 2013, http://mimas.calstatela.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com.mimas.calstatela.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bwh&AN=85912810&site=ehost-live

However, according to Russian opinion polls even among the faithful, among those that

are outraged by the sacrilegious nature of the Pussy Riot performance, many believe that their

sentence is disproportionate to the crime. Alexei Navalny, lawyer turned opposition activist, and

currently a defendant in a politically motivated trial, calls the Pussy Rioters “fools.” But Navalny

also feels that their “idiotic acts” were oriented more towards garnering publicity rather than the

commitment for any real sacrilege. According to him the Pussy Riots can hardly be considered a

violent crime that deserves the full weight of the repressive mechanisms of the state. How do we

evaluate the collective acts of Pussy Riot, whose young members prefer to be known

collectively, and even use interchangeable nicknames such as “Cat” and “Terminator” in public

interviews to detract from presenting a particularistic sense of self? Are they merely “idiots”

whose idiocy has been dignified by the greater ineptness of a bumbling Putin administration? But

this conclusion represents a generational divide not only between feminist mothers and punk

daughters, but also between those that witnessed the collapse of bureaucratic communist states

and the triumph of neo-liberalism worldwide in the 1990s, and the generation that was nurtured

by the consumerist ethos and hyper individualism that has defined capitalism and globalization

in the last two decades.

In an interview with Spiegel that was conducted from prison on 3rd

September 2013,

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova claimed, “… we're part of the global anti-capitalist movement, which

consists of anarchists, Trotskyists, feminists and autonomists. Our anti-capitalism is not anti-

Western or anti-European.”5 To generation with memories of lived socialism it means empty

shelves and long lines at stores, thuggish party bosses, and soporific party propaganda.

5 "Interview with Pussy Riot Leader: I Love Russia, But I Hate Putin". Der Spiegel. September 3, 2012, accessed 5 July, 2013, http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/spiegel-interview-with-pussy-riot-activist-nadezhda-tolokonnikova-a-853546.html

Anarchism, a term used multiple times by Pussy Riot and even enshrined in their song

“Kropotkin Vodka”, represents to us a “failed venture” that was ruthlessly suppressed by the

Third Communist International in the early 1920s after the Kronstadt Rebellion. And who has

time to worry about autonomy when you are busy shopping for clothes and disposable goods

made in global sweatshops? But the Pussy Riot generation, which is a worldwide phenomenon

stretching from Tahrir Square to Wall Street, and to cities in Tunisia, Iran, Brazil, Greece, India,

Portugal, Spain, Chile, and Turkey to name only a few of the thus afflicted nations, who have

few memories of state sponsored socialism, is breathing new life into old intellectual concepts in

stunningly radical ways. While our first reaction might be similar to that of outraged patriarchs

such as Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, or a Dick Cheney, who dismiss protesters as

extremists and traitors, it behooves us to stop and listen to these youthful rebels as they voice

their concerns in public squares and buildings.

I owe my own conversion to my student, Amanda Estrella, a knowledgeable and

sophisticated consumer of popular culture, and author of a really insightful essay on global

media reactions to the Pussy Riots.6 She persuaded me to take the “conceptual artists” seriously,

as “revolutionaries with a small r,” instead of summarily dismissing the media hype that

surrounds them. According to Estrella, punk rock deserves to be treated both as an art form and

as politics, and in the essay below I have tried to bridge the generation gap by using three frames

of analysis to understand the Pussy Riots. In the first iteration I compare the Pussy Rioters to

Vera Figner, Vera Zasulich, and Ekaterina Breshkovskaia, female revolutionaries from the late

nineteenth century that captured the global imagination and inspired many anti-colonial activists

6 Amanda Estrella, “A New Age of Revolutions: The Pussy Riot Movement, What It Takes to Stand Out in the 21st Century,” unpublished MA essay (California State University, Los Angeles, submitted on 7 June, 2013.)

around the world. Although the Pussy Rioters seem unaware of this feminist history, they are

following in the footsteps of foremothers who a century ago rocked Tsarist autocracy to its very

foundation in more than one way. In the second part of the essay I analyze the role that

authoritarian states play in the creation of events such as Pussy Riots in Moscow, and examine

the complex relationship between power and feminist rebellion. In the conclusion of the essay, I

look at the similarities between the goals of the Pussy Riots and that of other youth protest

movements that have convulsed the globe in the last few years. Unlike political rebellions in the

past that aimed at complete destruction of social structures and the creation of utopian societies,

in the twenty first century, youth movements have been surprisingly pragmatic in their goals and

for the most part peaceful. Young people on the streets of Egypt, Moscow, Brazil and Spain have

been demonstrating against authoritarian and unresponsive governments, financial corruption

and abuses of power in everyday life. And unlike our generation they refuse to be diverted from

their goals by manufactured wars, military interventions, and fears of terrorism.

“Take to the Streets

Live on the Red

Set free the rage

Of civil anger!”7

Vera Figner, one of the ring leaders of organization, Narodnaia Volia, that successfully

carried out the assassination of Tsar Alexander I on 1st March 1881, was initially condemned to

death but the sentence was commuted to twenty years of solitary confinement at the

Schlusselburg Fort. On 24th

January, 1878, Vera Zasulich, shot Colonel Trepov point blank with

77 “Putin has Pissed Himself,” Pussy Riot. A Punk Prayer For Freedom (The Feminist Press: New York, 2013), 37.

a British Bulldog revolver in his own office while posing as a petitioner. Trepov, governor of St.

Petersburg and renowned for his efficient suppression of the Polish uprising in 1863, had ordered

the flogging of Arkhip Bogolyubov, a student and a political prisoner who had refused to remove

his cap in his presence in the prison yard. Unlike Figner, Zasulich was released by a sympathetic

court and fled abroad before she could be rearrested and retried. In 1876 Ekaterina Breshko-

Breshkovskaia was sentenced to hard labor in Siberia for eighteen years for stirring revolution up

among peasants through the dissemination of propaganda. Aleksandra Kollontai fled Russia in

1908 fearing arrest for spreading social democratic propaganda among women workers in

factories in St. Petersburg and for advocating for Finnish independence from the Russian empire.

The list of female Russian revolutionaries is legion, and while most of them renounced

terrorism as a viable political action, many worked closely among factory workers and peasants,

and with members of civil society, building long term political movements that would ultimately

bring down the Tsarist autocracy in 1917.8 Women revolutionaries were a significant presence in

Tsarist society and their exemplary demeanor in court and in prison, their articulate defense of

their radical ideologies, and their stoic acceptance of their extended terms of prison and exile

inspired generations both in Russia and in distant places such as India where nationalists were

fighting against British imperialism. Like the Pussy Rioters, Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaia

left her young son behind when she was sentenced to hard labor in Siberia for many years. In

her closing statement at her trial, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, a student of philosophy at the

prestigious Moscow State University, invoked Dostoevsky, Christ, Montaigne and Socrates

among the many intellectuals in justification of her activities. But she forgot to invoke these

8 Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism and Bolshevism, 1860-1930 (Princeton: : Princeton University Press, 1988); I. I. Iukina, Russkii’ feminism kak vyzov sovremennost (Sankt Peterburg, 2007); Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild, Equality and Revolution: Women’s Rights in the Russian Empire, 1905-1917 (Pittsburgh: university of Pittsburgh Press, 2010)

foremothers who protested against authoritarianism, injustice, oppression, and capitalism as

effectively as they are doing now more than a hundred years ago.9 The weapons are different,

and to their credit, the Pussy Riot has eschewed the violence that some of the earlier women

revolutionaries chose. But across the revolutionary spectrum we see a shared antipathy to

autocracy and authoritarianism, and anger against state violation of civil liberties and human

rights.

The Tsarist government rather than silence these homegrown and fearless rebels in

prison and exile, through their use of heavy handed tactics, managed to bring opprobrium and

condemnation from intellectuals, activists, and governments around the world as they punished

these women with sentences wildly at variance with the severity of their crimes. In the popular

imagination these women were seen as saints and martyrs, their violent deeds strangely sanitized

and then sanctified through their sufferings in jail and in exile. Memoirs, hagiographic

biographies, literary fiction solidified the metaphors of saintly dissidents oppressed by the evil

empire and these images continue to circulate with striking continuity a century later.10

As a

historian of Russia, it seems that over the centuries Russian governments have learnt little in how

to deal with political opposition. Harsh sentences, hysterical witch hunts, politically orchestrated

show trials that barely pass legal muster, both in the past and in the present, have inevitably

turned dissidents into martyrs and celebrities at home and abroad. Witless Russian

administrations over the centuries have dignified oppositional speech with gravitas and intent, all

the while failing to control the way these events have been interpreted in the court of

international public opinion. Nimble dissidents have easily won the media war conducted in the

9“Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s closing statement in court, http://freepussyriot.org/content/nadia-tolokonnikovas-closing-statement, accessed June 21, 2013. 10 Choi Chatterjee, “Transnational Romance, Terror and Heroism: Russia in American Popular Fiction, 1860-1917,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, no. 3 (July 2008): 753-777.

West against the elephantine Russian/Soviet state, even as they have sometimes paid the price of

being reviled as traitors at home.

Scholars and journalists who have analyzed the Pussy Rioters have for the most part

placed them in the history of Russian dissidence: the eternal but compelling dyad of a hapless,

sensitive, but brave intellectual tortured and oppressed by an iron dictatorship for speaking the

truth that few others dare to utter.11

This explanatory trope which has been in circulation for

more than two centuries refuses to die a natural death and both its symbolic structure and

explanatory power seems to grow as new chapters are written in the book of Russian dissidence.

From Alexander Radischev’s rebellious journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow in the late

eighteenth century, to the Pussy Riot performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in 2012,

many have used this framework to understand the history of the relationship between the Russian

state and the intelligentsia. However, in the last two decades new explanations have surfaced that

seek to reinterpret the tortuous associations between these mighty opponents in the light of new

historical evidence. Svetlana Boym has critiqued the Russian myth of the brave but suffering

intelligentsia, while Jochen Hellbeck has analyzed the many ways that state power furnished

both content and form for varieties of cultural production and for models of selfhood in the

Soviet Union.12

Barbara Walker has argued that instead of seeing the intelligentsia and the state

as two separate but fixed poles of Russian history, we should uncover the many links, both

11 Masha Lipman, “The Outrageous and Absurdist Trial of Pussy Riot,” The New Yorker, August 7th, 2012, accessed 7 July, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/08/the-absurd-and-outrageous-trial-of-pussy-riot.html; Ilya Budraitskis, “Pussy Riot: etika, politika, I novye dissidenty?” Polit.ru, August 12, 2012, accessed 6 June, 2013, http://polit.ru/article/2012/08/27/ilbdr270812

12 Svetlana Boym, Common Places. Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1994; Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind. Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2006)

material and intellectual, that bind these two seemingly oppositional groups together.13

Finally,

Serguei Oushakine, in his provocative essay, has identified the ways that the speech of the

Russian dissidents, and their unfortunate addiction to monolithic language, grew out of the force

field of Soviet discourse.14

Pussy Riot has been rioting for a while in various public spaces such as a scaffold on the

subway, on trolley buses, at the Timirizyaev State Biology Museum in Moscow, on top of

Moscow Detention Center Number 1 Prison, where among others, Alexei Navalny was being

held. On Lobnoe Mesto, in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral in the Red Square in Moscow, Pussy

Riot performed their legendary and perhaps most infamous song, “Putin Zassal.” While members

were briefly detained and fined for their unsanctioned performances, few either in Russia or

abroad, knew about the group’s existence and or their aims. Their iconoclastic act in the

Cathedral of Christ the Savior might have also been unnoticed by history but for the fact that the

Russian government imprisoned three of the members and charged them with criminal offence.

A dictatorship draws its strength from its ability to crucify its opponents, and in return the

ordinary protester gets elevated into the ranks of the dissident mostly by being implicated in the

act of crucifixion. Would Christ the messiah, have existed without the deadly intervention of

Pontius Pilate? State power and the dictator’s personal attention have an extraordinary and

alchemic ability to turn ordinary and even banal utterances by the opposition into serious

political and moral commentary worthy of the scrutiny and critical attention.

Did the Russian state inadvertently turn the Pussy Rioters into global icons of resistance

to authoritarianism? Would academics, journalists, feminist groups, Amnesty International, and

13 Barbara Walker, Maximilian Voloshin and the Russian Literary Circle (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005).

14 Serguei Oushakine, “The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat,” Public Culture, vol. 13, no. 2( Spring 2001): 191-214

other media celebrities such as Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney taken such detailed interest in

their art, performances, and politics but for their disastrous trial and incarceration?15

Did Putin’s

administration inadvertently rekindle the cultural politics of the Cold War where a morally

righteous West is once again admonishing Russia about its poor record of human rights even as it

pursues Julian Assange and Edward Snowden for revealing state secrets? Has an insignificant

event been turned into something more noteworthy by an act of power? While Foucault has

turned the analytical gaze from resistance to power, I would argue that while power can elevate,

magnify, silence or suppress trackless marks of resistance, it rarely participates in the act of

creation. It takes courage to stand in the Red Square and call Putin a coward. It takes even more

courage to enter the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and expose the ways in which Orthodox

Church has colluded with the Putin administration in suppressing democracy. Finally, when

given a chance to repent in prison, Nadya and Masha chose incarceration over freedom even

though it meant being away from their children and their families for an extended period of time.

What label do we affix to this particular form of heroism?

The Pussy Rioters screamed in public what many have referred to covertly, in measured

political speech, in cultured intelligentsia language, and in allusive academic prose. Pussy

Rioters did not simply de-sacralize the altar of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, but their

crime was more heinous. They desacralized the ways in which power functions: the ways in

which it forms subterranean alliances; the ways in which it makes us believe that the hierarchical

and unequal social relations are normal, beneficial, and even desirable. Finally, Pussy Rioters

exposed the patriarchy that is embedded in the structures of power. The carnival of yore, beloved

by Rabelais and immortalized by Bakhtin, in which all social hierarchies are inverted, and where

15

Chehonadskih, Maria. “What is Pussy Riot’s Idea?” Radical Philosophy, December 2012, accessed July 8, 2013,

http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/what-is-pussy-riots-idea

raucous speech and vulgar bodily gestures mocks the pretensions of the rich and powerful, has

been appropriated in a feminist idiom, aptly named the Pussy Riot.16

When did the male carnival

become the Pussy Riot and what does this mean for the gender of resistance?

A word that was until recently unpronounceable in polite company has now become

synonymous with revolutionary art, politics and feminism everywhere. A state might have

inadvertently turned the insignificant event of the Pussy Riot in the Cathedral of Christ the

Savior into a chapter in history, but the act of creating resistance embedded in a particular art

form was their brainchild alone. We might deplore the vulgarity and the crudity of the Pussy Riot

but it is a foundational gesture that has created a new meme for feminist politics worldwide.

Pussy Riots have demonstrated once again that resistance can be an act of power as well, and that

power itself is always contingent and relational, and despite its many pretensions, never absolute.

“Egyptian air is good for the lungs

Do a Tahrir on the Red Square

Spend a violent day among strong women

Look for a scrap on the balcony, raze the pavement!”17

While the Pussy Riots have built a global coalition of supporters, they have not managed

to bring citizens onto the streets and squares of Russia. Alexander Galich’s haunting requiem

from his famous poem, Petersburg Romance, still echoes plaintively in the public spaces of

Russia: daring us to come to the square. Pussy Riots sing of Tahrir Square, but Russia has not

witnessed the mass rallies that have destroyed dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen.

16

Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 17

“Raze the Pavement,” Pussy Riot. A Punk Prayer for Freedom, p. 48.

Perhaps people are more content in Russia, safe in their new found economic freedoms, happy

with the improved conditions of everyday life, too busy with getting ahead with their careers to

care about Putin’s increasing monopolization of political power. The last time they flooded the

squares across the Soviet Union an empire crumbled and we are still wrestling with the after-

effects of the tsunami of 1991. But despite their many differences, I argue that Pussy Riots are

part and parcel of the youth revolutions that we have been witnessing in different locations of the

world for the past few years.

Spurred partly by the rampant youth unemployment since the recession of 2007, young

people are turning out in record numbers in public spaces, occupying parks in Taksim Square

and Wall Street, pavements in India, and thoroughfares in Spain. While some of them are

marching for jobs and affordable higher education, many seem simply fed up with the status quo

and the material promises of globalization that seemed so compelling for our generation. Perhaps

they take them for granted. But members of this digital generation whose smart devices appear to

be surgically attached to their hands seem strangely unconcerned by material rewards, upward

mobility, and the trappings of bourgeois existence. Wael Ghonim risked a lucrative career as an

executive at Google to plunge into Egyptian politics. He helped fashion a virtual uprising that

destroyed the Mubarak dictatorship. Subsequently, Ghonim resigned from his job and has started

a NGO focused on fostering education in Egypt. Edward Snowden gave up a promising and well

paid career as a technical consultant at the Booz Allen Hamilton to reveal the fact the US and the

British governments have been scrutinizing the activities of their citizens at a microscopic level,

without legal mandate or warrant. Pussy Riots have turned down an offer to perform with

Madonna and have refused to sell their performance art commercially.

In conclusion, I would like to draw attention to the pragmatism of youth politics in the

twenty first century, a phenomenon that is as novel as it is radical. In previous uprisings from the

French Revolution of 1789 to the Russian Revolution of 1917, from the Cultural Revolution in

China to global convulsions of 1968, young people called for a new world in art, politics,

emotions and private behavior. They wanted to destroy the old family structure, patriarchal

politics, capitalism and war mongering. The youth were iconoclastic and deeply prescriptive,

stridently laying down rules and regulations that should govern behavior both at home and in

public spaces. They had clear goals, well-structured demands and organized politics. In contrast,

contemporary uprisings are marked by intensive coalition building among a wide spectrum of

political actors, a great tolerance for ambiguity, and goals that are short term and completely

practical. The Occupy Movement in the US, who called themselves the 99%, did not want to

destroy Wall Street but wanted to make it more transparent and accountable. They want to

reduce the influence of big corporations on politics. In 2011 hundreds and thousands of citizens

in India publicly protested against corruption and malfeasance among politicians and bureaucrats

on the streets of metropolitan cities. In 2013, after a particularly egregious rape case, they

erupted once again calling for prosecutions of those committing crimes against women. In 2013

in Turkey, widespread protests broke out against the demolition of a public park in Istanbul, and

indignant citizens demonstrated against the authoritarianism of the Erdogan regime. In Spain

while the “indignados” claimed that the current political system did not represent them, their

demands for jobs and government support for unemployment were politically moderate.

While the slogans are for the most part pacifist and non-threatening to the status quo, the

ability of the technologically savvy youth to mobilize in public spaces in massive numbers

should serve as warning to authoritarian regimes that the political tricks of the twentieth century

will not work in the twenty first. People are fed up everywhere with patriarchal authoritarianism,

gender oppression, widespread corruption, and collusion among governments and business

interests. For the first time in many decades dire threats of a nation in danger, manufactured wars

and crises are not deflecting the young from their political activism. They want governments that

are transparent, accountable, responsive, and subject to democratic recall. They are demanding

smarter governments that can upgrade the infrastructure, save the environment, create a world

safe for women and minorities, and invest in universal social programs without theatrics, without

hysterics, without oppressive tactics, without stealing and wasting the taxes that citizens pay.

They want the free market to be genuinely free and competitive, not rigged by monopolies and

distorted by government subsidies and secret contracts awarded to crony billionaires.

The Pussy Rioters, a leaderless group, do not want to lead us into shining future. They

have no clear programmatic statements and refuse to issue portentous pronouncements for an

imminent utopia that is just around the corner. Their lack of didacticism and political

prescription is a huge relief after centuries of bearded prophets, many of Russian origin, who

have promised to lead us to a New Jerusalem. Youth movements that refuse to deify the leader,

sanctify the prophet, idolize the hero, and venerate the leader, are a new political phenomenon

that we barely understand. But these subversive small acts of passive and active resistance can

have an unimaginably large multiplier effect in the global context! In the words of Pussy Riots:

“Fill the city, all the squares and the streets,

There are many in Russia, beat it,

Open all the doors, take off the epaulettes

Come taste freedom together with us

Death to prison, freedom to protest!”18

18

“Death to Prison, Freedom to Protest,” Pussy Riot. A Punk Prayer for Freedom, p. 25