The following is the second of a two-part series. The first can be found here. The possibility of seven-year sentences for the perpetrators in colorful
*The following is the second of a two-part series. The first can be found **here.*The possibility of seven-year sentences for the perpetrators in colorful dresses was discussed as too benevolent a punishment in such circumstances. At the same time, state officials suggested that to keep women in custody was a gesture of good will, because otherwise they could have been in danger of being physically hurt by the angry believers. In his sermon in the Moscow Church of Risopolozhenie, Patriarch Kirill (Gundyaev) said: “Every believer could not be not hurt. And I am asking you to intensify your prayers about the country and our nation because we have no future if we start to jeer in front of the great shrines, and if this jeer lays in someone’s soul as a type of prowess, as a true expression of political protest, as some appropriate action, or harmless joke.”
In the official
document of expertise, which served as a
basis for the two-year sentence, we find almost the same expressions: “the
diminishing of the spiritual basis of the state,” “desiring to inflict deep
spiritual wounds,” “encroaching on its <Christianity – V.O.> equality, identity,
and high meaningfulness.”.
These formulas are expressive
partly because of their unintelligibility, but they led to a legal decision.
This decision, grounded in “spiritual basis” and “spiritual wounds,” defined
the fates of people – not just of the members of Pussy Riot and their families,
including children – and served as a warning to everyone who might be impudent
enough to join a certain political movement. It visibly marked the process of
the coalescing of the state and the Church, and was mirrored in further
practices, serving as a precedent of a kind, despite the fact that
jurisprudence in Russia is nominally based on the civil law as opposed to
common law where precedent plays greater role.
A remarkable “reversal”
event happened three years later.
“Orthodox activist” Dmitry Tsorionov, also known as Enteo, with his supporters,
members of the group God’s Will, damaged four linoleum engravings made by
artist Victor Sidur. It happened during the exhibition “Scuptures That We Do
Not See” in Moscow Manege on August, 14, 2015. Tsorionov
denied that any damage was done except
for a “broken plate.”
As opposed to “spiritual wounds,” the
result of his actions was material, and therefore evaluable damage. As a
motive, Tsorionov cited the “feelings of believers,” which were
offended by blasphemy (koshchunstvo). However, contrary to the
expectations of one part of the society, who gleefully discussed the
possibility for Tsorionov to obtain “twosie” for his actions, he was arrested for ten days and then freed.
Then he appealed, and research conducted by theologians concluded that the Sidur’s works had
“characteristics of pornography, along with the characteristics of the
propaganda of sexual perversion.” Furthermore, “it is commonly admitted and
does not merit additional proving that the naturalistic depiction of genitalia
which is not justified by the creative design (syuzhetni zamysel) belong
to the images of pornographic type.” Such expertise regards art objects as
separate agencies, which may or may not, according to this logic of thought,
“ignite hatred.”
“Religious feelings,” as respected
as they should be, are a shaky ground for a silently endorsed conclusion that
some objects are damageable and some people are punishable for offending those
feelings, because everything becomes potentially recognizable as offensive to
religious feelings of some group or the other. Both cases, Pussy Riot and God’s
Will alike, show that some type of violence is state-sanctioned and tacitly
approved, and some religious feelings are protected more fiercely than others.
Tsorionov’s and Pussy Riot’s cases
therefore present a fundamental imbalance in how in the phallocentric imaginary
the offences of one type is forgiven, and of another type is severely punished.
The gender issue presents itself here with no uncertain decisiveness. The
disparity in reading by the state of these two cases present evidence that the
corporeal discrimination is inalienable part of the legal discourse. This is a
feature of the state of political affairs in Russia that I would call Putin
Modern.
For anthropologist Richard Flores, modernity “references a series of economic changes, social practices, discursive articulations, and cultural forms,” and therefore provides a context in which a performance or an event is interpreted. Putin Modern is characterized, first, by the development of the economy as a rigidly centralized system relying on the extraction of oil from the land, and by active proclamation of such economy as efficient and productive.
The second characteristic is the merging of the state bureaucratic apparatus with a criminal network. Thus, those who previously, during the 1990s, were a market mafia and expropriators of a different kind are legitimized and therefore simultaneously eliminated and affirmed in the exuberant embracing of corruption, nepotism, and greed.
The third feature of Putin Modern
is the drastic narrowing of the traditionally broad segment of state-paid
services, such as health care and education, to which Russian society has been
historically accustomed. Some
scholars suggest that the
type of intervention the state makes into a social sphere signals a “policy
shift from neoliberalism to more statist forms” of governance. They see it as
the remnant and legacy of the Soviet state, but in 2015 the ambitious projects
of mobilizing people, such as the attempts to organize youth
in pro-party (“United Russia”) groups, have largely been exhausted. These
projects are largely closed or exist for display only, not only because their
attempts failed, but rather because they are redundant in the context of the
new military projects and discourse.
Putin Modern greets the
proclamations of state power and requires the ostensible demonstrations of
such, which in turn leads to unwarranted moves on the international stage, such
as the annexing of Crimea and a military operation in Syria in support of
Bashar Assad. In terms of civil life, freedoms are truncated, and the space of
what is allowed is narrow. Even though Russia still has greater degrees of
freedom of expression than many other countries with semi-military regimes, all
the “resistance” is happening on the social networks and several marginally
influential websites. Still, it bothers the state, and the conversation that
patriots need to shut down or at least increase control over the internet is
recurrent.Cultural Memory and a Figure of JurodivyC
The Pussy Riot performance turned
out to be one of the most widely and wildly discussed topics in Russia for
several months. In 2012, as events unfolded, I used the Yandex (a leading Russian internet search engine)
service which allows everyone to look up how popular a search term is, and back
then I found that there were as many as 300,000 searches for Pussy Riot in
March 2012, and more than 560,000 in five months after January 2012. In
comparison, the term “Patriarch Kirill” (Gundyaev) was searched only half as
many times during the same period. Even “orthodoxy” was less popular.
Why should there be such a broad
interest? This was, I suggest, because Pussy Riot worked with the “cultural
memory” in multiple ways. The Pussy Riot performance in the church evoked, if
only for a sacred place where it was carried out, the spiritual practice of jurodstvo.
Within the context of Russian culture, it is a very powerful and easily read
allusion.Jurodstvois a spiritual practice and a type of
saintliness in Orthodox Christianity. The figure of jurodivyis loosely
analogous to the figure of a fool for Christ’s sake, familiar to other
Christian traditions. The verses in the First Message to Corinthians, 1:4-10, provide a methodological basis for
this spiritual practice, known as “We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are
prudent in Christ; we are weak, but you are strong; you are distinguished, but
we are without honor.”
In the first Russian edition of
the Bible, the so-called “Elizavetinskoye” (1751), this phrase sounds
differently, which may account for some of the peculiarities of this practice
in Russia.*“Мы убо буи Христа ради,вы же мудры во Христе”(“Mi
ubo boui Khrista radi, vi zhe mudry vo Khriste”) *“Boui” has thesame
root as “bouiny” (“raving”, “violent”, “turbulent”). It is far from
“fool.” In the modern Russian psychiatric everyday language,
the word *“буйный”*is routinely used for describing an aggressive patient
suffering from a manic psychotic episode.
Some suggest
that “fool for Christ’s sake feigns madnessin order to reject the
prospect of the usually mandatory hermetic seclusion, thereby remaining a part
of secular life.” However, jurodstvois not bogus.Jurodivydoes
not feign anything, as it is in contradiction with his status of the God’s
person. The madness is real in a sense that it is a sanity in the realm of the
otherworldly, as opposed to what the world mistakenly sees as sanity.
In a *tropar *(church praise)
to Xenia Peterburgskaya there are words: “Rejoice, who revealed theinsanity
of the world by [her] seeming insanity.” Perhaps a more precise translation to *“mnimoye**bezumie” *is “imaginary,” rather than “seeming” insanity. Either way,
there are two separateinsanities at play: the insanity of the world,
which is synonymous with common sense, practical considerations, the search for
richness and fame, and the everyday little business of living. And the insanity
of the saint who observes another world, remembers death, knows the future,
speaks to angels etc.
The fool for Christ’s sake is not
fooling anyone.Jurodivysdo not fake insanity. They do not pretend to
be insane, and yet their insanity is pretend. At the same time, they are not
the sages who pretend to be mad because their audience is too short-sighted to
accept a divine message. In all the simplicity of a figure of a jurodivy,
there is a dialectic of what is sane and what is insane, and how we divide one
from the other.
Madness is sent to an ascetic as a
gift or is permitted by God so that His servant would maintain a praised
Christian virtue of humility. The wisdom of the jurodivyis paradoxical,
her gestures and speeches are enigmatic, her appearance is strange, sometimes
she runs around naked, and the meaning of her actions is revealed long after
the events.
For example,
one of the beloved and most widely known female *jurodivy — jurodivaya — *Xenia
Peterburgskaya, who lived in the first part of the eighteenth century, “went
out of her mind” after the death of her beloved husband. She dressed in her
husband’s clothing and answered to his name. She claimed that it was her,
Xenia, who died, and that he was alive.
Hagiographies of jurodivysfollow the same pattern of a story. A holy fool acts in accordance with the
laws of “another world.” These laws are often unknown to ordinary people and
their everyday life.
Almost always it is the case that
a jurodivyis persecuted. S/he is held in contempt, blamed for her/his
insanity, is beaten, insulted, robbed, humiliated, disparaged, and cursed.
Later, oftentimes after her/his death, however, it becomes apparent to everyone
that this insanity was not insanity at all, but the sanity of another order.
Usually after death there are miraculous healings and wonderful events.
Sometimes even in life jurodivyis known for his knowledge of the future. Xenia Peterburgskaya cried over the
killing of the dethroned emperor Ioann Antonovich when it had just happened. She also assured a nuptial celebration of a virtuous
maiden by prompting her to run to the cemetery where a young
and rich widower cried his eyes out on the fresh tomb of his late wife.Jurodivyreceives additional gifts of grace by quietly facing the abuse of those who
treat her as if she is possessed by demons (and sometimes she is possessed by
demons, as a form of other popushchenie, admission from God).Jurodstvo, which is a type of religious asceticism
often confused with jurodstvovanie, the employing of some aspect of this
practice in a different context, oftentimes altogether devoid of religious
connotations, and generally with a goal of satirizing something/mimicking
someone, particularly a figure of authority, for example, a teacher in class.
The history of jurodstvovaniein Russian culture is no less rich than
the history of jurodstvo, but these are two different, although
connected, histories.
In a secular context,*jurodstvovanie *is a mocking, jesting, satirizing behavior or action. It is
meant to be funny, and isoften accompanied by wild gesticulation and
face expression. The word “jurodstvovanie” would hardly be used by a
performer. It is more of a label that compartmentalizes the behavior, analogous
to krivlyanie(grimacing) and has a tinge of derogatory connotation. “Khvatit**jurodstvovat’!”(roughly translated as “Stop being silly!” but in a far
more displeased way) is anexclamation known to all schoolchildren in
Russia.
While jurodstvoas a
religious practice is thought to have ended with the institutionalization of
insanity, the “birth of the clinic” in Russia, it remains a powerful trope of
culture, traceable in literature. On the other hand, jurodstvovanieis a
living practice, a part of the contemporary Russian everydayness. Pussy Riot’s
performance fits the definition of jurodstvovanieas a mocking action.
Curiously, this is the case of jurodstvovaniemocking jurodstvo,
since jurodstvois now a part of a grand narrative, revolving around
Orthodoxy, sanctity, tradition, roots, spiritual and military power, classical
Russian literature, where jurodivyplays a noticeable role from Pushkin
to Ulitskaya, and so on.*Jurodivy *is an asocial individual. He laughs when no
one does, like Vassily Blazhenny; hesleeps with dogs on the street, as
did Andrey Tsaregradsky; he gives away golden coins to a rich merchant whose
affluence has just been ruined.Jurodivysare known for their disregard
to power. They berate the powerful, as did the jurodivayaElena, Nikolay
Pskovsky, and Mikhail Klopsky.
Here is what Sir Jerome Horsey, an
English nobleman and a traveler, writes on Nikolay Pskovsky’s (Salos)
interaction with tsar Ivan the Terrible:
*The emperour, after hee had saluted the eremite at his lodging, sent him a reward.**And the holy man, to requite the emperour, sent him a piece of rawe fleshe, beyng then their Lent time. Which the emperour seeing, bid one to tell him that he marvelled that the holy man woulde offer him flesh to eat in the Lent, when it was forbidden by order of holie Church. And doth Evasko (which is as much to saye, as Jacke) thinke (quoth Nicôla) that it is unlawfull to eate a piece of beasts flesh in Lent, and not to cate up so much mans flesh as hee hath done already?*As Flores shows, it is not so
important whether such stories are drawn from what really happened, or were
imagined. They were creatively rethought in Russian culture. For example, Alexander Pushkin’s jurodivyin his historical drama
“Boris Godunov”, is a character who dares to complain about street boys
purloining his coin, to the nearly omnipotent, terrifying Tsar, compelling his
ruler to “Order to slaughter them, as you slaughtered the little tsarevitch.”
This story is embedded in what might be called the fabric of culture. Its
reenactment in the space of culture poses questions about identity, power,
resistance, and their pertinence when it comes to the reconstruction of meaning
of the contemporary events.
The great and the good, in turn,
were ambivalent towards the phenomenon of jurodstvo. There was a power
dynamic that made jurodivya fearful figure, in a sense. God might have
been behind him, as might have been demons.
Tsar Alexey Mikhailovich was
favorably disposed to Vassily Blazhenny and Kiprian. In contrast, a church
reformist and a Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus’, Nikon forbade the painting of
icons of jurodivys. In 1716, Emperor Peter the Great issued a decree
that those priests who feigned insanity and became raving demoniacs should be
not only punished but prosecuted in the city courts.**Sometimes the acts that the jurodivy
performs, are blasphemous, obscene, and
indecent.*Jurodivys *break church rules, denounce sovereigns, dress in
bizarre clothes, cover themselves indirt, run around naked, and throw
feces into the parishioners. The skomorokhis an analogous figure of jurodivyin a secular context. He is a jester, a carnivalesque figure, and jurodivyis his twin in the spiritual matters.
On this “feast of fools,” where
everyone is anonymous or acts under an assumed name (as did Pussy Riot), the
authorship is shifted, the performance is happening, its sacrilegious nature is
evident, the eccentric behavior is a source of feast for a viewer, even if this
feast is full of indignation, and the only feature that breaks this Bakhtinian
world is the punishment that comes in response to the eccentricity and satire,
which reminds one that there is an ever-present realm beyond a carnival
celebration.
Pussy Riot’s performance looked
like jurodstvovanieto many observers and jurodstvofor some,
but, most importantly, it reproduced the dynamics of powerless “fool”
castigating those in power, which is a meaningful plot in itself. This plot is
easily recognizable within the common codes of hagiographies reflected by mass
culture.Jurodivyis a universally known figure owing to the
cinematography, the last well-known example of a popular movie with jurodivyas a central figure
being “Ostrov.”
In mass perception, Pussy Riot were abominable and loathsome
figures in 2012. According to Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM), in 2014 44% of 1600 respondents
think that Pussy Riot members were justly sentenced. 22% agreed that the
sentence was too benign, and it should have been more severe.
If an event is a rupture in
continuity, which is what constitutes the “eventness” of the event, it must
allude to some type of context, which participants and observers are able to
read and interpret.Obscenity, Femininity, and a Specter of Show TrialEvery now and then scholars
mention Pussy Riot in connection with Femen. Both groups consist of political actionists whose creative
methods are concerned with “performed femininity,” perhaps on the border of “sextremism.” “Sextremist feminists” is a
definition and self-identification that belongs to the Ukrainian-born group
“Femen,” famous for their topless protests and actions which outstrip in
straightforwardness and blatancy many protest actions around the world. While
“sextremism” would hardly define Pussy Riot’s actions, there is this common
feature between two groups in that they are feminist, and that the members of
the groups are females.
Gender certainly plays a very
important role here. At the Pussy Riot trial, “The defense didn’t offer a defense. Their
first witness, Samutsevich’s father, claimed that his daughter was a good girl
until she fell under Tolokonnikova’s baneful feminist influence and in his
speech mentioning “skomorokhs.” Feminism, he argued, was antithetical to
Russian civilization; feminism was for Westerners, not for Russians.”
The very motherhood of the accused
(Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova both mothers) was used as a tool of symbolic
violence against them. The reasoning was that good mothers would not perform
risky and meaningless actions that would endanger their future and as a result
the futures of their kids, but would spend their time with their children.
After Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova received amnesty and were released in 2013,
their first move was not to fly to their children, but to meet together for a
press conference, for which they were widely criticized. Even Pussy Riot supporters asked incredulous
questions: “Did I understand you right that
for you the rights defense advocacy about which you are talking is more dear,
more important, than your children?”
The whole plot of the Pussy Riot
performance and sentence shows that patriarchy uses ideas and ideals of
femininity as weapons against women. Not only the machismo and masculinity of
power affirmed in the repeated actions of pointing out women’s places, duties,
and missions, but the overarching concepts and “shared values” are so strong
that they seem to be representing common sense.
While
it was already noted that the trial over Pussy Riot evoked the historical
specter of show trials in Russia, I would argue that the trial was allusive to
the show trials of dissidents in the Soviet state in two aspects: its surreal
absurdity, and its supposed moral and propagandistic force were intended to
make it meaningful for an outsider, for a viewer, therefore ensuring that it
received media attention. An important feature of show trial, when a persecuted
individual is coached – by torture, threats to family members who are hostages
of the state, and psychological pressure – to respond in a correct way to the
questions posed for her during a trial, was absent. While the psychological
pressure was in place — and confinement is a pressure on its own—the members of
Pussy Riot were not convinced to respond in a premediated and desirable way.
Pussy Riot members were convicted
for “hooliganism” conducted by the motive of “religious hatred,” because,
according to the logic of the accusation, they inflicted suffering on those who
were present in the church at the time of their performance and traumatized
them. While for a number of Western observers it was extremely hard to
understand what kind of trauma it might be, because for them it was a
performance and they have the language to talk about it, many were deeply
offended by Pussy Riot’s actions, and experienced a painful affect.
The space of political affect that
Pussy Riot created is far from simple. Being an embedded feeling, a visceral
emotion, affect governs political processes. Somewhere in the dark intersection
of somatic and social, where the light of analytical thought does not quite
reach, emerges what Protevi calls “political affect.” The
prosecution produced the
witnesses who testified that they were offended, who lived the event (“perezhival
proisshedshee”) as a violation of a sacred place, and whose “religious
feelings were deeply hurt” (“gluboko zatronuli ego religioznie chuvstva”).
And there is no reason not to believe those people.
A religious feeling is such that
it is not shared with anyone in a direct way, and only communicated through
verbal and nonverbal means. The study found that the experience of desecration, though
harmless to physical health, was “tied to higher levels, though somewhat
differential patterns, of emotional distress. While sacred loss was predictive
of intrusive thoughts and depression, desecration was tied to more intrusive
thoughts and greater anger.” The sacrilege is perceived as a violation by a
religious person.
Many compared their impression of
Pussy Riot’s action to a situation that was more evocative to nonreligious
people. I was present at a conversation when one person explained to another in
a Moscow café: “Imagine that they would come to the tomb of your grandma and
dance there,” which turned out to be a decisive example in an argument where a
religious person was trying to convey how violated and offended he felt.
In describing Pussy Riot’s action,
journalists and different Internet communities used the words “shamelessness”
(“besstydstvo”), “obscenity” (“nepristoinost”), “pornography”
(pornografia), as well as “bravery” (“khrabrost”), “fearlessness”
(“besstrashie”), and “power” (“moshch”).
I would suggest that the
punishment for Pussy Riot’s transgression was obscene in its propagandistic
force. “Obscenity of propaganda” was a response to the “pornography” of the
Pussy Riot performance.
Bernstein
called the state response “the spectacular violence of sovereign power” and the
bodies of the women “vital sites for the enactment of sovereignty.” She
suggests that the contested narratives centered around Pussy Rio” coincided in
a trope of “sacrifice”: “Even Pussy Riot’s detractors recognized the
sacrificial character of the trial. The latter, however, argued that the women
did not constitute legitimate subjects of sacrifice.”
What this approach implicitly
suggests, is that the state here is back to its pre-modern incarnation, since
in a “modern state” no life can be sacrificed, but rather is a fuel for all-consuming
machine working on bio power. In the pre-modern world, Foucault writes, the sovereign power is embodied in the
figure of a monarch who has “right of death and power over life,” has “the
right to takelife or letlive,” (emphasis added), as opposed to
disembodied bio-power of a nation state, concerned with “the administration of
bodies and the calculated management of life.”
In a pre-modern epoch, according to Foucault, the figure of the monarch is an embodiment
of power, and a perpetrator offends the sovereign by committing a crime. The
punishment is a spectacle, theater, a liturgy, a celebration, a vengeance, and
a sermon: a moral lesson, and a warning to others. The trial and imprisonment
is not just the bureaucratized, anonymized, faceless procedure, not just a
reenactment of an indifferent mechanics of the state apparatus, but the
performance in itself, where everything is meaningful and evocative and
produces emotions and affects, meant to be displayed and to be impressive, and
should achieve something: the reclamation of justice, the re-establishment of
truth, triumphant good, and conquered evil.
The modern state, on the contrary,
as Agamben asserts, performs the procedures of power routinely
and bureaucratically, and the bare life as a core of sovereign power “is
exposed to a violence without precedent precisely in the most profane and banal
ways.” Therefore, the possibility that Pussy Riot were considered to be
sacrifice brings us back to the pre-modern epoch of sovereign power embodied in
an individual figure or a ruler, but since it happened in a modern nation
state, “Pussy Riot” were meant to be imprisoned and stripped from their
personality.
In modern epoch, the body becomes
an “object and target,” an instrument and a scene of the implementation of
power. It is accordingly trained, subjected to things, observed, reconfigured,
and becomes a center of coercion, manipulation, manifold usage and constant improvement.
Pussy Riot turned out to be remarkably resilient bodies that resisted attempts
to train them into docility, and disappear into undecipherable mass of the
incarcerated.
They did try to explain their
motives denying that they ever had intentions to offend
anyone and infringe on anyone’s religious feelings. Tolokonnikova stated that
they accept the aesthetic blame but refuse the criminal charges, and did not
want to offend. Alyokhina wrote a “Reconciliatory Latter” (Primiritelnoye**Pismo), speaking about the beauty of the religious celebration of
Paskha,asking for forgiveness and appealing to the Christian feelings.
Their pleadings fell on deaf ears.
As journalists reported, some of the believers displayed the adamant
refusal to accept the apology because “the regret was not on their faces,” and
some, as a church official Serguei Vinogradov demanded from Pussy Riot members
“to beat themselves with shackles or retire to the monastery,” otherwise
refusing to accept the sincerity of the apology.
Indubitably there was a
“collateral effect” of Pussy Riot’s actions. It was largely unspoken publicly,
but discussed among internet communities and tacitly implied, that many of the
events performed by Pussy Riot and their predecessor and inspiration, the
affiliated group “Voina,” are indecent and blasphemous, and thus deserve
punishment, one way or another.
One of the actionists put a
chicken in her vagina in a supermarket. Several “Voina” (“War”) members hanged
the effigies of gastarbeitersin a supermarket. Tolokonnikova
participated in a sexual orgy in the Timiryazev State Museum of Biology, while
pregnant (the nerve!) under the slogan “Fuck for the bear cub” when Dmitry Medvedev was elected as
president in 2008. None of these episodes was explicitly used against Pussy
Riot at the trial, but they undoubtedly were taken into account.
The sentence that Pussy Riot
received, signaled the state’s support for one group of citizens while
simultaneously giving the other group an explicit warning. The obscenity of the
state response was seen as an adequate measure in answering the obscenity of
performance, which was also an act of propagandizing of certain ideals that
clash with the hegemonic ideas of the nation state.
In the eyes of believers, Pussy
Riot committed symbolic violence, in response the state enacted violence of a
disproportionate force and magnitude. As Schuler muses, “Why the talk among people gathered here of
blasphemy and hate crimes? Why the string quartet surrounded by
anti-pornography signs? Why the detachments of husky, heavily armed male
militia whose every forward movement caused wary Pussy Riot supporters to
skitter back?” Indeed, the powers amassed in opposition to three young female
activists were impressive and one could not help but think that there are some
hidden dangers there that merit such a response.
Out of pure love for conspiracy
theories and emblematic allegories, I could not fail to mention that Putin’s flight on a glider when he was seen leading a flock of migratory
birds – six Siberian cranes – on September, 5, 2012 was read by some Russian internet analysts, perhaps ironically, as a symbolic response
to Pussy Riot’s indecency. The inconsiderateness of the Pussy Riot performance
matches the absurdity of the official narrative of displayed
masculinity, where Putin assigns himself a role of avian alpha-male, and
performs the deeds of valor worthy of Hercules: swims in the real river and
displays his ripped torso, pilots the amphibious plane and exterminates forest
fire, recovers from the bottom of the sea the ancient amphoras, protects tiger
cubs. Putin has long been using machismo as a legitimation strategy and an
excuse for governmental failures5, but the Pussy Riot case added to his
pronouncedly masculine image, not surprisingly for Russian feminists, a new
dimension of women abuser.
What kind of relationship is there
between the body and the sovereignty in the context of nation state and
bio-power? The body of a citizen still could become a “teachable moment.” The
Pussy Riot story conveys an important message about modern Russia as a
neoliberal nation state. As anthropologist Charles Hale writes on neoliberal
multiculturalism in Guatemala, corrupt systems inadvertently produce resistance
and feed on this resistance by overthrowing, subduing, and oppressing it, and
continuously demonstrating the government’s power and potency. What Hale says
about Central American societies is I think applicable to the Russian society:
it has “all the characteristics—at times exaggerated to the point of cruel
parody—of corrupt, predatory capitalism, with obscene levels of inequality and
social exclusion, held together by brute force.” “The parody on trial” was the
thought shared by many during “Pussy Riot” process. The predatory feeding on
who should have been helpless victims but adamantly opposed putting them in
this position, was a spectacle for the Russian resistance.
What kind of opposition is
possible and effective in the neoliberal context of a nation state? Could a
judicial system of a secular state operate with such categories as “blasphemy”
and “sacrilege”? Although it was not in a speech of the court itself, and
appeared in the testimony of the witnesses, it was evident that the religious
lexicon was used to create a space where a political sentence would not be
ostensibly displayed as political.
One of the main arguments which
was repeated in many variants and at length, was “Let them try to do it in a
mosque.” One especially passionate statement of this kind turned into an internet meme. The implication was, Muslims are passionate
for their religion and whoever commits something approximating blasphemy in a
mosque, is in mortal jeopardy. Besides equating Muslims with violent avengers
and racial extremists, those who made this argument apparently did not reflect
on the fact that they ascribed to the Russian nation state the functions and
sensibilities of a religious state, which would use severe punishment for those who infringe
on what it considers to be sacred, be it a sovereign’s power or religious
values.
In short, the local specificities
of resistance demonstrated by Pussy Riot’s performance and process, play out in
the global feminist discourse as the force opposing the masculinized power of
the state. Pussy Riot’s case showed that Putin Modern is a system in which a
court decision was an instrument of ascribing a second-class
symbolic citizenship status, especially taken into consideration the action by
Tsorionov. Put in this comparative perspective, one could hardly argue that the
state treating of the events is devoid of gendered reading and what I would
call here genderization, a process analogous to racialization, ascribing
to a group of people certain numberof qualities they should satisfy
based on their gender/race, manifest in the body, characteristics.
Putin Modern, as the masculine nation state and a set of political and aesthetic preferences, uses genderization as the instrument in maintaining the phallocentric hegemony. The legally disproportionate sentence to Pussy Riot serves as a symbolic deterrence for other future acts of disobedience, especially female and anti-clerical.
Such symbols redefine the political imaginary and used as precedents to construct patriarchal plutocratic sociopolitical normality.
*Vasilina Orlova is currently working on her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. She holds a doctorate in philosophy from Moscow State University (2013). She has published a number of books of prose and poetry in Russian. Her prose and poetry has appeared in prominent Russian literary journals such as Noviy Mir, Druzhba Narodov, and Oktyabr. She has received several Russian literary awards She is the author of *Contemporary Bestiary (Gutenberg, 2014) and Holy Robots(Gutenberg, 2017).