Just before taking off for Sochi and Vladimir Putin’s Olympiad, I stayed up late reading a remarkable new book that begins with a shiver: “Here is what I was trying to figure out: how a miracle happens. A great work of art—something that makes people pay attention, return to the work again and again, and reëxamine their assumptions, something that infuriates, hurts, and confronts—a great work of art is always a miracle.”
The author is Masha Gessen, one of the most important activists and journalists Russia has known in a generation, and the work of art she is referring to is a “punk prayer,” a fleeting political performance piece that took place on February 21, 2012, when five young women, dressed in colorful shifts, tights, and balaclavas entered the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, in Moscow, and began singing—no less frenetically than Patti Smith or Johnny Rotten in their time—“Virgin Mary, Mother of God, chase Putin out/Chase Putin out, chase Putin out.” They sang their protest against Kirill, the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, calling him a suka, or bitch, and sang the refrain “Holy shit” as a way of denouncing the closeness of the Putin government and the Church. The urgent, breakneck tune, the women of Pussy Riot said, was based on Rachmaninoff’s version of “Ave Maria.” The Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church soon declared the performance “blasphemy”—“The Devil has laughed at all of us!” he said—and, after a flagrantly unjust trial, three members of the group, Nadezhda (Nadya) Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina (Katya) Samutsevich, and Maria (Masha) Alekhina, were convicted and imprisoned. Putin, for his part, declared that Pussy Riot had “undermined the moral foundations” of Russia.
After finishing Gessen’s disquieting, moving, and closely reported book, “Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot,” I got in touch with Tolokonnikova and Alekhina, who were just released from Russian prison colonies after nearly two years—part of Putin’s pre-Olympic amnesties, which are clearly intended to tamp down criticism from human-rights organizations and foreign governments. They will appear onstage at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, on February 5th, with Madonna, the Flaming Lips, Imagine Dragons, and Lauryn Hill, at a benefit concert for Amnesty International. They will not perform their music, but they will have things to say.
“For Putin, the Olympic Games are an attempt to inflate the inflatable duck of a national idea, as he sees it,” Tolokonnikova told me. “In Russia today, there are no real politics, no real discussion of views, and meanwhile the government tries to substitute for this with hollow forms of a national idea—with the Church, with sports and the Olympics.”
“These Olympic Games are central to the meaning of his life—they are as important to him as anything he has done,” Alekhina said. “For us, it is important from an entirely different point of view. People need to note the corruption involved in building Sochi for the Games; they should notice the demolitions of buildings.”
Tolokonnikova and Alekhina said they thought that Putin, despite managing to suppress the wave of anti-government protests that erupted in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia two years ago, is weaker than he seems to the outside world. Even though they are now traveling in Europe and the United States, they said that they had no intention of emigrating or backing off; they plan to remain in Russia and concentrate their efforts on human-rights issues, particularly the plight of prisoners in Russian jails and prison colonies.
Gessen, a longtime spokesperson for L.G.B.T issues in Russia, spent many days with members of Pussy Riot to report her book, and some of the passages concentrate on Tolokonnikova and Alekhina’s prison experiences. In interviews and long e-mail exchanges, the Pussy Riot prisoners described the puny dimensions of their cells, their hunger strikes, the abuse, the cold (“the windows are caulked with bread crumbs”), the disgusting food, the invasive medical checkups. “In Soviet times, political prisoners were usually kept together in special cells or camps, but that is no longer the case,” Alekhina told me. “We were with women who were convicted for common criminal cases, selling drugs or murdering partners or husbands who had beaten them for many years in a row.”
Tolokonnikova and Alekhina, who are in their mid-twenties, quote and live by a vast library of musical, literary, and political influences: punk bands like Bikini Kill, Cockney Rejects, and Sham 69; the Riot Grrrl movement; the performance artist Karen Finley; feminist theorists such as Judith Butler, Kate Millet, and Shulamith Firestone; and the entire parade of Soviet-era dissidents: Vladimir Bukovsky, Andrei Sinyavsky, Joseph Brodsky, Irina Ratushinskaya, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. One of their performance-protests took place at Lobnoye Mesto—a platform on Red Square where Ivan the Terrible was said to speak in the fifteen-thirties, and where a handful of dissidents appeared, in 1968, to unfurl a banner in protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The members of Pussy Riot, compared to the mature intellectual voices of the Soviet dissident movement, are, at times, an inconsistent blend of fury, leftist rhetoric, and academic quotations, but that does nothing to diminish their astonishing courage, their poised endurance, and their refusal to withdraw and go silent.
Not everyone in the anti-Putin forces shows unalloyed admiration for Pussy Riot. The anti-corruption crusader Alexey Navalny—probably Putin’s leading nemesis in Moscow—is an Orthodox believer and has nationalist tendencies; he called the “punk prayer” at the cathedral “despicable” and “idiotic.” But he also spoke out against the show trial of Pussy Riot, telling Der Spiegel that the spectacle reminded him of “the Inquisition during the Middle Ages.”
Navalny, who helped lead the demonstrations in Moscow two years ago and has been fortunate so far to avoid an extended prison sentence, is in complete agreement with Pussy Riot about the Olympics. Navalny told me that state-run television, by far the most dominant medium in Russia, has been replete with Olympic propaganda in recent weeks, with constant images of “running the torch around the country and into outer space … In every city, they create a big celebration, with children coming into the streets to meet the torch, trying to create an atmosphere of something good coming. The state media is all about the expectation of a great celebration. We can also notice that Putin is very irritated by the discussion of gay rights and corruption and safety issues.”
Navalny has joined the dissident effort criticizing Putin for spending what he estimates is as much as fifty billion dollars on the Olympics, including massive cost overruns and corrupt arrangements with government cronies. Last week, Navalny put up a new Web site, in Russian and English, Sochi.FBK.info, which details his claims, and which he told me is based on open-source state-budget documents.
Putin claims that the Olympic project cost around seven billion dollars. An official Russian government audit allowed that there have been cost overruns of about four hundred million dollars—vastly less than those claimed by Navalny and another opposition politician, Boris Nemtsov—and Putin has adamantly denied reports of corruption. “If anybody has got this information, please show this to us,” Putin said on Russian television.
Five years ago, it was thought that major Russian businessmen were being asked to build hotels, arenas, roads, and railroads in Sochi as a kind of “tax”—the price of doing business elsewhere in Russia. But, according to Navalny, those same businessmen managed to get huge amounts of credit from Russian banks, and have profited enormously from their ventures along the Black Sea.
Navalny, who told me that the 2014 Olympic project is, for Putin, “what the pyramids were for the pharaohs,” also said that the government amnesties shortening the prison terms of the Pussy Riot members, the businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and some Greenpeace activists were merely a concession to the West on the eve of the Games. “The amnesties indicate that Putin is tired of answering these questions,” Navalny said. “He is fed up with the question of gay rights and safety issues and Khodorkovsky. The main point with Khodorkovsky is not the release—it was not launching a third case against him. The Olympic Games is the main reason why it happened, but it doesn’t indicate a real thaw. Yes, he released Khodorkovsky, but only after he was in prison for ten years. Pussy Riot was in prison for two years, and they were supposed to get out in two months. So he found the best-known cases in the West and he addressed them. But, believe me, we have many more cases of illegal prosecution in our country.”
As Masha Alekhina of Pussy Riot told me, “Our goal in coming to Europe and New York is not to breathe the fresh air and enjoy ourselves. It’s to talk about the things that matter to us, to talk about political prisoners. We have seen the situation inside, and in there it is impossible to protest. So we are doing it now.”
[#image: /photos/590950f8c14b3c606c103604]See more of The New Yorker’s coverage of the Sochi Games.