My colleague Masha Lipman has been doing a brilliant job of covering the terrifying and absurdist drama in Moscow known as the Pussy Riot trial. Masha reminds us that this is not Stalin or Brezhnev’s Moscow—the trial has been covered in a way that never would have happened in the heart of the Soviet era—but there is no minimizing what a distinctly representative moment this is for Vladimir Putin. Beginning at the end of last year, Putin stonily endured the spectacle of mass demonstrations protesting his regime and his imminent return as President. Much of the pre-election discussion was about whether Putin would crack down on the demonstrators after the balloting, whether he would erase the last traces of semi-liberal rhetoric and practice during the marionette years of Dmitry Medvedev. (Not that Medvedev was ever truly liberal; he just acted that way, from time to time, as if in a dumb show for foreign consumption.) Would political enemies come under attack? Would there be searches, arrests, or show trials? The answer has been obvious for months: Putin’s most vocal critics have every reason to fear.
What should also be heard and read is the direct address of the dissenters themselves to the court. A punk-feminist collective, Pussy Riot is a band of political rebel-artists who, faced with years in a Russian prison, turn out to be courageous, self-possessed, and historically aware. And in their testimony they have shown themselves to be defiantly intelligent, worthy of the long tradition of Andrei Sinyavsky, Larisa Bogoraz, Joseph Brodsky, and so many other dissidents who stood in the dock and spoke for themselves and the cause of freedom.
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, a mother in her early twenties, and an artist of fearless eloquence, thanked the group’s myriad supporters—those abroad but especially those in Russia—and linked their cause to that great tradition: to Socrates; to Dostoevsky, who was made to face a firing squad (a ruse to terrify him); to the Oberiu poets (who were purged by Stalin); and to Solzhenitsyn, who once wrote, as she quotes him, “the word is more sincere than concrete, so words are not trifles. Once noble people mobilize, their words will crush concrete.” Her closing statement is a kind of instant classic in the anthology of dissidence. (A video is below; translations are available.)
And that has been the Pussy Riot credo all along in court: the true verdict will be a verdict on the regime, not them. The women of Pussy Riot, like Sinyavsky and Brodsky before them, have spoken with the confidence of free people who know that their words—not least their closing statements—will outlive their persecutors, both in the courtroom and the Kremlin.
Photograph by Natalia Kolesnikova/Getty
