amnesty international via pickadolla.wordpress.com
By now you’ve heard and/or read about the Russian protest/music/performance-art collective Pussy Riot.
About the group’s carefully staged protest at a Russian Orthodox church against Vladmir Putin, the political boss of Russia’s current crony-driven, corrupt regime.
About the regime’s rote reaction against the protest.
About the two-year labor-camp sentences dutifully dished out to three Pussy Riot members; following five months of imprisonment and a farcical show trial tainted by allegations that the women were beaten, denied food, and weren’t allowed witnesses to speak in their defense.
About the protests throughout western Europe and elsewhere in support of the group.
I found it all to be an extremely well thought out piece of real-life theater.
The group’s English language name and song titles were clearly intended to generate a global support network.
Their act was inspired both by 1990s U.S. “riot grrrl” bands and the recent Ukranian activist group Femen (who’ve staged topless protests against “sex tourism” in their country).
The concept was to put human faces (albeit sometimes masked faces) on what had been a year of mass protests, in Moscow and elsewhere, against Russia’s increasingly oppressive and even neo-Stalinist system.
This face is young, dynamic, colorful, defiant, female, and (even when fully dressed and masked) openly sexual.
It was crafted as a deliberate contrast to a regime that willingly depicted itself as old, staid, grim, mechanical, humorless, and, yes, patriarchal. A machine as repressed as it is repressive; appealing to fear and bigotry to maintain support among older citizens nostalgic for the days of Soviet predictability.
Anti-Putin and anti-Putinism protests are not confined to Pussy Riot. Mass marches have been held in major cities for more than a year. Putin’s somber bureaucrats have issued increasingly suppressive laws to stop them.
Russia’s opposition is broad and deep, cutting across ethnic and class as well as gender lines.
Pussy Riot gives this opposition a face and a voice the outside world can see and hear.
