Alex Massie Alex Massie

Enjoy the Winter Olympics but remember – and listen to – Pussy Riot as well.

And so to the winter Olympic Games which should not be hosted by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Sure, Putin’s Russia is not nearly as horrific as Stalin’s Russia but when that’s the yardstick for decency you know you’ve bankrupted yourself.

Was anyone taken in by Putin’s decision to release a handful of political prisoners recently? Shame on them if they were gulled by such an obvious play. Again, it is better that the likes of Mikhail Khodorkhovsky and Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova freed but they should never have been in prison in the first place. The upside, as so often in Russia, is heavily qualified.

The Pussy Riot girls – previously saluted here and here – are now at least at liberty to speak out and are currently on an international tour to highlight the nastiness and inadequacies of Putin’s Russia. They still deserve your support. There may be little that people in this country can do to embarrass Putin except this: keep highlighting the real nature of his regime. It is not enough but it is a start.

As for the Olympics, Tolokinnikova tells David Remnick that:

“For Putin, the Olympic Games are an attempt to inflate the inflatable duck of a national idea, as he sees it. 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.”

It is worth recalling Tolokinnokova’s closing statement at her pretend-trial, a statement that, whatever you think of a Russian punk girl band’s antics demonstrated that they were serious dissidents with a serious message. In it she despaired:

We were looking for authentic genuineness and simplicity and we found them in our punk performances.

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