Punks vs. Putin

What makes for meaningful political protest? In regimes where ideology was taken seriously (such as the Soviet Union or America during the Cold War), dissidents and dissenters could target rulers’ political ideas, whether communist or capitalist. But in regimes where ideology is used more to distract than indoctrinate (such as Putin’s Russia or Trump’s America), directly opposing the leaders’ ‘narrative’ (one which can change, depending on political expedience) risks playing right into their game. As Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon revealed in an interview with American Prospect, Trump’s race-baiting has provoked Democrats into focusing on identity issues, which is just the argument Bannon wants them to obsess over: he believes it electorally unfavourable. Similarly, when Putin faced mass protests against his corruption and bad governance in 2011, Kremlin propaganda refocused the national debate on a culture war between ‘western liberals’ and ‘Russian conservatives’.

So when the art-activist group Pussy Riot burst into Moscow’s main cathedral to perform a swear-filled satirical ‘punk prayer’, begging the Mother of God to rid Russia of Putin, it was a godsend for him. The Kremlin proceeded to orchestrate a grotesque show trial and slap two-year sentences on the western-inspired feminist ‘witches’ who were attacking the nation’s moral fibre. Riot Days, Pussy Rioter Maria Alyokhina’s energetic and enjoyable prison diary, is a search for meaningful protest in an age in which presidents often appear to be playful performance artists.

Alyokhina treats the punk prayer itself breezily, as part of an ongoing series of stunts which included stuffing chickens into vaginas as some sort of comment on Putin’s rule — protests which bemused rather than angered the police and left the general public uninterested. Even the prayer in the cathedral elicited little response at first, the guards merely booting the girls out of the building.