Pussy Riot were wrong

It’s hard to tell which is the more absurd over-reaction to Pussy Riot’s 51-second performance of political and religious blasphemy in Moscow’s St Saviour’s Cathedral in February — that of the Russian state or that of the western media.

It should go without saying that the treatment meted out to the three retro-punks — five months’ pre-trial detention at the mercy of unkind jailers, isolation from their families, heavily embroidered charges, their display in an aquarium-style dock under threat of a seven-year maximum sentence before a clearly biased judge — has been cruel, oppressive and grotesquely out of proportion to the offence they committed. But it cannot any longer go without saying. Now that the case has became a liberal cause célèbre, one is required to observe the proper pieties and chant a solemn litany of outrage before the iconostasis. Failure to do so will inevitably result in one being cast as a Putin apologist.

In case you’re still in doubt about my position, let me remove every scintilla of ambiguity. What has been done to the trio was wrong, wrong and viciously wrong. Nadia, Masha and Katya (first names will do now that they’ve been co-opted into celebrity culture) have been cynically used to intimidate the Russian opposition generally, and I’ll happily throw in that President Putin is a nasty, unscrupulous weasel, too, if it helps get us back to the point. Which is this: hasn’t there also been something immoderate about Pussy Riot’s reception by our media, something fulsome and rather distasteful too?

The predictable references in the trial coverage to Kafka and Eugène Ionesco were tolerable, but it was around the third comparison of the Pussy Riot shenanigans with the Dreyfus affair that it became clear that any sense of proportion had been banished.