Pussy Riot might seem, to many, like a quirk in the world-news pages. But Masha Gessen's book is the second significant piece that delves deeper into the Russian feminist punk protest group after their imprisonment. Words Will Break Cement and the documentary Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, by Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin, are concerned not just with the shorthand of bright balaclavas that coloured quizzical reports on CNN but also with the intellectual foundations and bravery of a few women who exposed the hypocrisy and oppression that typify Vladimir Putin's regime. It would be a far more Hollywood-ready fairy tale to assume that a few young women staged a rough-and-ready protest that blew up without them realising what they were getting into, but Pussy Riot knew exactly how subversive their actions could be. Their most famous protest, at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, was not just an inciting moment but the culmination of a fascinating DIY campaign.
Gessen, a Russian journalist who moved to New York last year to avoid the consequences of new Russian legislation that bans "homosexual propaganda", has written extensively on Russian affairs and LGBT rights, gaining considerable attention for her last book, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.
Here she begins a year to the day since Pussy Riot were arrested, and focuses on the group’s three most famous members: Nadezhda “Nadya” Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina “Kat” Samutsevich. With a year left in their prison sentences – and on the fifth birthday of Gera, Tolokonnikova’s daughter – Gessen, Tolokonnikova’s husband, Petya, and her father, Andrei, make their way to Penal Colony Number 14, the prison camp where Tolokonnikova, perhaps the most recognisable of the group, has been languishing, and then rewinds.
Intellectual evolution
The context of Pussy Riot's origins are vital in understanding how ready they were for their actions to go global, and Gessen outlines the intellectual evolution of all three, along with a focus on environmental factors, from the influence of their families on their thinking to the burgeoning protest movement in Russia, initially born out of Gary Kasparov's Marches of the Disagreeable, from 2005, which resulted in thousands of activists being detained by 2006, when Tolokonnikova started college in Moscow.
Tolokonnikova was born precocious. In prison she wrote to Gessen, “At the age of four I could distinguish a Baroque building from a Rococo one.” After school Tolokonnikova read Sartre and Schopenhauer, as well as devouring Russian philosophers, dissident history and visual-art theory. Precociousness is sometimes an off-putting trait, but Gessen’s focus on the intellectual side of Pussy Riot’s genesis acts as an affirmation of their actions. It becomes assurance, if not insurance, for their eventual protests.
Performance art
Before that, though, there's the genesis. The strong history of performance art among Pussy Riot's most famous three is charted, focusing on Tolokonnikova and Samutsevich's involvement with the art group Voina (or "War").
In the late 2000s Voina was on a roll, making performance art that combined commentary with satire, subversion and controversy. The hypocrisy of the police was a frequent topic. Sometimes religion entered the fray, such as the action Cop in a Priest's Cassock, Oleg Vorotnikov's performance wearing a police officer's hat and a Russian Orthodox black priest's robe while leaving a supermarket with a trolley of groceries without paying, to demonstrate that police and priests were robbers.
Of course, not all of these actions were successful or even well documented. Gessen is honest about their execution, detailing some misfires that many involved in grassroots political activism will identify with. The night they welded shut the superexpensive Moscow restaurant Oprichnik, for example, it was empty.
At the heart of all of these actions was an attempt at peeling away the doublethink that typifies Russian society. Gessen writes, “Voina faced a challenge that perhaps exceeded challenges faced by any other artist in history: they wanted to confront a language of lies that had once been effectively confronted but had since been reconstructed and reinforced, discrediting the language of confrontation itself. There were no words left.”
Buss the Buzz – kissing police officers in public – accidentally became a women-only, same-sex action when the male “volunteers” backed out. By now a feminist and queer sensibility was in the air. Gessen references Guerrilla Girls and Bikini Kill as hypothetical inspirations. “If only Russia had something like these groups, or anything of Riot Grrrl culture, or, really, any legacy of twentieth-century feminism in its cultural background! But it did not. They had to make it up.”
In September Tolokonnikova gave a slide-show presentation at a conference of the many small Russian opposition groups. The crash course in feminist art ended with the birth of Pussy Riot, as Tolokonnikova pressed play on a boom box with the group's first recording, Kill the Sexist.
The inevitable lead-up is, of course, to the protest at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. After that, a game of cat and mouse ensues, with Gessen detailing their attempts at hiding, using code names and secure internet connections, until their arrest. As their trial begins, the Pussy Riot members reject the charges, saying they don’t understand the ideological basis for them, and an almost childish back-and-forth between court officials ensues.
The righteous petulance shows up the charade that’s unfolding. Gessen merely needs to repeat the conversations held in court to illustrate the transparency of the prosecution’s argument, and the bravery of those sitting in the “aquarium”, the glass box where Pussy Riot were held.
Tolokonnikova’s closing statement takes up 14 pages of the book. She questions the motives for their arrests, political oppression in Russia, media corruption, and their desire for artistic expression. A manifesto unfolds that is hugely emotional to read, although its construction is brilliantly calm, making a mockery of the prosecution through sheer righteousness and intelligence.
Clinical and thorough
The space between historic events and their documentation is squeezing to a sliver now, as revolutions are live-streamed. So, in a way, the legacy of Pussy Riot's actions is denied a certain amount of reflection in Words Will Break Cement. But excitement is also in the now. Gessen's clinical and thorough depiction of Pussy Riot is as personal as it is political, thanks to the rather remarkable access she is afforded to the individuals, their families and allies.
Ultimately, their fame and iconic status pale in comparison to the reasons Pussy Riot excelled. Like many who speak out against inequality, they were elevated by their oppressor’s botched attempts to stifle their voices. As Tolokonnikova writes almost cheerily from jail in April 2012: “They cannot take our selves away from us.”
