Pussy Riot II: the closing statements

Our sudden musical appearance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior with the song “Mother of God, Drive Putin Out” violated the integrity of the media image that the authorities had spent such a long time generating and maintaining, and revealed its falsity. In our performance we dared, without the Patriarch’s blessing, to unite the visual imagery of Orthodox culture with that of protest culture, thus suggesting that Orthodox culture belongs not only to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Patriarch, and Putin, but that it could also ally itself with civic rebellion and the spirit of protest in Russia.

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Maria Alyokhina keeps a strong focus on Pussy Riot’s protests and courtroom appearances as dialogue between people and State, and this informs her diagnosis of the state — funny word that — of affairs:

Russia, as a state, has long resembled an organism sick to the core. And the sickness explodes out into the open when you rub up against its inflamed abscesses. At first and for a long time this sickness gets hushed up in public, but eventually it always finds resolution through dialogue. And look — this is the kind of dialogue that our government is capable of. This trial is not only a malignant and grotesque mask, it is the “face” of the government’s dialogue with the people of our country.

She focuses in on the abuse of language, on Orwellian “Double-Speak” — and interestingly enough given the context of the action for which they were charged, the word she specifically chooses to examine in light of Orwell’s insight is humility:

I would like to note that this method of personal development clearly impedes the awakening of both inner and religious freedoms, unfortunately , on a mass scale. The consequence of the process I have just described is ontological humility, existential humility, socialization. To me, this transition, or rupture, is noteworthy in that, if approached from the point of view of Christian culture, we see that meanings and symbols are being replaced by those that are diametrically opposed to them. Thus one of the most important Christian concepts, Humility, is now commonly understood not as a path towards the perception, fortification, and ultimate liberation of Man, but on the contrary as an instrument for his enslavement. To quote [Russian philosopher] Nikolai Berdyaev, one could say that “the ontology of humility is the ontology of the slaves of God, and not the sons of God.”

Not only that, she calls on the Russian theological philosopher Berdyaev in support of her position — Berdyaev being the 1874-1948 theologican credited with the saying:

The question of bread for myself is a material question, but the question of bread for my neighbor is a spiritual question.

Abthough she has been, and remains, an activist, she sees activism as proceeding from interiority:

When I was involved with organizing the ecological movement, I became fundamentally convinced of the priority of inner freedom as the foundation for taking action. As well as the importance, the direct importance, of taking action as such.

It is, after all, interiority which allows us to see our living connection with all that is…

During the pickets and demonstrations [of the winter and spring], back when I was collecting signatures and organizing petitions, many people would ask me—and ask me with sincere bewilderment — why in the world they should care about, what business could they possibly have, with that little patch of forest in the Krasnodar region — even though it is perhaps unique in Russia, perhaps primeval? Why should they care if the wife of our Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev wants to build an official residence there and destroy the only juniper preserve in Russia? These people … this is yet another confirmation that people in our country have lost the sense that this country belongs to us, its citizens. They no longer have a sense of themselves as citizens. They have a sense of themselves simply as the automated masses. They don’t feel that the forest belongs to them, even the forest located right next to their houses. I doubt they even feel a sense of ownership over their own houses.

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