When Pussy Riot members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina were released from their respective penal colonies last week, as part of Vladimir Putin’s conveniently-timed amnesty for 20,000 non-violent offenders, practically the first thing they did was call for a Western boycott of the Sochi Winter Olympics. “This is not an amnesty,” Alyokhina said. “This is a hoax and a PR move.”
It was wonderful to see the pair outside the medieval cages in which they were forced to sit during their trial for hooliganism last year—from behind balaclavas to behind bars, as it were—let alone to see them outside of the confinement cells they were forced to call home for the past twenty-one months.
But for those of us who remember the failure of the anti-Putin opposition groups to expand their base in the wake of last year’s presidential election—the moment, in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, when the wave finally broke and rolled back—there was something exasperatingly familiar about the tone, timbre and target of their comments.
When Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina call Putin’s amnesty a publicity stunt aimed at a Western audience, they know what they’re talking about. By the criterion of visibility and name-recognition in the West, Pussy Riot has, like FEMEN in neighbouring Ukraine, been wildly successful. A documentary about the group premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. Madonna, Paul McCartney and others have lined up in its defence. In November, The Guardian published a theory-laden series of letters between Tolokonnikova and a seemingly star-struck Slavoj Žižek, and last year poets from all over the world, including my friend Alison Croggon, contributed to a PEN anthology in which everyone appeared masked in their authorial headshots as a show of solidarity. (Alison wore a pair of underpants on her head.)
The trial and incarceration of Pussy Riot was a travesty of justice and it is right and proper to condemn them as such. (Though one wishes the celebrities would reign in their savour complexes a bit.) But here’s the thing: Westerners were always going to be on Pussy Riot’s side. Putin-bashing is practically a sport here. The people who required and still require convincing are exactly the kind of people who were in the pews that day when the balaclavaed women took to the altar. And this is where their project—to the extent that it was designed to change the country—has failed.
Tolokonnikova, Alyokhina and their comrades did more damage to the cause of Russia’s anti-Putin opposition groups in less a minute than almost anyone else in the whole 2011-12 protest season outside of Putin himself. Pro-government protests had previously been made up of bussed-in workers and mouth-breathing teenagers clearly below the minimum voting age. Pussy Riot changed all that. A month after the election, when the opposition groups were failing to get more than 10,000 people onto the streets at a time, some 65,000 believers gathered for a nationwide prayer session "in defense of the faith and desecrated sacred objects". The Levada Centre, the independent polling body whose work is widely considered unbiased and reliable, found in July last year that 29 per cent of respondents believed the women should be sentenced to forced labour (read that sentence again and let it sink in), 16 per cent to more than two years in prison, and 10 per cent to between six months and two years jail time. Only a quarter believed that the pair should be fined (20 per cent) or receive no punishment at all (5 per cent). As Forbes’ Mark Adomanis wrote at the time: “Doesn’t the fact that Russians overwhelmingly support some kind of draconian punishment for the members of Pussy Riot do a lot to explain why the trial is, in fact, continuing?”
Support for such measures does not justify them, of course. But it does show why Pussy Riot should perhaps have thought twice before performing their so-called Punk Prayer in the first place. Not out of any deference to the Russian Orthodox Church, which is enjoying a cosiness with the Kremlin not seen since tsarist times, nor indeed out of deference to the man whose rule they should obviously have been within their rights to oppose. Pussy Riot should have thought twice before performing their Punk Prayer for the simple reason that it was—and was always going to be—a disaster for the opposition. It alienated potential converts to the cause and cemented the president’s relationship with the same. Like all instances of radical behaviour and rhetoric throughout that long winter, it was an immediate turn-off for the liberal democrats who made up the protest’s rank-and-file. Not for nothing did Russia’s most prominent anti-Putin campaigner, Alexei Navalny, write at the time that the performance had been a “very stupid” idea.
This is not a question of self-censorship, but rather one of strategy. In a dispatch I wrote from Moscow last year, I said that the opposition groups needed to concentrate on “party- and institution-building […] and [the] necessary expansion of [their] base beyond the urban middle class.” Pussy Riot’s performance was the epitome of their failure to do so. Rather than reach out to Putin’s base and try to convince it of the rightness of their cause, Pussy Riot addressed themselves almost exclusively to a Western audience and, in so doing, spat in that base’s face. This is not the way to win hearts and minds.
A few of Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina’s comments since their release do give me some scintilla of hope. The former’s desire to start a human rights organisation dedicated to helping Russian prisoners and to bring a "cultural revolution" to the country’s penal system is more potentially transformative in my mind than her call for a boycott of an international sporting event. Putin might be embarrassed by the absence of world leaders at the Games—Barack Obama, Angela Merkel and David Cameron have all sent their apologies—but a boycott is just as likely to fuel his rhetorical attacks on Western interference in Russian affairs as anything and such attacks, independent polling suggests, tend to play very well for him at home.
And so Russia’s opposition groups continue to face the same problem they have faced for more than two years now: a problem of strategy. Pussy Riot’s method of courting Western admirers while putting the majority of their countrymen offside has been a failure. Sure, it’s great that they’ve got Madonna, McCartney and Žižek on their side. My suggestion remains the same: how about convincing some Russians now?
Matthew Clayfield is a freelance foreign correspondent who covered the 2012 Russian presidential election from Moscow.
