Pussy Riot: ‘Things have changed, but our desire to protest remains’

One year ago, Yekaterina Samutsevich was riding a euphoric high. Moscow had exploded in an unexpected storm of protest, as tens of thousands took to the streets to show their anger at Vladimir Putin’s upcoming return to the presidency. Samutsevich and a group of friends went to protest dutifully – and returned home to don balaclavas and bright dresses for a secretly planned performance by their anti-Kremlin punk band, Pussy Riot.

“I had huge hopes,” Samutsevich said wistfully as she recalled those days during an interview in a Moscow cafe.

A year later, and although anger at Putin remains high, the spirit of protest that rocked the country has stalled. Also, two of Samutsevich’s best friends are in prison, far from the capital, far from their family, and far from the Kremlin that put them there.

The three band members – Samutsevich, Maria (Masha) Alyokhina and Nadezhda (Nadya) Tolokonnikova – rapidly shot to global prominence in the summer after performing an anti-Putin punk anthem in a Moscow cathedral. They were charged with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” and sentenced to two years in prison. Two months later, Samutsevich was let out on appeal after taking on a new lawyer who argued she should be set free since she was kicked out of the church before the performance.

She notes now with sadness that some accuse her of winning her freedom at the expense of her friends. Yet she feels no guilt – only the responsibility to speak for the friends who can’t speak for themselves.

“Now that I’ve been let out early, I can be here and free and speak in the name of the group,” Samutsevich said. “We took part in the trial and only we saw it from inside. Now I can tell everyone about that. Unfortunately Nadya and Masha can’t, since they’re in jail.”

“More than anything, what many people didn’t see during the trial were those moments when our ‘right to defence’ was violated,” she said. “It’s not that we were helpless, it was a situation of despair.”

“The trial was built in such a way that we couldn’t defend ourselves,” she said. “They didn’t listen to us. We could have sat downstairs, where you wait till you’re taken to the courtroom, and not go in at all and everything would’ve gone the same way. The fact that we took part physically [in the trial] didn’t actually change anything.”

Her days are now filled with interviews, keeping Pussy Riot’s message alive in the press. And then there are the endless court cases, requiring almost daily filing of documents, lawyer consultations, hearings.

“Right now I’m just dealing entirely with the all the Pussy Riot court case, because it’s not over,” Samutsevich said. There is an appeal to the European court of human rights in Strasbourg. Samutsevich is also appealing against a ruling by a Moscow court in late November branding all of Pussy Riot’s videos extremist. “I don’t think it will all over be over soon,” she said. “It will only be over when Nadya and Masha get out.”

In mid-December, Samutsevich had her first conversation with Tolokonnikova since she walked free in October – all previous requests were denied. “I asked how she was doing, how she’s feeling – she said her headaches had started up again,” Samutsevich said.

Tolokonnikova spends her days sewing uniforms, including for prison and police officials, at a prison colony in the republic of Mordovia. “She’s doing everything she can to get parole. And she said: don’t stop, do everything to set me free. Of course, she wants to get out.”

Samutsevich said the authorities turned down her daily requests to speak to Alyokhina, who is serving her sentence in Perm.

The desire to continue Pussy Riot’s blend of art, music and protest still burns, but Samutsevich recognises that times have changed and she may no longer be able to continue.

“I want to do art and continue what I was doing – but I can’t say yet in what concrete form,” she said. Of the three women who went on trial, Samutsevich is the only one with formal artistic training, having graduated from Rodchenko School of Photography and Multimedia in Moscow.

She continues to meet the members of Pussy Riot who remain free and anonymous, including two who performed the punk prayer inside Christ the Saviour Cathedral but were, inexplicably, never arrested or tried. “The other girls have the desire [to continue]. We all have that desire,” she said.

Yet the fact that they are all now under the watchful eye of Russia’s powerful security services means they cannot organise anything yet, she said. Samutsevich says she has even considered the possibility of never being able to perform again – in which case she would teach others how to follow in Pussy Riot’s footsteps.

No matter what, she says, she will continue fighting against Putin’s regime.

“Our trial was a political trial because our actions were political – we did political art,” she said. “Because of that the authorities reacted, the system reacted.

“But that doesn’t mean that everything was decided right away, that there’s no game or competition between the prosecution and the defence. We always had hope. But everything was done so we couldn’t defend ourselves.

“If you believe Putin has limitless power, against which it’s impossible to do anything, then you get depressed,” she said, of the group’s desire to challenge the state during the trial and beyond. “You start to think that you have no other way, that from the start, when you make some sort of political gesture, especially in the realm of art, then from the start you’ll go to jail, that you can do nothing against Putin, that no one will help you. It seems to me a harmful way of thinking. One needs to change one’s thinking, you need to think, on the contrary, about fighting, about gathering strength for the struggle.”

Source: The Guardian