Both more and less than a band, Pussy Riot is continually misunderstood by the Western media. This book sets the record straight. After their scandalous performance of an anti-Putin protest song in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior and the imprisonment of two of its members, the punk feminist art collective known as Pussy Riot became an international phenomenon. But, what, exactly, is Pussy Riot, and what are they trying to achieve? The award-winning author Eliot Borenstein explores the movement's explosive history and takes you beyond the hype.
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To many observers (both foreign and domestic), Pussy Riot seemed to come out of nowhere. As we shall see in Chapter 9, while feminism has deep roots in modern Russia, it was far from popular in 2012. And even if one imagined growing unrest after over a decade of Putinism, the most obvious Russian precedent was the dissidents of the 1960s and 1970s: serious, often bearded intellectuals who laid out their claims against the regime in reasoned, persuasive language, with nary a balaclava in the bunch. If Putin-era Russia were a novel, the sudden appearance of masked feminist punk avengers would be a sign that the author has lost the thread of the plot.
Pussy Riot becomes more understandable (if not predictable) in light of a counter-history of Russian artistic dissent. As the Soviet writer Andrei Sinyavsky (Abram Tertz) said in a 2010 interview not long after he was exiled from his homeland, “My differences with the Soviet authorities were purely stylistic.”1 The last 25 years of Soviet power saw the rise of postmodernist artistic movements whose unconventional practitioners, though clearly disapproving of their country’s political system, chose playful, oblique artistic expression over straightforward political critique. Chief among these were the Moscow Conceptualists, such as Dmitri Prigov (mentioned in the Introduction), the artist Ilya Kabakov, the poet Lev Rubinshtein, and the painters Komar and Melamid. Prigov and Rubinshtein’s written work tended towards the whimsical and the irreverent, while Komar and Melamid took the classic paintings of socialist realism (official Soviet art) and distorted them by adding toy dinosaurs, renaissance motifs, and, in one case, E.T. the Extraterrestrial.2
The generation that followed them was also schooled in the philosophy of the Situationist International (1957–1972), a primarily French movement holding that advanced capitalism had replaced the individual, lived experience with commodity consumption and spectacle. The Situationists mounted public events according to the principle of “détournement” (“misappropriation”, “diversion”), essentially turning the symbols of mass culture against themselves through pranks and parody.3,4 The legacy of the Situationists can be felt throughout the world of left-wing political activism and art, from the activities of LGBTQI groups such as ACT-UP and Queer Nation to Emma Sulkowicz’s “Mattress Performance: Carry that Weight” (carrying a mattress with them as a Columbia University undergraduate to protest what they saw as their university’s indifference to sexual assault), to the Guerrilla Girls (an anonymous group of women who wore gorilla masks and demonstrated against sexism in the art world).
But the movement with which Pussy Riot most closely identifies is called Actionism. Founded in Austria in the 1960s, Viennese Actionism was one of the first waves of performance art, in this case rejecting art as an object in favor of art as an event. The Viennese Actionists were (in)famous for their violations of both law and decorum, often performing nude and occasionally publicly masturbating. They defied any sense of boundary between life and art, public and private, valuing transgression both as an attack on conventional, consumerist morality and for its own sake.5
In Russia, Actionism arose in the 1980s, allegedly independent of its Viennese predecessor, but with a great deal in common. The Moscow Actionists also emphasized transgression, and cultivated media exposure of their violations of social norms. In 1991, a group of Actionists, in response to a proposed law banning the use of foul language in public, lay their bodies down outside of Lenin’s Mausoleum in order to spell “X
” (“Cock”), one of the most offensive words in the Russian language. Probably the most famous of the Moscow Actionists is Oleg Kulik, who gained notoriety by performing naked and pretending to be a dog (even going so far as to bite a viewer who disregarded the “Dangerous” warning sign to which he was chained).6
In 2007, inspired by Situationism, Actionism, and Moscow Conceptualism, Oleg Vorotnikov and Natalia Sokolova founded Voina (“War”), an anarchist, activist art collective whose members rejected participation in the mundane world of capital, wage labor, and consumerism (shoplifting was not just encouraged, but considered a “form of art”). Among the earliest members of the group were Petya, Nadya, and Katya. The year 2009 saw a schism divide the group (with Vorotnikov accusing Petya of being a police informant), leading to the formation of two separate Voina groups who refused to recognize each other’s legitimacy: Vorotnikov’s in Petersburg, and Petya’s in Moscow.7
No matter the city, Voina created “actions” that were irreverent, politically challenging, and often hilariously funny. Not to mention obscene: Voina proudly deployed what the Russian media primly calls “non-normative vocabulary,” crude sexual imagery, and the naked human body (with emphasis on nearly all its orifices). While many of their notable pranks had nothing to do with sex (such as their 2007 celebration of International Worker’s Day involving throwing live cats at McDonald’s cashiers), the more (porno)graphic actions not only attracted more activity, but also illuminate the path that led Nadya and Katya from Voina to Pussy Riot.
All power to the phallus
As the actionist group that would eventually eclipse Voina, Pussy Riot’s very name announces a shift in focus based on each group’s understanding of gendered bodily realities. Pussy Riot owes a debt to French feminism’s insistence on grounding feminist politics in the female body itself, whereas Voina’s gendered priorities were largely unexamined. Here it is Pussy Riot, rather than Voina, that proves to be the best student of their beloved Situationists, since the name itself represents something of a détournement in the bodily discourse of power.
The history of Voina is the history of a struggle between two charismatic men in two different cities to define the agenda of this actionist movement (one of those men being Petya), with the sexualized imagery employed in their actions being primarily masculine-focused. To put it bluntly, before Pussy Riot, Russian Actionism was a celebration of the phallus. In May 2009, Voina occupied the Tagansky courtroom in Moscow, claiming to be a punk group called “A Cock Up the Asshole”; a few of the men performed a song called “Remember, All Cops are Bastards,” while the rest of the group danced wildly. All three of the future Pussy Riot defendants took part in the dancing, little knowing that they would eventually headline a much more famous punk act of their own. But despite the presence of women, the whole event was structured around not just male sexuality, but male sexual violence. Thanks to the magic of Russian grammar, it’s clear in the original that the group’s name is about the act of inserting the aforementioned cock, rather than its simple location. The name is as much a threat as it is a description.
In 2010, the Petersburg wing of Voina painted an enormous phallus on a drawbridge opposite FSB headquarters, in an event called “Cock Captured by the FSB.” As the bridge went up, so, too, did the phallus. But Voina’s most notorious sexual performance took place in February 2008, the day before the presidential election (in which Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev’s victory was a foregone conclusion). An obvious reference to the future president’s last name (“Medved” in Russian means “bear”), “Fuck for the Puppy Bear Heir” consisted of five heterosexual couples having sex in Moscow’s Biological Museum. This is one of Voina’s most notorious actions, and not only because of the very public sex. One of the couples was Petya and a very pregnant Nadya (she would give birth to their daughter Gera only a few weeks later). The Pussy Riot affair revived public attention to the event, which helped frame Nadya as a “slut” and a “bad mother.”
Was “Fuck for the Puppy Bear Heir” pornography, as its detractors would call it? If we set aside the implicit anti-pornographic value judgment implicit in the accusation, then the answer is both yes and no. In porn, the actors and actresses at least pretend to be enjoying themselves, a feat managed by only one of the five couples (for the record, it was the one on the far left).8 A better critique would be on the grounds of gender. “Puppy Bear Heir” was a study in patriarchal power dynamics; it seemed not to have occurred to anyone involved that there could be a sex act that did not involve penetration by a penis. There may have been a practical reason, given that anyone viewing the video is treated to the spectacle of the men grimly trying to get into (and maintain) the proper frame of mind—the men’s steely determination was less like the demeanor of the stars of PornHub, and more reminiscent of the British prime minister at the end of the notorious bestiality-themed first episode of the dystopian TV show Black Mirror. Clearly, they needed all the help they could get. Still, even if we allow for the fact that Voina was exploiting a clear patriarchal metaphor of power (who gets fucked by whom), the video displays a marked lack of sexual imagination. Cunnilingus, it seems, is the love that dare not speak its name, and not only because the mouth is otherwise occupied.
If the biological museum event can safely be called pornographic, it is not as a value judgment, but as a performance that followed the most important imperative of filmed heterosexual porn—all power to the penis. Indeed, power is precisely the point. The use of the word “fuck” as an insult or even a political criticism implicitly assumes that the object of the verb is not just grammatically, but inherently passive, with penetration a metaphor for triumph and penetration (Valerie Sperling calls this the rhetoric of “topping,” shared by the regime and opposition alike).9 Perhaps inadvertently, the Petersburg wing of Voina’s drawbridge stunt makes this fact even clearer: tracing a giant penis on public property is a classic “fuck you” gesture, but it is also one that inherent...
