Words Will Break Cement

by Masha Gessen

  Then the three women got arrested, and regret replaced the longing. She tried to help by joining in press events organized by Petya: several women would sit down in balaclavas and be interviewed on camera. The balaclavas were not foolproof: Activist Ambition’s boss recognized her and she was fired—for giving an interview to the television channel where she was interning. The worst part was, the interviews did nothing to help with the regret. She felt like an actress who had retired from the stage—she had enough irony to think of herself that way, but this did not help either. There is that moment in every action, when you have handed over your personal belongings to whoever is helping and you know exactly why you are there and you know what you are about to do and you feel that you can do anything at all and at the same time it is as though you could see yourself, so lithe, so young, so bright in every way, climbing up onto that platform—it was this moment she remembered when she brooded alone at a table on the second floor of a café overlooking a desolate autumn park.

  She saw Kat. She knew Kat had been released from prison a few weeks earlier. She had been hoping to hear from her. Activist Ambition could have called Kat herself, but she wouldn’t have known what to say: she wanted Kat to need her, to call her to action. She slapped a few bills on the table and ran out of the café after the woman she thought might be Kat.

  It was Kat. She was friendly in a flat way, as she always was—Activist Ambition thought Kat generally kept all her feelings and most of her thoughts inside—but she seemed happy enough to spend time talking. She talked about the lawyers. She said they had betrayed her and Nadya and Maria. She said the only way to get justice for everyone was to confront them, fight them, and expose them for the traitors they were. Activist Ambition agreed—how could she not agree—and tried to change the subject. She asked what new actions Kat was thinking about. Kat talked about the lawyers. And when Activist Ambition asked straight out—even though it seemed a little tactless and possibly illegal—what Pussy Riot was going to do, Kat talked about the lawyers.

  Activist Ambition decided she was going to wait for Nadya to get out of prison. She knew that once she did, Nadya would start something—and Activist Ambition would feel that feeling again. She read all she could about Nadya to try to get a glimpse of what she might do next. Sometimes she even thought she could tell what it would be.

  ———

  Kat was living back at the apartment with her father. For the first few weeks, maybe two months, she was a celebrity. She went to parties thrown by foreign journalists; she was recognized on public transport; people asked to have their pictures taken with her. She obliged—Kat usually did what people asked, if she could—but she was not sure she liked it. And they all wanted to know what she was going to do—what Pussy Riot was going to do. As though they did not realize that a suspended sentence meant she was on parole, and her sentence could be un-suspended at any moment.

  Lest she forget, once a month she had to report to an office on the first floor of one of the yellow apartment towers not far from her home. It smelled of stale sweat, a faint reminder of the stench of the pretrial detention facility. She waited in a narrow corridor with her fellow paroled felons, then entered a small office where a squat policewoman shoved a piece of paper across a desk without looking and told her to sign it, using the condescending, familiar form of the imperative. The piece of paper certified that the officer had conducted an educational talk with Kat. She signed and got another piece of paper, instructing her to report back in another month.

  Once, the police summoned her for questioning in the case of the cutting down of an Orthodox cross at a chapel outside of Moscow. It had been said that Pussy Riot might be responsible. Kat was questioned, said she had nothing to do with it, and was released.

  If she could not be Pussy Riot in any visible, familiar way, Kat could at least get justice for Pussy Riot. If she could only prove that they had been denied proper legal representation, then the sentence could be overturned. To do that, she would have to expose the defense attorneys as the traitors they were. Irina Khrunova, the lawyer who had secured her release, slowly backed away from Kat’s case. “I can’t really claim that a thirty-year-old woman with a master’s degree did not understand the proceedings,” she told Kat, whose claim by that point more or less amounted to this. They agreed they would tell the larger world that Khrunova was too busy to handle Kat’s complaints. Kat found a lawyer on the Internet. She was doing most of the work herself by now, helped by a self-styled and self-taught legal expert, but she needed someone with a defense attorney’s license to sign her complaints. The new lawyer would meet her outside his apartment building in a suburb clear on the other end of Moscow and sign the papers she brought, using the trunk of a parked car as his desk. Then Kat would deliver the papers to the court—the guards at Khamovnichesky recognized her from when she’d been on trial there, and were nice to her—or to the Defense Attorneys Collegium, the rough equivalent of a bar association, where she also filed complaints. The collegium reviewed her long list and found only one clear violation of legal procedure among the many she had attempted to document: Violetta Volkova had failed to enter into a proper remunerative contract with her client, an offense under Russian regulations, which banned pro bono representation.

  Kat still thought of herself as Pussy Riot, as did three other women who spent time with her. They were the two participants in the cathedral action who had not gone into hiding and had not gotten caught, and Natasha, Kat’s Rodchenko classmate and collaborator, who had participated in Voina but had not been living in Moscow during Pussy Riot’s brief period of activity before the arrests. They were quick to condemn as fake a tightly produced video that appeared in the summer of 2013, in which women in brightly colored dresses and tights and balaclavas belted lyrics—at least partly written by Nadya—that took aim at the unholy alliance between Putin and the oil industry. Among other things, Kat’s group felt that it did not correspond to Pussy Riot’s idea of serial performance: it consisted of several performances, but these, Kat’s group believed, had been staged solely for the purpose of producing the video rather than as independent actions. It was a subtle distinction, and a difficult argument to make given the group’s brief but varied history, but for Kat’s Pussy Riot, it was serious.

  ———

  Arguably, serial performance—a months-long joint serial performance, unrehearsed and largely unscripted—was exactly what Nadya and Maria were engaged in. Their venues were the courtrooms of Berezniki and Perm in the Urals, Zubova Polyana and Saransk in Mordovia, and Nizhny Novgorod, where Maria was eventually transferred. Although, as convicted felons and coconspirators, they were banned from communicating with each other, they located their roles, as they always had, through a series of public performative experiments. They found ways of doing exactly what they had, in effect, promised to do in their closing statements in the Moscow court in August 2012.

  Nadya had then said that it was the regime that was on trial and had pledged to continue to “act and live politically” to fight Russia’s overarching problems: “the use of force and coercion to regulate social processes” and the “forced civic passivity of the majority of the population as well as the total domination of the executive branch over the legislative and judicial ones.” That and the “scandalously low level of political culture… intentionally maintained by the state system and its helpers.” And the “scandalous weakness of horizontal links in society” and the “manipulation of public opinion, carried out with ease because the state controls the vast majority of media outlets.”

  Maria had chosen the opposite approach in her closing argument, moving from the general to the specific. Like Nadya, she had addressed the sham nature of the trial, but it was the particulars that engaged her. She had talked about the psychiatric facility for children—in part because her visits there, of all her experiences before jail, had prepared her best for life behind bars, but also because the similarities between its specific horror and the ins
anity of the court proceedings served to highlight the absolute absurdity of the trial. Nadya, on the other hand, pointed to the trial as a small example of the larger travesty—of justice, decency, and reason—that Pussy Riot had been screaming about.

  And Kat had spoken only of the results of the trial and conclusions from it.

  ———

  Almost as soon as Nadya and Maria arrived in their penal colonies and arranged for new legal representation, both began filing all the appeals, complaints, and motions they and their lawyers—but mostly Maria with her legal books—found grounds to file. Petya shuttled back and forth between the colonies, the inmates, and the lawyers, collecting paperwork and delivering messages. Most important, he coordinated the ragtag support group, fashioning it into a working entity that distributed information, served as bodies—tweeting, texting, and videotaping bodies—at every hearing, and ultimately helped ensure that all hearings were open to the public and covered by the media. In late January, less than three months after leaving pretrial detention in Moscow, the Pussy Riot inmates commenced a regular schedule of court hearings, which also guaranteed them regular appearances in Russian and international media.

  If Pussy Riot ever edited their court performances into a clip, its refrain would be “It seems that the court is denying my right to a defense.” (Indeed, the same might be claimed by any defendant in any court in Russia.) After a few hearings, Maria worked out her MO. She confronted the court to the point where the violations, and their routine nature, were exposed, obvious even to the clerks and court marshals, who had long ago stopped paying attention. At this point, the judge usually lost composure, along with the seemingly inherent sense of his or her own superiority. Judges snapped at Maria, screamed at her, and sometimes became belligerent. As soon as that happened—and it happened every time—Maria, whose own voice, by this point in the proceedings, had begun to crack traitorously, instantly regained her calm. And then she said, “It seems that the court is denying my right to a defense.”

  After the very first hearing in Berezniki, the one where Maria had quoted Heidegger and Martin Luther and had merely mentioned Orwell and Kafka because quoting them would have been redundant, courts and prison authorities kept her out of the courtroom: she participated by a video uplink from the penal colony or another local facility. In late July 2013, the regional court in Perm took up her appeal of a denial of parole.

  It started, as it usually did, looking like an actual court proceeding. The recently built regional courthouse, an eight-story structure of glass and concrete and modest but evident architectural ambition, would not have looked out of place in a medium-size U.S. city. The lobby was decorated with large glass panels engraved with Latin sayings of the Dura lex, sed lex variety, and the court’s press secretary was exceedingly polite and made sure everyone had a seat. The marshals manning the metal detectors did not do quite as well: one barked at Khrunova, “Lady, place your shopping bag in the metal detector!” Khrunova shot back, “I am not a lady, I’m a lawyer, and these are not shopping bags, this is the legal case.”

  The large and well-ventilated wood-and-glass defendants’ box in the courtroom was empty: Maria was visible on two large flat-screen monitors in the courtroom. She had been delivered to a pretrial detention center in Perm, and there she sat in a metal cage. The camera was positioned outside the cage, so the court had a view of Maria through the grates.

  The Perm judge lost his composure soon after lunch, when Maria requested, for the fourth or fifth time that day, a break in the proceedings to allow her to consult with counsel. Every time she did this, the video link had to be broken and rerouted to a separate office in the courthouse, where Khrunova could go to talk with Maria in confidence. Maria had mentioned, a time or two or ten, that this kind of conferring would have been carried out easily and without disrupting the proceedings if only she had been allowed to be physically present in court. In any event, now that the court was moving to the substantive part of her complaint, the moment had come when she needed to discuss with Khrunova their strategy for the remainder of the hearing.

  “And what were you and your lawyer discussing before?” screamed the judge. He was tall and thin and he looked elegant in his long black robe. His fine-featured face, framed by salt-and-pepper hair, was handsome in a way that put one in mind of a mythic, refined, aristocratic Russia. Now this face was contorted in annoyance. “I mean if it’s not a secret, of course. You did not discuss your strategy for the remainder of the hearing?” Of course, it was a secret, by law.

  “It seems that the court is denying my right to a defense,” said Maria, and it looked like she might be smiling a little up there on her screen in her cage.

  After a short conference with Khrunova, Maria announced that she had decided not to take part in court proceedings where her right to a defense was being violated. She had done this once before, in May, when the Berezniki court heard her original motion for parole. Back then she had not only pulled out of the proceedings herself but forbade her defense team to participate. The judge had had something resembling a breakdown and ended up appointing an attorney to represent Maria, who had refused to be represented—or to meet with this court-appointed lawyer. Now the Perm judge was terrified he would find himself in a similar position.

  Maria was kinder to him. She said she would allow Khrunova to continue to participate in the hearing on her behalf. And then she turned her back to the court. Literally—she was seated on a swiveling office chair in her cage, and she swiveled it around until all the court could see on its screens was the mane of slightly frizzy red hair that covered most of Maria’s back.

  It took the judge a few minutes to realize he should order the video link cut.

  ———

  If Pussy Riot put together a video clip of their court performances, it might cut from Maria’s back, turned to the court, to an April 2013 hearing in Zubova Polyana—the first time Nadya went to court after she left Moscow. The largest courtroom in Zubova Polyana was too small to fit all the journalists, cameras, and assorted supporters. The courtroom was sweltering, and the smell of human bodies hung heavier as the afternoon wore on. The judge, a prim middle-aged woman with a blond perm, tried to conduct an exemplary hearing in these trying circumstances. “I felt like I was in television court,” Khrunova told me later. “I’ve never seen a Russian judge act like that—asking the marshals to carry papers from the defense table to the bench, for example. Except on TV, of course.”

  But in the late afternoon, something snapped: either the judge’s resources had run dry, or someone had called to tell her to wrap up the hearing, which was being broadcast live by every independent media outlet in Russia, and a couple of foreign ones too. And so the judge asked for the prosecution’s opinion, called a break in order to draft a verdict, and hurried out of the courtroom. Nadya stared out of her cage, her mouth slightly open. She had drafted a four-page speech to deliver at the end of the hearing. Khrunova looked like she was having a breakdown. Standing behind the defense desk, all five feet of her, she screamed hoarsely as the judge left: “In my fifteen years as a defense attorney, nothing like this has ever happened to me!”

  Nadya made sure nothing like that ever happened to her again. Before every court hearing, she drafted several speeches of various lengths. She ranked them according to importance and started saying them, in turn, whenever and as soon as she had the opportunity to say anything in court.

  Two days after Maria’s hearing in Perm, at Nadya’s own hearing on the appeal of her denial of parole, before the Supreme Court of Mordovia, she said her longest and most important speech at the first opening.

  “I would like to discuss the very concept of correction,” she began, standing up in the steel cage in the court. “I have once again observed that the only true education possible in Russia is self-education. If you don’t teach yourself, no one will teach you. Or they’ll teach you who knows what.” She had been thinking about this at least since she wrote that tu
rgid article titled “What’s the World Coming To” at the age of fourteen. Her life since then had been a series of confrontations and adaptations to educational institutions, of which IK-14 was the latest.

  “I acknowledge that I have a great many stylistic disagreements with this regime, this aesthetic, and this ideology.” She was quoting Andrei Sinyavsky, a writer and literary critic, one of the Soviet Union’s first dissident political prisoners and one of the earliest political emigres of the post-Stalin era. He had said that his disagreements with the Soviet regime were “purely stylistic in nature.” Not that the judge or any other member of the court would recognize the quote, of course, but Nadya was not addressing the court: she was speaking to the public outside the courtroom and outside Mordovia, and to some of the public outside of Russia as well.

  “So it stands to reason that a state institution that represents the dominant aesthetics would not see me as having been reformed,” she conceded.

  “What can a state institution teach us? In what way can I be reformed by a penal colony and you by, say, Russian TV Channel 1? In his Nobel lecture, Joseph Brodsky said, ‘The more substantial an individual’s aesthetic experience is, the sounder his taste, the sharper his moral focus, the freer—though not necessarily the happier—he is.’ We in Russia once again find ourselves in a situation where resistance, especially aesthetic resistance, becomes the only viable moral choice as well as a civic duty.”

  Nadya then lectured briefly on the origins of contemporary Russian aesthetics, which she called a combination of imperial Czarist aesthetics and “a faulty understanding of the aesthetics of socialist realism.” This, she said, was on display at IK-14. At the parole hearing in April, penal colony representatives had reproached her for not taking part in reformative activities such as the singing contest or the Miss Charm contest. “I assert that it is the principles in accordance with which I conduct my life—feminist, antipatriarchal, and aesthetically nonconformist principles—that are the basis for boycotting the Miss Charm contest. These principles—and mine alone, for they are certainly not shared by the guards who run the camp—lead me to study books and magazines, for which I have to wrestle time away from the colony’s stupefying daily schedule.”