Read & Riot

by Nadya Tolokonnikova

  Reading, in the super strict prison of Omsk, the memoirs of Russian revolutionary Vera Figner, I decided that she is my style icon forever, with her rigor and dedicated look, her tightly buttoned shirts, her unimaginable combo of being harsh, ascetic, mighty, and slightly coquettish at the same time; she was initiating prison protests while knowing that she was in jail for life. In my prison wagon—having not the slightest idea where I was heading to—I read a history of the Soviet dissident movement written by Lyudmila Alexeyeva, a veteran of the civil rights movement in my country who’s still active nowadays in her nineties. In my Siberian prison hospital I read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and Ninety-Three with its passages praising the sublime madness of the revolutionary spirit. And Osip Mandelstam’s essay on a magnetic gangster, prisoner, blasphemer, and poet from the Middle Ages: François Villon.

  What I learned from my hunger strike is that to protest is better than not to protest. Talking out loud about your values and goals is better than not saying anything. Before I learned this lesson, I was trying to be patient in Mordovia—for a year. I was telling myself that things could not be changed, because everything is too rotten. I’m too weak to change it, I thought. You can hardly find anything more typical than this kind of thought. They make us give up in advance. Without even trying. What we often don’t realize is that trying may not bring you right away the bright future you’re seeking, but it’ll surely give you power, and strength, and muscles. Being a prisoner, I became much more powerful in my protest.

  “We’re with you, girl!”

  “You rule!”

  “You bent cops, sister!”

  “Respect.”

  I’d hear this from old, weary prisoners covered with mind-blowing tattoos when I met them in transit jails or prison wagons. I mean, what can be better on earth than this kind of respect?

  Because officials were slightly intimidated and confused by my presence now, I ended up in a carnival of prison surrealism. Like, they didn’t give me real shitty prison food but bought food especially for me. That’s how I got lamb ribs with mashed potato in the prison of Chelyabinsk. It happened only because I had mentioned Mordovian prison food in my open letter and it became known internationally for its misery.

  In a prison of Abakan I was put in a cell with a young girl who was celebrating her birthday. She was so shocked by the new food that wardens started to give us after I was moved to her cell! It was real meat, real vegetables. She was asking me about the difference between the North and South Poles, about Stalin and Madonna, when guards showed up in our cell, greeted my cellmate, and wished her a happy birthday. She could not believe what had just happened. Before they had been rude and the food was disgusting. Later I was invited to the prison boss’s office, where he talked to me for four hours about his life story, about his friends and enemies, about his fears and hopes for the prison, about the prison economy and prison labor. The main idea was, we have a good established enterprise here, please don’t interfere with your activism, okay?

  At the end of my one-month journey I was transported to Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, and sent to the biggest and oldest Siberian prison. In fact I was happy to be sent to Siberia, ’cause it’s my home. Siberians are simply great. Another exciting thing is that I had wanted to wind up in that prison since I was five. My grandmother’s apartment, where I spent a lot of time in my childhood, is located right across the road. I remember being five or six years old and walking alongside those giant fences thinking, “How curious I am to take a look at what’s there! I wonder if it’s possible to escape? Can I use a ladder and take a look?” No doubt there is something witchy about me, because everything I passionately want inevitably happens.

  My final destination was a prison hospital. It’s probably one of the most prosperous prison facilities in the whole of Russia. The prison system didn’t want to hear my complaints anymore. They let me write, read, and paint what I wanted. Instead of wearing the tight and extremely uncomfortable prison uniform, we wore pajamas. And finally, I got to participate in a prison rock band. It was called Free Breathe. Our band was mixed—four men and two women, including me. Every evening at 6:30, we were escorted to a prison theater, where our rehearsals took place. All of that was inconceivable before my hunger strike. I tried a couple of times to visit the prison theater in Mordovia, but I was only punished.

  A sweet boy from my band, a kid who used to live by stealing cars, offered me a love letter exchange. It’s a super big thing in prison, love letters. Often people wrote letters to people they had never seen in person. I knew that I’d never be good at that highly sentimental genre, and that’s what I told him, so we ended up writing political rap texts to each other.

  But the real fun started when we were touring with our band. We made a couple of concerts in our own facility, and then we went on tour. It’s like a normal tour, but you travel in a prison van. You put guitars, pianos inside your cage and go. We came to a women’s penal colony, and I was singing the songs of Zemfira, a Russian singer and songwriter, about sexual love between women (a topic and practice that’s legally prohibited in any Russian camp): “I was dreaming about people desiring each other in a different way.” After the concert officials took me on a private tour of their facility, showing me solitary confinement cells and barracks. We were fed special food, lots of chocolate and candies. This whole thing seemed awkward as hell to me.

  In a couple of months I was released. I went back to Mordovia with food and medicine for my fellows in prison, and during that visit I was attacked twice by local thugs hired by the police. Prison officials did not let me visit the facility, of course, but our lawyer reported that since I was transported to Siberia, the workday had become sixteen hours again.

  Prison officials, at least those currently taking those positions in Russia, can’t be trusted. They have to be watched 24/7. They have to be held accountable. Most of them don’t have any good intentions, and if they tell you they do, they’re lying.

  It’s really sad, though, if you start to think that the whole Russian political system is based on the same principle: there are certain people who have to be treated in a special way, and then there are the rest. We’ve visited a couple of male camps too, and we got that kind of vibe everywhere. As an activist I love to feel empowered, but an activist cannot be satisfied with personal privileges.

  All this hypocrisy and showing off is not good. But this awkward behavior of officials definitely shows you how much muscle you gain by simply using your voice. My voice was amplified by the voices of all those who supported Pussy Riot. And it became a polyphony, a polyphony that made the whole Russian prison system feel weird. And when systems of all sorts feel weird, we’re having fun, we’re taking our fucking joy back.

  * * *

  May I finish with a short prison story?

  Sometimes we don’t see radically politicized people, but open your eyes—they’re all around you. Look at that policeman who just arrested you. Look closely. Talk to him. What if he’s even more pissed off at those who’re in power than you are?

  One of my prison guards was talking to me, leaning against the bars separating us.

  “You know, civil war is not far off. Things are headed in that direction. Putin is clinging to power. He won’t leave on his own. One day, we’ll find ourselves on the same side.”

  “I wonder how that will happen if you’re in uniform?”

  “It’s simple. I didn’t swear an oath of allegiance to this government. I don’t owe them a thing anymore. I’ll take off my uniform and go with you.”

  “When?”

  “When the revolt begins.”

  Heroes

  michel foucault

  Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?

  MICHEL FOUCAULT, DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH

  Foucault is a poet of a high suspicion.

  If you want to learn the trick of using history for your critical thinking, Mi
chel Foucault is your man. He works with history like a fighting dog, bites it hard and doesn’t let go easily. He spots a norm and digs into the history of it. Sexuality, madness, prison, surveillance, whatever. He’s a gracious killer of norms.

  When I first discovered Foucault at seventeen, I might not have understood everything he said, but what I got is that I don’t have to take anything for granted. It was a relief, because the adult world expected me to believe and accept rather than investigate, doubt, and inquire, which was in my nature to do. Foucault elegantly reveals that there is always a power struggle that leads to a certain idea we have at our disposal, an idea that we’re tempted to consider an accepted axiom.

  Pussy Riot’s basic, knee-jerk reaction in life is to refuse to obey any authority—prison, university, or record label. Pussy Riot and Foucault have the same demons to fight against—rigid and restrictive thinking, normalization, classification, incarceration. When we hear something about “a norm” (or “it’s normal, deal with it,” “that’s how it is,” “you can’t change it, just accept it”), we try to find someone who’s a beneficiary of ours buying into this norm.

  His debut book, History of Madness, was published in 1961, a year when the USSR sent the first human into space, East German authorities closed the border between East and West Berlin and construction of the Berlin Wall began, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated, and the CIA undertook an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Castro that history remembers as the Bay of Pigs invasion. Foucault was thirty-five years old, and the book was a critique of modern approaches to madness that he had seen when working in a mental hospital in Paris and later in his own experience of psychiatric treatment.

  Foucault’s history of madness is a perfect example of someone gloriously questioning a norm before accepting it. The whole idea of mental illness is super new, claims Foucault, and it was created as an instrument of control.

  Discipline and Punish, Foucault’s book on prisons, normalization, and mass surveillance, published in 1975, was written under the motto “to punish less, perhaps; but certainly to punish better.” Foucault describes how prison becomes the model for control of an entire society, with factories, hospitals, and schools modeled on the modern prison.

  Foucault names three primary techniques of control: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and examination. Control over people can be achieved merely by observing them, he says (thirty-eight years before Edward Snowden published his leaks about mass surveillance).

  * * *

  Think about how much disgusting stuff was—and is—legal. Slavery was legal. Segregation was legal in the United States as recently as 1964. It was not that long ago that the Civil Rights Act ended all state and local laws allowing segregation. “Propaganda of homosexuality”—talking about LGBTQ issues publicly—is still illegal in my country. On the other hand, wars are legal, and making profits from killing people is legal (General Electric, which makes your fridges and washing machines, and Boeing, whose planes you’re flying in, are two of the biggest—and very legal—arms manufacturers and profiteers from war). Outsourcing low-wage labor, using cheap labor from non-Western countries to make our computers and phones, making Asian children sew our pants is legal. Destroying the planet via uncontrolled carbon dioxide emissions is legal, and very well-respected men are doing it. On the contrary, speaking truth to power, being a whistleblower can be illegal—in Russia, in the United States, anywhere.

  * * *

  Prison is an ideal architectural model of modern disciplinary power. There are surveillance cameras everywhere in prison, and inmates might be being watched at any time and all the time. But they can’t be sure exactly when. As Foucault notes, since inmates never know whether they are being observed, they must act as if they are always objects of observation.

  Prisons mirror the society around them. Unless we change both, we will all be trapped in a kind of prison.

  liberation theology: a conversation with chris hedges

  Chris Hedges was Middle East bureau chief of the New York Times for seven years and has reported on wars in the Falklands, El Salvador and Nicaragua, and Bosnia. He was part of a Times team that won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on terrorism in 2002. A prolific author, he has taught at Columbia, New York University, the University of Toronto, and Princeton—and increasingly in prisons. He was ordained as a minister in 2014.

  NADYA: You work at Princeton, which is an Ivy League university. So you’re teaching all those people who want to be 1 percent. Do you try to influence them?

  CHRIS: You can’t change their mind. Here, at places like Princeton, they’re very hardworking. Many of them are very bright, but because these institutions are so difficult to get into, they have been conditioned to cater to authority. Large corporations like Goldman Sachs send people to this campus to recruit. The students too often define themselves by prestige, financial success, so they’re easily seduced by Goldman Sachs. And that’s sad. It’s not that they’re not good people, they are. And many of them have a conscience. I would just say they’re weak . . . in that sense.

  NADYA: I was this nerd. The best student in high school. I got a scholarship to Moscow State University (I didn’t bribe anybody) and then I turned to politics. So it is possible. And how did it happen with you? Because it looks like you are a nerd too.

  CHRIS: Yeah, definitely a nerd.

  At the age of ten I went to a very elite boarding school for the uber-rich. And I was only one of sixteen kids on scholarship. My mother’s family was working class, even lower-working class, in Maine.

  I would look at the kids in the prep school, and many of them were very mediocre on many levels, including intelligence. And I realized that when you’re rich you get chance after chance after chance. If you’re poor, you—at best—get one chance. You may not even get that. And that kept me grounded.

  So from a really young age I was always political. I was always fighting the institution, and luckily, I was a very good student, I was also a very good athlete, and I didn’t drink, and I didn’t take drugs so they couldn’t get me. I started an underground newspaper in high school, and the administration banned it.

  NADYA: Of course.

  CHRIS: It was a serious paper. I wrote stuff I cared about that would normally never have been in a school paper. For instance, the people who worked in the kitchen, who were poor people of color, lived above the kitchen in terrible conditions. No students were allowed to go up there. I went up there and took pictures, and waited until the commencement issue so all the parents would be there and handed it out to embarrass the school, and the trustees were there.

  Over the summer, the school renovated the kitchen, and when I came back, the kitchen staff had put up a little plaque in my honor.

  NADYA: Wow.

  CHRIS: Also my father was an activist; my father was a minister. He had been a veteran of World War II but he came back from the war virtually a pacifist. He was very involved in the antiwar movement in Vietnam, in the civil rights movement. We lived in an all-white farm town, where Martin Luther King was one of the most hated men in America.

  He was very involved in the gay rights movement because his brother was gay, for which the church finally got rid of him. That was also important because I understood that you’re not going to be rewarded for your activism. If you really, truly stand with the oppressed, you’re going to be treated like the oppressed. And that was a lesson, because of my dad, I learned really young, and that saved me because I wasn’t naive. I didn’t think I was going to be exalted for doing the right thing. I knew the cost.

  There was no gay and lesbian organization at my college, Colgate University. My father by then had a church in Syracuse, which was an hour away, and he brought gay speakers to my campus, and my father said, you have to go public, you have to come out. They were too frightened to go out of the closet. So one day my father said to me: you’re going to have to start the gay and lesbian organization, which I did. I’m not gay, but I founded the gay
and lesbian organization.

  NADYA: Do you know if there are some priests who are still on the left side, who can be connected with us? I ended up in prison because I came to the church and I care about the church.

  CHRIS: My favorite theologian is James Cone. The only theologian living in America worth reading. He’s the father of black liberation theology. Cone called out the white church. He condemned the white church as the Antichrist. And he said, if you look at lynching, of black men and women and children in the South . . . what is that? It’s the crucifixion. And the white church said nothing. As a matter of fact, the white church in the South supported it. Even when the physical manifestation of the crucifixion was in front of them, they were silent. And I asked him a year or so ago, so do you still think the white church is the Antichrist? And he said, well if you define the Antichrist as everything that Jesus fought against, I would have to say yes.

  After the third century, with the rise of Constantine and apologists for power—Augustine, Aquinas, and others—they created a theology that I think was not only contrary to the fundamental message of the gospel, but was used to sanctify state power. And that’s how you got a thousand years of church rule, with the inquisitions and the subjugation of the poor. There’s a theologian named Paul Tillich who says every institution including the church is inherently demonic. And that’s right.

  And I was ordained, which you can watch online. James Cone preached the sermon, and Cornel West spoke, we had a blues band, we invited all the families of my students in prison to come in an inner-city church. When I did this ordination I was asked, “Will you obey the rules of the church?” And I said, “When the church is right.”