I think one of the most serious problems is in the law and the system that puts people in prison in the first place. Consider, for example, Article Number 228 [of Russia’s Criminal Code] on narcotics. It’s a classic law that is used only for (a) launching criminal cases, (b) meeting quotas for the number of cases brought against suspects, and (c) issuing a certain number of criminal sentences in a given time period. No one actually thinks that the criminal code is there to punish crimes. The narcotics law is an enormous issue in itself, since about 30 to 40 percent of the people who are locked up in prison are there for drugs.
Maybe in 50 percent of cases, people are put in prison because investigators have to launch a case and bring it to court, so [prosecutors] use stories about drugs for their own statistics and quotas. It’s a big problem. And there’s no control over these agencies. They can write basically anything they want in the case files.
This is the main problem: people don’t know how to work anymore. We can see this in the general level of work done in the courts. Investigators don’t really know how to investigate anymore. They aren’t taught, and they don’t have any real opponents. It’s a completely failed system. Even when young investigators come in, they see right away that, after they open a case, it doesn’t matter at all what they write in the files. I’ve seen so much nonsense in protocols over the past year. When it comes down to it, when they actually have to search for someone in a real criminal case, they don’t know how to do it. Because people have gotten used to working in a system where everything is scripted.
I’ve also seen a lot of judges, and so many of them are just so desperate. They know they can’t declare anyone innocent; they know they can’t make their own calls when sentencing. I have a feeling that when judges get any kind of freedom to make a decision, they get really happy and brighten up. Seriously.
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If we didn’t use our imagination, we would never have invented the lightbulb.
So allow your imagination to create alternatives. Imagine police officers as social workers rather than killers and armed robbers. Imagine free health care. Imagine art being made for art’s sake, not just to be successfully sold. Imagine that instead of making us submissive, education encourages creativity and intuition.
Heroes
aleksandra kollontai
Aleksandra Kollontai was a feminist, activist, and Russia’s first woman government minister and ambassador.
Kollontai was born in Saint Petersburg in 1872. Her mother had three children from a first marriage before she obtained a divorce, which was not easy, to marry the man who was to become Aleksandra’s father. Aleksandra herself refused the arranged marriage that was set up for her and instead married a distant cousin, an apparently unsuitable man who was broke.
After the Russian Revolution, Kollontai wrote about gender relations and equality for women in a communist society like the one she thought was emerging. Women were not men’s property, she wrote in “Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle” (1921). It should be easier for women to get divorced. Marriage should be based on freedom, equality, and friendship. Kollontai freaked out even her fellow Bolsheviks.
Kollontai’s focus was on equality. Her writing reads as if it were very modern, not like something written a hundred years ago. In “Sexual Relations,” she writes about social hypocrisy. If a man marries a lowly cook, no one says anything, but if a woman doctor looks at a footman, she is scorned (even if he’s good looking, she added).
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Later, in the 1960s and ’70s, came Kollontai’s heirs, like the activist and visionary Shulamith Firestone (1945–2012). Firestone’s ideas were a radical cocktail of feminism and critiques of Marxism and psychoanalysis. In The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970), a bestseller written when she was twenty-five, Firestone advocated the complete elimination of gender as the only way to achieve equality. She wrote that to eliminate “sexual classes,” children would be born through “artificial reproduction” and they would no longer be dependent on a single mother. “Genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally,” she wrote, and labor wouldn’t be divided by the sexes because labor itself would be eliminated too (“through cybernetics”). A promoter of celibacy, Firestone said that in an equal society, sex and reproduction would no longer be important.
In a piece in the Atlantic published after Firestone’s death, Emily Chertoff wrote that “Firestone wanted to eliminate the following things: sex roles, procreative sex, gender, childhood, monogamy, mothering, the family unit, capitalism, the government, and especially the physiological phenomena of pregnancy and childbirth.”
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Under capitalism, Kollontai wrote, the woman was forced to work and bring up children, which was impossible. Women should be equal to men in the workplace and be defined by that work and not the domestic bondage they are forced to live under. In “Communism and the Family” (1920), she wrote that equality in the workplace would leave women with no time for cooking and cleaning and mending clothes, which were unproductive jobs in the new society. In fact there was now no need for families at all—workers would eat in communal kitchens, have their laundry done, and the state would bring up the children. It was a fantastic utopian glimpse of radical feminism written in the first quarter of the twentieth century. She managed to be a second-wave feminist five dozen years before the actual second wave, a kind of seeing that can only occur in highly sensitive and intuitive thinkers and artists who feel the air of an epoch before the epoch is born.
In The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Woman (published in Russian in 1926), Kollontai wrote about her early disappointments in the attitude of the Bolshevik Party regarding her efforts to win over women workers. These battles started a long time before the revolution of 1917, dating back to 1906. Kollontai tried to set up a women’s bureau, but her efforts were blocked. She wrote about that episode: “I realized for the first time how little our party concerned itself with the fate of women of the working class and how meager was its interest in women’s liberation. . . . My party comrades accused me and those women comrades who shared my views of being ‘feminists’ and of placing too much emphasis on matters of concern to women only.”
Kollontai was stubborn about the feminist question, and she became influential in founding an All-Russian Women’s Congress in December 1908. In the aftermath of that event she was forced to leave Russia for Germany, where she joined the Social Democratic Party. She hung out with leading European Social Democrats like Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and Karl Kautsky. She roamed Europe for the cause, attending such events as a housewives’ strike in Paris.
She knew Lenin and became a Bolshevik. She was made People’s Commissar of Social Welfare in 1917, the first Russian woman to hold any government position. But women’s rights were not as important to the Leninists as they were to Kollontai. We should admire Kollontai for pushing the Bolsheviks on women’s rights, because Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and the others were men who didn’t like a lot of pushing. But when conservative tendencies started to win in the party, Kollontai was forced out of Russia again. She was made Soviet ambassador to Norway in 1923, and she was the first woman to have that type of job too. She lived a long and eventful life and died in 1952.
“New concepts of the relationships between the sexes are already being outlined,” she wrote one hundred years ago. “They will teach us to achieve relationships based on the unfamiliar ideas of complete freedom, equality and genuine friendship.”
An ability to think beyond the confines of your own era is the greatest value of a creator.
Rule № 10
BE A (WO)MAN
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Feminism is a liberating tool that can be used by male, female, transgender, transsexual, queer, agender, anybody. Feminism allows me to say: I behave how I like and how I feel, I deconstruct gender roles and play with them, I mix them up voluntarily. Gender roles are my palette, not my chains.
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There is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.
PAUL THE APOSTLE, GALATIANS 3:28
No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
BETTY FRIEDAN, THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE
The oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves.
FRANTZ FANON
Words
proud witch and bitch
“Russian feminism, of course, is not natural to Russia and has no basis,” says archpriest Dmitry Smirnov, a popular spokesman for the Russian Orthodox Church, in one of his YouTube sermons. “Feminism aims to destroy Christian principles. Feminism tries to put a woman on the same level as man, depriving her of her advantages as a woman. Feminism lays waste to the family. Distinct rights for men, women, and children destroy the family. If we are baptized, we must regard feminism as a poison that makes people unhappy when it penetrates the minds of society and families.”
I’ve always enjoyed watching Archpriest Smirnov’s videos on YouTube. He was one of the inspirations for Pussy Riot. We fell off our chairs when we watched his sermons, and as we fell we came up with the idea of starting a feminist punk band.
Archpriest Smirnov talks about women’s advantages that are being destroyed by feminism. A well-known trick; the same old story. Sexists are famous for claiming that they’re actually helping women by putting them on a super special pedestal. But, of course, there on that pedestal, you’ll not see any creative work or career or any self-fulfillment. This pedestal is all about being a servant or a beautiful thing among other things. And it’s easier to look up someone’s skirt when they’re standing on a pedestal.
“School,” Smirnov said in a deep voice, “must be a crutch for the child to prepare him for adult family life. Alas, twenty-five years ago, our schools, under the influence of winds blowing from the West, rejected education and limited themselves to pumping knowledge into children. There is another problem: Ninety-nine point nine percent of our teachers are women. In terms of their psychophysical capacities, they . . . Teachers should be men.”
“Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians,” said Pat Robertson—a conservative Christian, televangelist, and another media mogul from the United States who apparently is out of his mind—in a fund-raising letter quoted in the New York Times in 1992.
“Feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream,” wrote Rush Limbaugh in the Sacramento Union in 1988. Limbaugh is known for popularizing the term “feminazi” and dismissing consent in sexual relations.
Donald Trump has casually boasted of sexually assaulting young women. In an interview in Esquire in May 1991, he dismissed getting bad press. “It doesn’t really matter what they write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass,” he said.
“A real man should always try, and a real woman should resist,” says Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, as quoted by Komsomolskaya Pravda.
In Russia, women make up only 10 percent of the cabinet. We Russians come out ahead of only the poorest African countries and the Arab world, where there are legal and religious restrictions on the involvement of women in politics and public life. And yet polls show that a quarter of Russian citizens believe women have no place in politics or the number of women in politics should be reduced. Instead of protecting women from domestic violence, my government has recently passed a law that legalizes domestic violence.
Sexists live among us, not just in parliaments and on TV. A statement from the father of Kat, one of the incarcerated Pussy Riot activists, was used in our trial: “He knows that Tolokonnikova drew his daughter into the so-called feminist movement. In this connection, he has repeatedly and strongly condemned the very idea of feminism in Russia, because he believes the movement does not conform to Russian civilization, which differs from western civilization.” This chthonic statement was quoted in the verdict in the Pussy Riot trial, and it was used by the court to prove that my “correction” was not possible without isolating me from society.
“Feminism and feminists are cusswords, indecent words,” said the guard at Christ the Savior Cathedral, one of the “injured parties” named during the Pussy Riot trial. If that is how it is, swear as much as possible. Cuss. Be indecent.
“Feminism has achieved everything already! What else do you need?” How often do you hear this question? I feel like each day starts with it. Having in mind everything that’s listed above, it does not look like feminism can celebrate victory and peacefully retire.
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Pussy Riot considers ourselves to be part of the third wave of feminism. The third wave deconstructs the very concept of gender duality. If gender is a spectrum, then discrimination on the basis of gender becomes absurd. We reject the bipolar “man/woman” model itself. We think of gender differently: there are innumerable genders that do not follow the line between “male” and “female” poles.
I don’t have a stable sexual identity, I refer to myself as a queer person. I see no reason to say “I’ll never ever do this or that” about anything.
There is no use hoping that previous generations have settled everything for you and gender roles have been obligingly spelled out for you. Don’t think that your job is just being born with a certain kind of wee-wee, and then supposedly everything is clear: the boys step to the right, wearing army uniforms and brandishing pistols, while the girls step to the left, wearing lace and brandishing eyebrow tweezers.
Gender roles are site, time, context specific. All that crazy talk about historically neutral, eternal male and female roles will always remain irresponsible baby talk. There are different notions of genders and different sets of roles prescribed for those genders in every decade of human history, in every social class, at every workplace, for every age and race. You can talk about that feminine mystique crap as much as you please, but I know for a fact that low-class women who were living under slavery in nineteenth-century Russia were tough and strong as fuck, and those ladies would beat any modern male New Yorker in arm wrestling. There were and are “traditional” societies where it’s a norm to have, say, three genders and four types of sexuality. Just two centuries ago all European aristocratic cis men wore heavy makeup and wigs.
This whole thing about “a weak fragile woman” or “a weak sex” is merely a fetish. This fetish had a certain place in our history, but there was a specific time and culture in which it was born, and there is a time when it dies. Disappears like a face drawn on the sand.
What is feminism about to me? Feminism is about getting rid of excessive expectations that are projected on people according to a gender and sexual role that they are expected to perform. Feminism is about understanding the genealogy and history of every gender role that’s prescribed for you. Feminism is about freedom of choice and having informed options.
I don’t have enough time on Earth to play at being a weak sex. My life is finite. I have a very limited amount of years indeed, and I want to learn, try, achieve, change, feel, dare, lose, win a lot. I have no time for old-school games. You know, some people are unwilling to live straight from the shoulder. What if you’re living only once, for the last time? I cannot simply assume that I have another thousand years left.
I have been an activist and a feminist since I was seven or eight. The first time I discovered what feminism was, I was eight years old. I immediately decided that I was a feminist, because it just makes sense. You go to school and you see that all the authors and all the scientists you’re studying are men. So you’re asking yourself, “Why? What happened in history?” And so I claimed I was a feminist, and one day my mate from preschool came to me, and he was really sorry for me, he was really sad, and he told me, “It’s okay, don’t worry, everybody at eight years old can call themselves a feminist, but it’s okay, you’ll change your mind, you’ll begin to love men. Maybe when you’re around fourteen.”
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He spoke with me like I had some kind of disease, but he was trying to encourage me and tell me that I would get over it.
I was a nerd from a very early age. Once my physics teacher was embarrassing me in front of the whole class by saying that “Nadya is such a good girl! She gets just the best marks all the time.” She continued with the thought that I’d probably become a very successful person in life and marry a president. I was ten years old, but I remember I understood enough to be furious. I thought, Why can’t I be president myself? Is it really the greatest achievement of a girl to become somebody’s wife?
I became a feminist because Russian men refuse to give me a hand. Russian men don’t shake hands with women. It bothered me. A guy from my art collective liked to proclaim that women are not capable of making art. “The only one who actually made real art was Leni Riefenstahl,” he would add. That bothered me even more.
I came across Simone de Beauvoir when I was eighteen. “One is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman,” she said. She actually gave me some hope. I also was blessed to discover queer theory and gender as acting—with Judith Butler’s help. At eighteen I realized what the main question of my life was: How can we effectively redefine the norm? What makes you a pirate, a nomad, or a rebel?
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Misogyny stinks in big cities, but it starts to stink even more when you find yourself in a small and nearly closed society like a village, a tiny industrial town or prison. I learned that in prison you are obliged to compete in beauty contests. If you don’t compete, you won’t be paroled. Not competing in the “Miss Charming” contests means they will write “does not have a proactive stance” in your personal dossier. I boycotted the contest, so the prison decided I did not have a proactive stance. Because I did not compete in the beauty contest, the court refused to grant me parole.
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