‘And the Leader said to his regiments,
“Men, is Moscow not with us?” ’
khaki-skin
I could hear the television blaring inside the café: a live broadcast. Putin is at the stadium, surrounded by a huge crowd, reading a poem by Lermontov. It’s on every channel.
Let’s die near Moscow,
As our brothers died.
And we vowed to perish
And we kept our vow of faith
In the Battle of Borodino.
The Battle of Borodino? I thought. Is he in his right mind? All the traffic in Moscow is shut down and the city is swarming with police because Putin decided to call out a bunch of supporters-for-hire and recite poems to them? And this had to happen now, of all times, when the police are looking for me. ‘It’s my lucky day,’ I muttered under my breath as I walked along Kamergerskiy Lane to meet the lawyer, and bumped into one of the uniformed men. He appeared out of nowhere, on the pavement, flooded in sunlight. Behind him were two more; they all wore light blue berets. A thought went through my head: Strange, NKVD officials used to wear those, too.
‘Oh, excuse me,’ I managed to say.
Before we even said hello, the lawyer told me, ‘Don’t go to the police. They’ve issued a warrant for your arrest. Run.’
run, masha
We went into hiding somewhere on the outskirts of town, where the city turns into countryside. We switched off our phones as soon as the train came into the station. We hurried, certain that we were being tailed, constantly turning around, then separating to reach the apartment we were going to hide in by different routes. We stayed in that apartment for several days.
rule #3: use cash
‘We have an interview scheduled with Al Jazeera.’
‘But we don’t have a single balaclava left.’
‘So what? We’ll go to the store and buy hats, then cut them up. We’ve still got two hours before the interview, there’s plenty of time.’
‘What if there’s not enough time to get them?’
‘We’ll wrap ourselves in sheets.’
‘We can’t do that! It’s Al Jazeera. They’ll think we’re terrorists!’
We found some hats in the only second-hand shop around. We stood by a wall trying to set up Skype on an old laptop so that our four heads fit on to one screen. We kept interrupting each other in the interview, saying that we didn’t want to harm anyone or cause any trouble, that criticism and protest are not a crime, that our performance was not blasphemy but criticism of the institution of the Church and contemporary Russia. Who were we trying to convince? Who?
rule #4: don’t show up in the obvious places
It was the season of Maslenitsa. The devil’s holiday. Carnival. Maslenitsa is the week when the winter dies. Saying goodbye to winter in Russia means burning effigies, dressing up in costumes, eating pancakes, sledging down icy slopes.
We didn’t have an effigy to burn. But next to our apartment was a wonderful hill of snow. We found a few cardboard boxes on the nearest rubbish dump. Tearing them into pieces to make sleds, we went down the hill again and again until we were completely covered with snow. When we’d run from our homes, none of us had thought to take extra clothes. We were all wearing whatever we’d been able to grab. I, for example, was wearing someone’s (wonderful) old sailor shirt.
amateur revolutionaries
‘Hey, we look like witches!’ I shouted, trying to keep up with the others on our way back to the apartment.
‘We are witches!’ Nadya shouted back.
In the evening, we made pancakes and ate them. We didn’t know that this would be our last Maslenitsa celebration for a few years. We stayed up half the night, talking and laughing.
forgiveness sunday
We were woken by an early-morning phone call. Someone pressed the loudspeaker button.
‘Did you hear?’
‘Hear what?’
‘Turn on the news. They’re going to prosecute.’
Silence.
don’t watch the news
We were charged with ‘Disorderly conduct, committed with the purpose of inciting religious hatred by a group of persons in an intentional conspiracy’, according to Article 213, Section 2, Subsection (b) of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.
It’s 24 February, Forgiveness Sunday. The significance of the day is enshrined in these words: ‘If you forgive others their sins, our Father in Heaven will forgive yours, and if you do not forgive others their sins, our Father will not forgive yours.’
We left the flat in a hurry.
rule #5: don’t go online from home
After the performance in the church, everybody wanted to interview us. We gave our interviews via Skype. We weren’t supposed to go online at the places where we were staying. Where we spent the night, more accurately. We changed apartments every few nights. We tried our best to keep hidden.
bread with kefir
We had no money to eat at cafés. We had no money at all. We ate bread and buttermilk, and tried to go online using random free Wi-Fi hotspots. I’d brought a small camping stove and a canister of gas from home. We used it to boil water and make coffee. We had to give interviews in our balaclavas. ‘Millions of viewers at home’ were unfamiliar with our faces, and we planned to keep it that way.
girl with a camping stove
Giving an interview over Skype while wearing a balaclava and sitting in a café without ordering anything is weirder than ordinarily sitting in a café without ordering anything. So, we hid in the toilets. All three of us would go in together, lock the door for half an hour, and hold three interviews. Then we would move to another café. After a while, the employees naturally became alarmed and would start knocking on the door. What must those poor people have thought? Some woman had locked the bathroom door from the inside and was shouting in broken English about Putin’s third term. They would turn out the lights and bang on the door.
Once, one of us left a balaclava in the stall. The waitress brought it back to us.
the talented conspirators
We had no money for the metro either, and someone who had promised us shelter for the night suddenly changed his mind. We ended up in the apartment of a bohemian theatre director who lived nearby. The place was being renovated, and the room we were given was stuffed with various sofas. We drank red wine.
‘Which two books would you take if you had to be away from home for an indefinite period of time? Which do you think I would take?’ a friend asked.
‘Not the Bible, I hope.’
‘Mandelstam and Rilke. You can always find a Bible.’
you can always find a bible
In the morning, I woke early because it was hard to breathe. The windows were blocked by sofas. Everyone else was still sleeping. I went to church. I couldn’t believe our action had inspired hatred. I asked for a priest. The priest was eating lunch. I sat on a bench inside and waited. It was an old, dilapidated church. The priest came out after his meal.
I said, ‘Do you know about the dancing in the church?’
‘I heard about it.’
‘Did you know that those girls might end up in jail, that they’re being charged with a crime?’
‘Well, they deserve it.’
He couldn’t have cared less. He was still chewing on his lunch. I was wearing the same coat and the Cossack hat I’d worn in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. I had truly pinned my hopes on this priest. I believed that he would look at me and say something completely different. But we’d been charged for political reasons, and the priest agreed with the charges. He agreed with the TV.
I left the church. I sat on the steps and looked at the sky. There was no sun.
rule #6: change your appearance
In the photographs posted by the police, I had my hair down. It occurred to me that if I hid my hair under a hat when I went outside, no one would recognize me. So I stuffed it under a hat. A white, knitted cap. Wearing tinted glasses in winter wo
uld have been too suspicious, so I started wearing regular glasses. I thought that hair up + hat + glasses = an unrecognizable Masha. I changed my coat, too. My grandmother’s Cossack-officer coat was too conspicuous. I borrowed a black one from the Bass Player. Someone else’s black coat.
hair up + hat + glasses =
That night, we went to the Bass Player’s and talked until morning. Until sunrise.
This was where we had recorded the Pussy Riot songs. The Bass Player sang the whole ‘Punk Prayer’. It’s her voice you can hear in the video; the whole world heard it. This was the apartment we left to go to rehearsals. We had ridden the same metro train and been late together. It was less than two weeks ago. I looked at her and couldn’t believe it.
two heroines
Maybe if I hadn’t asked the Bass Player questions the night before our action, she would have come, too. Which would mean that now, this morning, she would be leaving her apartment with us. There is a moment when two heroines of the stage understand that their fates will now unfold in different directions.
She said, ‘You probably want to sleep now.’ And she made up a bed on the sofa in the kitchen. The cheapest kind of a Ikea sofa, with black upholstery.
The next day, the police came to the Bass Player’s; but we were already gone.
1984
The police were after us.
Now there were five of us in a small car, driving through night-time Moscow. In that moment, Moscow was no longer the familiar city with apartments and cafés where we had all met. Now, it was a map with bright points of light shining on the road up ahead – the traffic police. We only saw these points of light. On the one hand, we needed to pass them slowly, no speeding up at all; on the other, we wanted to fly by at maximum speed – every one of these posts could have meant our last taste of freedom.
wear a disguise
We got out of the car on the outskirts of the city, in a distant residential area.
We went up the stairs of the building and rang the doorbell. A grey-haired man of average height opened the door. He smiled.
‘Do you know who this is?’ Petya, our Englishman, asked me.
‘No.’
‘You should. This is Podrabinek.’
We proceeded into a small kitchen, where the table was set, and started to talk. Alexander is a dissident, author of a book called Punitive Medicine. It is an indictment of the Soviet authorities, who sent people who disagreed with them to psychiatric hospitals. They diagnosed people with ‘mild schizophrenia’. Before Podrabinek was sent into internal exile in Siberia, in 1978, for ‘slandering the Soviet system’, the security services offered him the opportunity to leave the country. He refused and was sentenced to jail in 1980 for continuing to write about punitive psychiatry.
‘When did you get out?’ I asked.
‘In 1984,’ said Podrabinek.
We read copies of the Chronicle of Current Events until midnight. It was a magazine that had been put out by Soviet dissidents, for which they had been given unbelievably long terms in the colonies and internal exile. We joked that, if they caught us, we would be the new dissidents. Which was just what happened.
Podrabinek was the first person in all that time to say, ‘You should be proud of what you did.’
you should be proud
On our last day, we moved from one café to another in downtown Moscow.
‘We have an interview in an hour,’ Nadya said, settling down with a huge backpack on a bench in Starbucks.
‘Okay. I’m going to go for a walk,’ I said, and went outside.
the last day
It’s very unsettling, knowing they could grab you at any second. That any random passer-by could turn out to be an undercover agent. I looked at people’s shoes. Agents wear shoes with pointy toes. That’s their idea of fashion. They also wear money belts. I went towards the metro. Two autozak police vans were waiting by the entrance. I went into a church.
autozak by the church
While I was standing in the church, I felt as if the other people there were about to surround me, drag me by the arms into one of the autozaks, and that no one in the world would know about it. No one. The priest was reading the liturgy. In prison, every night for several months I would dream about how we were on the run.
every night in my dreams i ran
Every night in my dreams I ran – and I still woke up in prison.
and every night i woke up in prison
When I left the church, the autozaks were gone.
‘Where were you?’
‘In church.’
‘What?’
‘Never mind.’
We locked ourselves in the bathroom at Starbucks and gave an interview via Skype for half an hour. The waiters turned off the light, tugged at the door handle, and threatened to call the manager. I wanted to shout, What do you mean, the manager? There are a couple of police divisions looking for us in every corner of Moscow! But we used our phones as improvised lights and just continued the interview.
it’s our country
I can’t say how long we thought we could keep running and how we thought it would all end. People offered to help us leave the country – we refused. There were various options: to go deep into Russia, far from the capital. Good people invited us to stay with them in secluded places. But that would be voluntary exile. Why would we agree to that? (No doubt some people would. Not us.) We didn’t start this whole thing just to disappear.
we won’t disappear
Revolution is a story. If we fell out of it, disappeared, it would be their story, not ours. Their country, not ours. We never took off our masks. We had never left the church. My T-shirt: ‘To back down an inch is to give up a mile.’ No sense in wearing those words if you don’t live up to them.
Here was Putin running for a third term, and many people, in despair, left the country. But we didn’t want to emigrate. In our story, personal choices are political.
they’re the ones who should disappear
We spent our last night together in an enormous apartment.
‘If we keep going to different cafés, they’ll never find us,’ Katya said. ‘Also, how come there’s no grechka?’
the last night
Meat patties, pasta, vegetables: everything ready for us to eat – but no grechka. ‘There just isn’t any,’ Katya grumbled, and opened every cupboard in the kitchen, one by one. We started to laugh.
‘What’s so funny?’ Katya asked.
Nadya and I climbed into the jacuzzi, lit every candle we could find. Night. A huge, empty sleeping apartment in the centre of Moscow, ours for just one night.
the royal night
‘If we had got good grades, we could live in an apartment like this,’ we said, trying to joke, and sinking into the hot water. We didn’t feel like sleeping. I read:
I know in Hell I will be
An artist of Hell-wide repute.
They will seat me under a tree
And issue me a gold flute.
in hell i will be
In the morning, we left. With our backpacks. As we approached the metro, they descended on us right by the entrance. I never even saw their shoes.
About ten of them, all in black.
‘Stop! Don’t move!’
They surrounded us in a tight circle. Then we were staring at the high metal fence they had rammed us up against. We laughed. Well, that’s it, girls. This is as far as we’re going. No more running.
‘What are you looking at? You’ll never be able to jump over this.’
They were very smug.
rule #7: never give names
They shoved us into a car and wouldn’t tell us where we were going. We didn’t talk and didn’t call each other by name. You shouldn’t talk when cops are around. I tried to figure out what they were allowed to do to us and what they weren’t. How I should behave. I knew nothing. Except that I was supposed to flush my SIM card down the toilet. So they wouldn’t get the phone numbers of other m
embers of Pussy Riot.
‘Hand over the keys to your apartment!’ an agent shouted at Katya. He was three times bigger than she was.
‘What apartment?’
‘Where you were living!’
‘We don’t live anywhere.’
‘You don’t have a home?’
‘No, life’s been kind of hard, you know …’ Katya said calmly.
They are used to us being afraid of them. Don’t be afraid.
rule #8: destroy your sim card
‘We’re going to see the investigator,’ one of them said. I tried to find my phone in my pocket to call the lawyer. The agent noticed and took the phone away. He pulled out the battery in a matter of seconds, handed it back to me, and said, ‘Now you can call.’
‘We haven’t slept in a week. Trying to fucking find you.’ The agent leaned back against the seat wearily.
Riot Days Page 3