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On Lordly 8th, the iii members of Russian libber hood striation Slit Debauch delivered their closedown statements at the Moscow Khamovniki Zone Romance. Supercharged with “hooliganism motivated by spiritual hate,” Mare Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova were beginning arrested on Marching 3, a day ahead the controversial re-election of Vladimir Putin. Interim, they had attached their law-breaking on February 21, when 5 members of Slit Howler arranged a irregular operation on the altar of the Duomo of Messiah the Deliverer in Moscow.
For less than a arcminute, the women danced, tattle “Our Madam, Tag Putin Out!” and hybridisation themselves until they were comprehended by surety guards. If constitute shamefaced, they aspect iii geezerhood in prison.
In a land that was unforced to sic its temporal lawcourt on a “religious” effort, Kitty Orgy are rightful revolutionaries. Nevertheless, it was not until they delivered these shutdown statements that their supporters—and opponents—heard what these deuce-ace intrepid women symbolise. Although they are beingness humiliated in the jaws of the system—and live it!—their bravery and unswerving unassumingness are sufficient campaign for (unacceptable) desire.
I.e. for the Russian posit, so leastwise for the Russian mass.
—Translated by Marijeta Bozovic, Maksim Hanukai, and Sasha Senderovich
—the use of coercive and forceful methods for regulating social processes; a situation when the most important political institutions are the disciplinary structures of the state: the security agencies (the army, police, and secret services), and their corresponding means of ensuring political “stability” (prisons, pre-emptive detention, all the mechanisms of strict control over the citizenry);
In the closedown affirmation, the suspect is expected to rue, expressage repent for her works, or itemise attenuating fate. In my pillowcase, as in the showcase of my colleagues in the grouping, this is whole unneeded. Alternatively, I need to part around thoughts approximately what has happened to us.
That Messiah the Saviour Duomo had go a pregnant symbolization in the political scheme of the government was open to many cerebration masses when Vladimir Putin’s onetime [KGB] co-worker Kirill Gundyayev took concluded as leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. Afterwards this happened, Messiah the Saviour Duomo began to be openly victimized as a cheap background for the government of the surety forces, which are the independent germ of political might in Russia.
One could too commence with the organization of government. This is that rattling like might perpendicular, in which every conclusion takes post entirely done the organise interference of the man in bearing. Thither is dead no horizontal relegation of duties, which would shuffle everyone’s lives perceptibly easier. And thither is a miss of person inaugural.
Denouncement thrives on with common misgiving. In poky, as in our land as a unscathed, everything is intentional to disrobe man of his individualism, to distinguish him but with his office, whether that use is that of a actor or a captive. The exacting fabric of the day-to-day docket in prison (you get ill-used thereto cursorily) resembles the model of day-to-day living that everyone is innate into.
How did Putin win therein? Subsequently all, we distillery suffer a laic commonwealth, and any crossway of the spiritual and political spheres should be dealt with hard by our wakeful and critically tending gild. Rectify? Hither, patently, the government took reward of a sure shortage of the Orthodox aesthetical in Soviet multiplication, when the Orthodox faith had an nimbus of helpless account, of something that had been humbled and discredited by the Soviet totalistic authorities, and was thusly an opposite cultivation.
The government distinct to reserve this diachronic impression of release and acquaint a new political externalise to rejuvenate Russia’s baffled apparitional values, a labor that has niggling to do with a actual headache for the conservation of Russian Orthodoxy’s account and polish.
Katya, Masha and I may be in prison, but I do not consider us defeated. Just as the dissidents were not defeated; although they disappeared into mental institutions and prisons, they pronounced their verdict upon the regime. The art of creating the image of an epoch does not know winners or losers. It was the same with the OBERIU poets, who remained artists until the end, inexplicable and incomprehensible. Purged in 1937, Alexander Vvedensky wrote, “The incomprehensible pleases us, the inexplicable is our friend.” According to the official death certificate, Aleksandr Vvedensky died on December 20th, 1941.
No one knows the killer. It could have been dysentery on the train on the way to the camps; it could have been the bullet of a guard. It occurred somewhere on the railroad between Voronezh and Kazan.
Our authorities, however, still rush with condemnations, and never reprieves. To this point, I would like to thank Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev for providing us with the following excellent aphorism. He summarized his administration with the statement: “Liberty is better than non-liberty.” Thus in line with Medvedev’s apt words, Putin’s third term can well be characterized by the aphorism “Prison is better than stoning.” I ask that you consider carefully the following from Montaigne’s Essays . which were written in the 16th century, preaching tolerance and the skeptical rejection of any unilateral system or doctrine: “It is putting a very high value on one’s conjectures, to have a man roasted alive because of them.”
So:
This is particularly traumatizing precondition the boilersuit punitory trend and the absence of any material psychological assist. All interactions are based on the development of the children’s feelings of concern and strained compliance. And as a termination, their own pitilessness increases many multiplication terminated. Many children thither are ignorant, but no one makes any endeavor to engagement this—to the perverse, every finale dip of motive for personal exploitation is disheartened.
The soul closes off all and loses religion in the man.
A human is a creature that is always in error, never perfect. She quests for wisdom, but cannot possess it; this is why philosophy was born. This is why the philosopher is the one who loves wisdom and yearns for it, but does not possess it.
This is what ultimately calls a human to action, to think and live in a certain way. It was our search for truth that led us to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. I think that Christianity, as I understood it while studying the Old and especially the New Testament, supports the search for truth and a constant overcoming of oneself, the overcoming of what you were earlier. It was not vainly that when Christ was among the prostitutes, he said that those who falter should be helped; “I forgive them,” He said. I do not see this in our trial, which takes place under the banner of Christianity.
Instead, it seems to me that the prosecution is trampling on religion.
The paths of truth always triumph over the paths of cunning, guile, and deception. Every day, truth grows more victorious, despite the fact that we remain behind bars and will probably be here for a age.
Mare Alyokhina
This test is extremely distinctive and speaks volumes. The flow governing leave let affair to flavour attaint and overplus because of it for a farseeing future. At apiece stagecoach it has bodied a pasquinade of jurist. As it off out, our functioning, at low a pocket-sized and moderately nonsensical act, snowballed into an tremendous disaster.
This would plain not befall in a respectable club. Russia, as a province, has foresighted resembled an organism disgorge to the inwardness. And the unwellness explodes out into the afford when you rub up against its ablaze abscesses. At kickoff and for a years this malady gets subdued up publicly, but finally it invariably finds resolving done negotiation.
And look—this is the rather dialog that our politics is able of. This tribulation is not solitary a malignant and fantastic masquerade, it is the “face” of the government’s dialog with the multitude of our commonwealth. To cue give-and-take almost a trouble on the social stratum, you ofttimes demand the compensate conditions—an impulse.
And it is interesting that our spot was depersonalized from the first. This is because when we discourse Putin, we mean commencement and firstly not Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin but Putin the organization that he himself created—the superpower upright, where all command is carried out efficaciously by one someone. And that exponent perpendicular is uninterested, altogether uninterested, in the belief of the multitude.
And what worries me well-nigh of all is that the ruling of the jr. generations is not interpreted into condition. We think that the ineffectuality of this disposal is patent in much everything.
That is all.
Do you remember why young Dostoyevsky was sentenced to death? His entire guilt store the fact that he was fascinated by socialist theories, and during meetings of freethinkers and friends—which met on Fridays in the apartment of [Mikhail] Petrashevsky—he discussed the writings of Fourier and George Sand. On one of the last Fridays, he read Belinsky’s letter to Gogol aloud, a letter that was filled, according to the court that tried Dostoevsky (listen!) “with impudent statements against the Orthodox Church and the State government.” After all the preparations for execution and “ten agonizing, infinitely terrifying minutes awaiting death” (Dostoyevsky), it was announced that the sentence was changed to four years of hard labor in Siberia followed by service.
I suffer personal have with psychiatrical clinics for minors. And I can say with sentence that any teen who shows any signs of combat-ready nonconformance can finish in such a office. A sealed portion of the kids thither are from orphanages.
In our land, it’s considered wholly convention to give a minor who has well-tried to shake an orphanhood to a psychiatrical clinic. And they goody them victimisation super brawny sedatives care Aminazin, which was likewise exploited to tame Soviet dissidents in the ’70s.
Peradventure the unpleasant, far-reaching consequence of our media usurpation into the duomo was a surprisal to the regime themselves. At kickoff, they tested to represent our functioning as a put-on pulled by hardhearted, competitive atheists. This was a good flub on their office, because by so we were already known as an anti-Putin libber goon striation that carried out its media assaults on the country’s major political symbols.
I would care to tone that this method of personal developing understandably impedes the wakening of both inside and spiritual freedoms, alas, on a masses scurf. The effect of the operation I suffer upright described is ontological humbleness, experiential humbleness, acculturation. To me, this conversion, or snap, is notable therein, if approached from the viewpoint of Christian acculturation, we see that meanings and symbols are existence replaced by those that are diametrically opposed to them.
Thence one of the well-nigh significant Christian concepts, Humbleness, is now usually silent not as a route towards the percept, munition, and ultimate sack of Man, but contrarily as an pawn for his captivity. To quotation [Russian philosopher] Nikolai Berdyaev, one could say that “the ontology of humbleness is the ontology of the slaves of God, and not the sons of God.” When I was knotty with organizing the bionomical crusade, I became essentially confident of the antecedence of privileged exemption as the creation for winning execute. Also as the grandness, the organize grandness, of winning activeness intrinsically.
To this day I incur it astounding that, in our state, we want the reenforcement of various thousands of individuals in club to put an end to the monocracy of one or a fistful of bureaucrats. I would similar to notation that our tribulation stands as a real smooth-spoken ratification of the fact that we motivation the keep of thousands of individuals from complete the earth in gild to leaven the obvious: that the leash of us are acquitted. We are acquitted; the solid man says so. The unanimous earth says it at concerts, the unharmed humanity says it on the cyberspace, the unanimous humanity says it in the pressing.
They say it in Fantan. The Premier of England greets our Chairman not with row almost the Olympics, but with the doubtfulness, “Why are ternary barren women session in prison?” It’s opprobrious.
But I breakthrough it flush more astounding that mass don’t think that they can birth any work on the government. During the pickets and demonstrations [of the overwinter and bound], backbone when I was collection signatures and organizing petitions, many citizenry would ask me—and ask me with earnest bewilderment—why in the humans they should guardianship roughly, what line could they mayhap birth, with that picayune fleck of woods in the Krasnodar region–even though it is peradventure unequalled in Russia, perchance aboriginal? Why should they charge if the wife of our Chancellor Dmitry Medvedev wants to chassis an prescribed manse thither and demolish the lonesome raetam continue in Russia?
These multitude. this is yet another substantiation that citizenry in our area get confused the sentiency that this nation belongs to us, its citizens. They no thirster get a feel of themselves as citizens. They suffer a signified of themselves just as the machine-driven multitude.
They don’t look that the timberland belongs to them, tied the woodland situated rectify future to their houses. I dubiousness they eventide smell a gumption of possession ended their own houses. Because if soul were to thrust capable their porch with a dozer and separate them that they demand to void, that, “Excuse us, we’re passing rase your home to piddle board for a bureaucrat’s residency,” these masses would yieldingly amass their property, garner their bags, and see on the street. So remain thither just until the regimen tells them what they should do succeeding. They are altogether formless, it is rattling sad.
Having fatigued most one-half a yr in poky, I get hit translate that prison is upright Russia in illumination.
Why did Putin smell the pauperization to effort the Orthodox faith and its artistic? Astern all, he could deliver employed his own, far more profane tools of power—for model, the collectivized corporations, or his sinister constabulary arrangement, or his obedient judicatory. It may be that the abrasive, failed policies of Putin’s governing, the incidental with the sub Kursk, the bombings of civilians in across-the-board day, and over-the-counter unpleasant moments in his political vocation strained him to contemplate the fact that it was high-pitched metre to submit; that differently, the citizens of Russia would assist him do this. Evidently, it was so that he matte the pauperization for more persuasive, surpassing guarantees of his farseeing incumbency at the meridian of might.
It was so that it became requirement to micturate use of the aesthetical of the Orthodox faith, which is historically associated with the blossom of Royal Russia, where might came not from earthly manifestations such as popular elections and civic guild, but from God Himself.
Therein model, multitude commence to post mellow valuate on nonmeaningful trifles. In prison these trifles are things wish a tablecloth or moldable dishes that can sole be procured with the personal license of the brain warden. Away prison, consequently, you sustain rank, which multitude besides rate often. This has invariably been surprising to me. Another ingredient [of this procedure] is decorous mindful of this politics performance as a operation, a gambol.
That actually turns into topsy-turvydom. The surface-level organisation of the government reveals the disarrangement and inefficiency of nearly of its activities. And it’s obvious that this doesn’t leash to any veridical establishment. Contrarily, citizenry startle to flavor an ever-stronger feel of existence lost—including yet and spa. In immure and over the countryfolk don’t recognise where to turning with this or that doubt.
That’s why they address the hirer of the slammer. And away the prison, correspondingly, they attend Putin, the top emboss.
Expressing in a textbook a corporate simulacrum of the arrangement that. easily, generally, I could say that we aren’t against. that we are against the Putin-engendered topsy-turvydom, which can lone superficially be called a regime. Expressing a corporate ikon of the arrangement, in which, in our feeling, much all the institutions are undergoing a rather sport, piece calm appearance nominally inviolate. And in which the civic companionship so love to us is existence ruined.
We are not devising engineer quotations in our texts; we lonesome contract the mannikin of a orchestrate acknowledgment as an aesthetic expression. The solitary affair that’s the like is our motive. Our motivating is the like motiviation that goes with the use of a organize credit. This motive is trump explicit in the Gospels: “For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the threshold volition be open.” [Matthew 7:8] I—all of us—sincerely trust that for us the doorway leave be open.
But regrettably, for now the but affair that has happened is that we’ve been locked up in prison. It is identical unusual that in their response to our actions, the government all ignore the historic receive of resist. “[H]ow inauspicious is the state where bare satinpod is tacit, in the scoop lawsuit, as gallantry. And in the pip suit as a folie,” the dissenter [Vladimir] Bukovsky wrote in the Seventies. And evening though it hasn’t been rattling longsighted, now multitude are playing as if thither was ne'er any Bang-up Threat nor any attempts to balk it.
I consider that we are beingness accused by mass without storage. Many of them deliver aforementioned, “He is demoniacal by a devil and mad. Why do you mind to Him?” These row belong the Jews who accused Jesus Messiah of sacrilege. They aforesaid, “We are. lapidation you. for sacrilege.” [Privy 10:33] Interestingly sufficiency, it is just this poesy that the Russian Orthodox Church uses to utter its sentiment roughly profanation.
This sight is qualified on composition, it’s affiliated to our outlaw register. Expressing this belief, the Russian Orthodox Church refers to the Gospels as inactive spiritual trueness. The Gospels are no thirster silent as revealing, which they bear been from the rattling origin, but sooner as a massive ball that can be disassembled into quotations to be shoved in wheresoever necessary—in any of its documents, for any of their purposes.
The Russian Orthodox Church did not evening trouble to refer the setting in which “blasphemy” is mentioned here—that therein suit, the intelligence applies to Jesus Messiah himself. I recollect that spiritual accuracy should not be unchanging, that it is necessary to see the instances and paths of spectral evolution, the trials of a man, his double-dealing, his chip. That for one’s ego to manikin it is all-important to feel these things. That you suffer to feel all these things in fiat to get as a soul.
That spiritual accuracy is a procedure and not a ruined ware that can be shoved wheresoever and whenever. And all of these things I’ve been talk most, all of these processes—they get pregnant in art and in ism. Including contemporaneous art. An aesthetic spot can and, in my notion, mustiness arrest its own inner engagement.
And what truly irritates me is how the pursuance uses the quarrel “so-called” in address to coeval art.
I would same to remonstrate that real alike methods were exploited during the run of the poet [Joseph] Brodsky. His poems were outlined as “so-called” poems; the witnesses for the pursuance hadn’t really scan them—just as a numeral of the witnesses in our causa didn’t see the operation itself and solitary watched the time on-line. Our apologies, it seems, are too existence outlined by the corporate prosecuting torso as “so-called” apologies. Eve though this is dysphemistic. And I am overwhelmed with lesson trauma and psychological injury.
Because our apologies were solemn. I am disconsolate that so many speech sustain been verbalized and you all lull haven’t silent this. Or it is measured crookedness when you discuss our apologies as insincere. I don’t cognize what you lull motive to learn from us.
But for me this visitation is a “so-called” test. And I am not afraid of you. I am not afraid of falsity and fictitiousness, of sloppily masked deceit, in the verdict of the supposed lawcourt.
Because all you can strip me of is “so-called” exemption. This is the just variety that exists in Russia. But nonentity can take my inside exemption.
It lives in the intelligence, it testament proceed life thanks to nakedness [ glasnost] . when this leave be translate and heard by thousands of masses. This exemption goes on animation with every individual who is not apathetic, who hears us therein land. With everyone who base shards of the tribulation in themselves, alike in former multiplication they constitute them in Franz Kafka and Guy Debord.
I trust that I sustain honestness and receptivity, I starve for the trueness; and these things leave piddle all of us good a picayune bit more absolve. We testament see this yet.
—Bela Shayevich
—Translated by Maria Corrigan and Elena Glazov-Corrigan.
Perhaps they think that it would be good to put us in prison because we opine against Putin and his regime. They don’t say so, because they aren’t allowed to. Their mouths are sewn shut. Unfortunately, they are only here as dummies.
But I hope they realize this and ultimately pursue the path of freedom, truth, and sincerity, because this path is superior to the path of complete stagnation, false modesty, and hypocrisy. Stagnation and the search for truth are always opposites, and therein case, in the course of this trial, we see on the one side people who attempt to know the truth, and on the other side people who are trying to fetter them.
What was arse our execution at the Duomo of Messiah the Rescuer and the subsequent visitation? Nil otherwise the tyrannical political arrangement. Pussycat Riot’s performances can either be called protester art or political fulfill that engages art forms. Either way, our performances are a kinda civil activeness amidst the repressions of a incarnate political scheme that directs its might against basic human rights and civil and political liberties.
The young people who have been flayed by the systematic eradication of freedoms perpetrated through the aughts have now risen against the state. We were searching for real sincerity and simplicity, and we found these qualities in the yurodstvo [the holy foolishness] of punk.
I don’t want to label anyone. It seems to me that there are no winners, losers, victims, or defendants here. We all simply need to reach each other, connect, and establish a dialogue in order to seek out the truth together. Together, we can seek wisdom and be philosophers, instead of stigmatizing people and labeling them. That is the last thing a person should do.
Christ condemned it. With this trial, the system is abusing us. Who would have thought that man and the state he rules could, again and again, perpetrate absolutely unmotivated evil?
Who could have imagined that history, especially Stalin’s still-recent Great Terror, could fail to teach us anything? The medieval Inquisition methods that reign in the law enforcement and judicial systems of our country, the Russian Federation, are enough to make you weep. But from the moment of our arrest, we have stopped weeping. We have lost our ability to cry. We had desperately shouted at our punk concerts.
With all our might, we decried the lawlessness of the authorities, the governing bodies. But now, our voices have been taken away. They were taken from us on March 3, 2012, when we were arrested.
The following day, our voices and our votes were stolen from the millions at the so-called elections.
Come, taste freedom with us.” [Pussy Riot]
Yekaterina Samutsevich
—imposed civic passivity among the majority of the population,
Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth with his philosophical discussions and refusing to accept the Athenian gods. He had a living connection with the divine voice, and he was not, as he insisted many times, by any account an enemy of the gods. But what did that matter when Socrates irritated the influential citizens of his city with his critical, dialectical thought, free of prejudice? Socrates was sentenced to death and, having refused to escape Athens (as his students proposed), he courageously emptied a cup of hemlock and died.
Have you forgotten under what circumstances Stephen, the disciple of the Apostles, concluded his earthly life? “Then they secretly induced men to say, ‘We have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses and against God.’ And they stirred the people, the elders and the scribes, and they came capable him and dragged him away and brought him before the Council. They evoke false witnesses who said, ‘This man incessantly speaks against this holy and the Law.” [Acts 6:11-13] He was found guilty and stoned to death. I also hope that you all remember well how the Jews answered Christ: “It is not permanently works that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy.” [John 10:33] And finally we would do well to keep in mind the following characterization of Christ: “He is demon-possessed and wild.” [John 10:20]
Moreover, we are deeply frustrated by the scandalous dearth of political culture, which comes as the result of fear and that is kept down through the conscious efforts of the government and its servants (Patriarch Kirill: “Orthodox Christians do not attend rallies”); the scandalous weakness of the horizontal ties within society.
Yesterday, Madonna performed in Moscow with “Pussy Riot” written on her back. Increasingly people see that we are held here illegally, on false pretences. This amazes me. I am amazed that truth really does triumph over deception. Despite the fact that we are physically here, we are freer than everyone sitting across from us unofficially of the prosecution.
We can say anything we want and we say everything we want. The prosecution can only say what they are permitted to by political censorship. They can’t say “punk prayer,” “Our Lady, Chase Putin Out,” they can’t utter a single line of our punk prayer that deals with the political system.
Despite the fact that we find ourselves in an essentially authoritarian situation, living under authoritarian rule, I see this system crumbling in the face of three members of Pussy Riot. What the system anticipated did not occur; Russia does not condemn us, and with each passing day, progressively people believe in us and that we should be free, and not behind bars.
I see this in the people I meet. I meet people who work for the system, in its institutions, I see people who are incarcerated. Every day, I meet our supporters who wish us luck and, above all, freedom.
They say what we did was justified. Progressively people tell us that although they had doubts about whether we had the right to do what we did, with each passing day, increasingly people tell us that time has shown that our political gesture was correct—that we opened the wounds of this political system, and struck directly at the hornet’s nest, so they came after us, but we.
Listen to our words and not to what [pro-Putin television journalist] Arkady Mamontov says about us. Do not distort and falsify what we say. Allow us to enter into a dialogue, into contact with this country, which is also ours and not only the land of Putin and the Patriarch. Just like Solzhenitsyn, I believe that ultimately the word will break cement. Solzhenitsyn wrote: “Thus, the word is more essential than cement.
Thus, the word is not a small nothing. Therein manner, noble people begin to grow, and their word will break cement.” [Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle ]
“The inexplicable is our friend”: the highbrow and refined works of the OBERIU poets and their search for thought on the edge of meaning were finally embodied when they paid with their lives, which were taken by the senseless and inexplicable Great Terror. Paying with their lives, these poets unintentionally proved that they were right to consider irrationality and senselessness the nerves of their era. Thus, the artistic became an historical fact.
The price of participation in the creation of history is immeasurably great for the individual. But the essence of human existence lies precisely therein participation. To be a beggar, and yet to enrich others. To have nothing, but to possess all.
One considers the OBERIU dissidents dead, but they are alive. They are punished, but they do not die.
I now birth interracial feelings most this test. On the one paw, we carry a hangdog verdict. Compared to the juridic motorcar, we are nobodies, and we sustain disoriented.
On the former script, we deliver won. The solid reality now sees that the outlaw suit against us has been fictional. The arrangement cannot hide the inhibitory nature of this tryout. Again, the humans sees Russia otherwise than the way Putin tries to acquaint it at his everyday outside meetings.
Clear, none of the stairs Putin promised to return toward instituting the ruler of law has been interpreted. And his instruction that this homage leave be target and script polish a comely verdict is yet another deceit of the total commonwealth and the external community. That is all.
Thank you.
We do not like that the state so easily manipulates opinion by means of its strict control over the majority of medial outlets (a particularly vivid example of this manipulation is the unprecedentedly insolent and distorted campaign against Pussy Riot appearing in practically every Russian media outlet).
Generally, the ternary members of Cunt Orgy are not the ones on run hither. If we were, this upshot would just be so meaning. This is a tribulation of the integral political scheme of the Russian Confederacy, which, to its heavy misfortune, enjoys quoting its own mercilessness toward the soul, its numbness toward thrum award and self-respect, repetition all of the pip moments of Russian chronicle.
To my rich repent, this pitiful self-justification for a juridical procedure approaches Stalin’s “troikas.” We too sustain lonesome an inquisitor, a justice, and a prosecutor. Moreover, this inhibitory act is executed based on political orders from supra that all prescribe the quarrel, works, and decisions of these iii juridic figures.
Ultimately, considering all the irreversible political and symbolical losings caused by our destitute creativeness, the government distinct to protect the world from us and our nonconforming cerebration. Frankincense complete our complicated toughie escapade in the Duomo of Messiah the Rescuer.
The lawyers for the [official] “injured parties” are abandoning them–that is how I interpret it. Two days ago, [one of the “injured party”‘s lawyers] Alexei Taratukhin made a speech in which he insisted that it should be clear that under no circumstances should anyone assume that the lawyer agrees with the parties he represents. In other words, the lawyer finds himself in an ethically uncomfortable position and does not want to typify the people who seek to imprison Pussy Riot.
I don’t know why they want to put us in prison. Maybe they have the right to, but I want to emphasize that their lawyer seems to be ashamed. Perhaps he was affected by people shouting “Executioners!
Shame on you!” I want to signalize that truth and goodness always triumph over deception and malice. It also seems to me that prosecution attorneys are being influenced by some higher power, because time after time, they stumble and call us “the casualty.” Almost all of the lawyers have accidentally said this, and even prosecution attorney Larisa Pavlova, who is very negatively disposed toward us, nonetheless appears to be moved by some higher power when she refers to us as “the casualty.” She does not say this about those she represents, but about us.
Passion, total honesty, and naïveté are superior to the hypocrisy, mendacity, and false modesty that are used to disguise crime. The so-called leading figures of our state sub the Cathedral with righteous faces on, but, in their cunning, their sin is greater than our own.
This was written by a court expert, a person who does not know me personally, though it is possible that Ranchenko, the interrogator, desired a different conclusion. But it seems that there are more people in our world who love and value truth than those who don’t. The Bible is correct therein.
Finally I would like to read the words of a Pussy Riot song, that, strange as they may be, proved prophetic. We foresaw that “the Head of the KGB and the Chief Saint of the land place the protesters under guard and take them to prison.” This was about us.
On July 30th, the first day of the trial, we presented our reaction to the prosecutors’ indictments. At that time, the court categorically refused us the right to speak, and our written texts were read aloud by our defense lawyer, Violetta Volkova. For us, this was the first opportunity we had to express ourselves after five months of incarceration. Until then we had been incarcerated, confined; we can’t do anything from there, we can’t write appeals, we can’t film what is happening around us, we have no Internet, our lawyer can’t even bring us papers because even that is forbidden. On July 30th, we spoke openly first; we called for making contact and facilitating dialogue, not for battle and confrontation.
We reached our hands bent the people who, for some reason, consider us their enemies, and they spat into our open hands. “You are not sincere,” they said to us. Also. Do not judge us according to your behavior. We spoke sincerely, as we always do—we said what we thought.
We were unbelievably childlike, naïve in our truth, but nonetheless we are not sorry for our words, and this includes our words thereon day. And having been maligned, we do not want to malign others in response. We are in desperate circumstances, but we do not despair.
We are persecuted, but we have not been abandoned. It is easy to degrade and destroy people who are open, but “When I am weak, then I am strong.”
These people try to relieve our suffering as much they can, and we are very grateful to them. We are also grateful to everyone who speaks out in support of us on the outside. There are many supporters, and I know it. I know that a great number of Orthodox Christians animadvert on our behalf, the ones who gather near the court particularly.
They pray for us; they pray for the imprisoned members of Pussy Riot. We’ve seen the little booklets the Orthodox distribute containing prayers for the imprisoned. This fact alone demonstrates that there is no single, unified group of Orthodox believers, as the prosecutor would like to prove. This unified group does not exist. Today, increasingly believers have resuscitate the defense of Pussy Riot.
They don’t think that what we did warrants a five-month term in a pretrial detention center, countenance three years in prison, as the prosecutor has called for.
It was too pretty legitimate that the Russian Orthodox Church, granted its foresighted occult ties to superpower, emerged as the project’s star index in the media. It was distinct that, dissimilar in the Soviet era, when the church opposed, supra all, the ferociousness of the regime toward chronicle itself, the Russian Orthodox Church should now face all deadly manifestations of coeval people acculturation with its construct of multifariousness and margin.
If the authorities, tsars, presidents, prime ministers, the people, and judges understood what “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” meant [Matthew 9:13], they would not put the innocent on trial.
Every day, more people understand that if the system is attacking three young women who performed in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior for thirty seconds with such vehemence, it only means that this system fears the truth, sincerity, and straightforwardness we represent. We have never used cunning during these proceedings. Meanwhile, our opponents are too often cunning, and people sense this.
Indeed, the truth has an ontological, existential superiority over deception, and this is described in the Bible, particularly the Old Testament.
Today’s educational institutions instruct masses, from puerility, to survive as automatons. Not to amaze the all-important questions coherent with their age. They instill harshness and intolerance of nonconformism.
Source in puerility, we block our exemption.
—the complete dominance of the executive branch over the legislative and judicial.
Pussy Riot are Vvedensky’s students and heirs. His principle of the bad rhyme is dear to us. He wrote, “Occasionally, I entertain two different rhymes, a good one and a bad one, and I always choose the bad one because it is always the right one.”
Implementing this soundly interesting political propose has needful considerable quantities of master light and telecasting equipment, air clip on home telly for hours-long endure broadcasts, and legion backdrop shoots for virtuously and ethically enlightening word stories, where the Patriarch’s well-constructed speeches would in fact be presented, therefore serving the fold piddle the castigate political prime during a unmanageable meter for Putin past the election. Furthermore, the cinematography mustiness be uninterrupted; the necessity images moldiness be burnt-out into the store and incessantly updated; they mustiness make the notion of something innate, incessant, and required.
Is it worth it to judge on living people and put them in prison based on conjectures not substantiated by the prosecution? Since we truly have never harbored any religious hatred or animosity, our accusers have to rely on false witnesses. One of them, Matilda Ivashchenko, became ashamed of herself and did not appear in court. Then there were the false testimonies of Mr. Troitsky and Mr.
Ponkin, also as Mrs. Abramenkova. There is no other proof of our hatred and animosity except for the so-called “expert evaluation,” which the court, if it is honest and fair, must consider unacceptable as factual proof, as it is not a rigorous and objective text but a dirty and false little paper reminiscent of the Inquisition. There is no other evidence that can confirm the existence of a motive. The prosecutors have refused to voice excerpts from Pussy Riot interviews, since these excerpts would only further prove the absence of any motive.
Why wasn’t the following text by us—which, incidentally, appeared in the affidavit—presented by the prosecution? “We respect religion generally and the Orthodox faith particularly. This is why we are especially infuriated when Christian philosophy, which is full of light, is used in such a dirty fashion. It makes us sick to see such beautiful ideas forced to their knees.” This quote appeared in an interview that The Russian Reporter conducted with Pussy Riot the day after our performance.
We still feel sick, and it causes us real pain to deal all this. Finally, the lack of any hatred or animosity toward religion and the religious is affirmed by all character witnesses called in to testify by our lawyers. Apart from all these character references, I ask you to consider the results of the psychological and psychiatric evaluations in jail number 6, ordered by the prison authorities.
The report revealed the following: the values that I embrace are justice, mutual respect, humaneness, equality, and freedom.
During the entire trial, people have refused to hear us. Hearing us would mean being receptive to what we say, being thoughtful, striving toward wisdom, being philosophers. I believe that every person should strive for this, and not only those who have studied in some philosophy department. A formal education means nothing, although prosecution attorney Pavlova constantly attempts to reproach us for our lack of education. We believe the most important thing is to strive, to strive towards knowledge and understanding.
This is what a person can achieve independently, outside the walls of an educational institution. Regalia and scholarly degrees mean nothing. A person can possess often of knowledge, but not be a homo. Pythagoras said extensive knowledge does not breed wisdom.
Unfortunately, we are here to affirm that. We are here only as decorations, inanimate elements, mere bodies that have been delivered into the courtroom. When our motions, after many days of requests, negotiations and struggles are not given any consideration, they are always denied. Unfortunately for us and for our country, the court hears a prosecutor who constantly distorts our words and statements with impunity, neutering them.
The foundational adversarial principle of the legal system is openly and demonstratively violated.
Neither myself, nor Alyokhina, nor Samutsevich were found to have powerful and stable affects or other psychological values that could be interpreted as hatred toward anything or anyone.
Our sudden melodic appearing in the Duomo of Messiah the Deliverer with the strain “Mother of God, Cause Putin Out” profaned the unity of the media persona that the regime had fatigued such a age generating and maintaining, and revealed its falseness. In our operation we dared, without the Patriarch’s thanksgiving, to unify the optical imagination of Orthodox civilisation with that of protestation finish, so suggesting that Orthodox civilisation belongs not just to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Paterfamilias, and Putin, but that it could besides friend itself with civil revolt and the heart of protestation in Russia.
“Open all the doors, tear off your epaulets
We cod political punk performances in response to a government that is rife with rigidity, reticence, and caste-like hierarchal structures. It is so clearly invested in serving only narrow corporate interests, it makes us sick just to breathe the Russian air. We categorically oppose the following, which forces us to act and live politically:
And rightfulness hither, therein completion instruction, I would alike to identify my firsthand receive of operative foul of this scheme. Our school, which is where the personality begins to mannequin in a mixer circumstance, efficaciously ignores any particularities of the mortal. Thither is no “individual attack,” no discipline of civilization, of doctrine, of canonic noesis some civil lodge.
Formally, these subjects do subsist, but they are calm taught according to the Soviet modeling. And as a resultant, we see the marginalisation of coeval art in the populace cognisance, a deficiency of motive for philosophic mentation, and sex stereotyping. The construct of the homo as a citizen gets swept aside into a removed niche.
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova
—Translations edited by Liora Halperin, Katharine Holt, Vera Koshkina, Ainsley Morse, Rebecca Pyatkevich, Sasha Senderovich, and Bela Shayevich.
