How Pussy Riot revealed the deep cynicism of the Russian Orthodox Church
It seemed deeply cynical of the Russian Orthodox Church to wait until after sentence had been passed to ask for clemency for the protestors from Pussy Riot. Earlier Patriarch Kirill had demanded the most severe punishment possible for the women who had performed a parody prayer in Moscow’s main cathedral asking the Virgin Mary to drive Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, from their native land.
Pussy Riot is not an English translation. The band has no Russian name. The fact that the women protestors chose an English name – and one which left most of their fellow Russians utterly bewildered when they first heard it – tells you something about the intent of these artistes provocateurs. Nor was their choice of venue a coincidence. The Cathedral of Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was built to honour those who died defending Russian freedom, against Napoleon in 1812. It is a reconstruction of a cathedral which was destroyed during the Soviet persecutions when churches were routinely desecrated with obscene songs.
Pussy Riot chose the cathedral because the venues for their previous protests – outside a prison and in Red Square– had not created waves. A song near the Kremlin about “Putin who is pissing his pants” brought them only a brief arrest and no worldwide attention. A punk prayer, before the iconostasis, the holiest public place in an orthodox church, with a chorus of “Holy shit, shit, Lord’s shit!”, was calculated to outrage.
But if there is something adolescent about Pussy Riot’s scatological language, their message is more profound, as the women’s closing statements in court reveal.
The corrupt relationship between the Orthodox church and the Putin state is not news. Its head Patriarch Kirill, a former KGB agent, has called Mr Putin a “miracle from God” and backed his re-election. He pronounced that “Orthodox Christians do not attend [protest] rallies”. In return Mr Putin has made decisions on property and religious schools which benefit the church. Last year the Patriarch was granted official residence in the Kremlin, restoring the church-state intimacy of Imperial Russia .
“Our church does not consider itself an enemy of the state,” a leading Orthodox official, Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, said recently. “The Western idea that the state and the church should be slight rivals and slight enemies is both bizarre and incorrect from an Orthodox point of view”. That does little, however, to address reservations about the material venality of the Patriarch, with his $30,000 Breguet watch and his recent lawsuit claiming dust from a neighbour’s building work had done 20 million roubles worth of damage to his extremely grand flat.
Both sides have used the church to add legitimacy to the Putin state. All three women cited the gospels to critique that. Pussy Riot was trying, said Yekaterina Samutsevich, to “unite the visual imagery of Orthodox culture with that of protest culture, thus suggesting that Orthodox culture belongs not only to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Patriarch, and Putin, but that it could also ally itself with civic rebellion and the spirit of protest inRussia”. Christianity is about a search for truth “and a constant overcoming of … what you were earlier,” said Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. Among Orthodox leaders, lamented Maria Alyokhina, “the Gospels are no longer understood as revelation” but as a collection of quotations that can be manipulated for their own purposes.
Such statements may not have been as shocking as the yurodstvo [holy foolishness] of their violent punk song. But they may explain why as the trial progressed there was a distinct softening in attitude to the women in Russian public opinion polls. And why both church and state have been so unnerved.
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