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 \u00a0had demanded the most severe punishment possible for the women who had performed a parody prayer in Moscow\u2019s main cathedral asking the Virgin Mary to drive Russia\u2019s president, Vladimir Putin, from their native land.<\/p>\n
Pussy Riot is not an English translation. The band has no Russian name. The fact that the women protestors chose an English name \u2013 and one which left most of their fellow Russians utterly bewildered when they first heard it \u2013 tells you something about the intent of these artistes provocateurs<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n Pussy Riot chose the cathedral because the venues for their previous protests \u2013 outside a prison and in Red Square\u2013 had not created waves. \u00a0A song near the Kremlin about \u201cPutin who is pissing his pants\u201d 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 \u201cHoly shit, shit, Lord\u2019s shit!\u201d, was calculated to outrage.<\/p>\n But if there is something adolescent about Pussy Riot\u2019s scatological language, their message is more profound, as the women\u2019s closing statements in court reveal.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cmiracle from God\u201d and backed his re-election. He pronounced that \u201cOrthodox Christians do not attend [protest] rallies\u201d. 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 .<\/p>\n \u201cOur church does not consider itself an enemy of the state,\u201d a leading Orthodox official, Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, said recently. \u201cThe 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\u201d. 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\u2019s building work had done 20 million roubles worth of damage to his extremely grand flat.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cunite 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\u201d. Christianity is about a search for truth \u201cand a constant overcoming of … what you were earlier,\u201d said Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. Among Orthodox leaders, lamented Maria Alyokhina, \u00a0\u201cthe Gospels are no longer understood as revelation\u201d but as a collection of quotations that can be manipulated for their own purposes.<\/p>\n Such statements may not have been as shocking as the yurodstvo<\/em> [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.<\/p>\n