The Null Device
2012/8/18
As the Pussy Riot Three prepare to join the civil dead in the Russian gulag, numerous artists in the West have condemned their sentence, some more self-aggrandisingly than others. For example, Glen Matlock of punk marketing breakthrough the Sex Pistols pointed out the similarities between Pussy Riot's protest against the Russian Orthodox Church's complicity in the Putin regime's authoritarianism and his own band's protest against Queen Elizabeth II's inhuman fascist regime, and the sacrifices both bands made for the righteousness of their causes:
"It's bad. I suppose it's similar in a way to what happened with our 'God Save The Queen' single in '77," he said. "But though there was a bit of violence against the band we didn't do two years. That Putin's a twat, isn't he?"Quite.
The Russian feminist punk collective Pussy Riot have, as expected, been found guilty, and sentenced to two years in a gulag, a sentence less than the 3-7 years the prosecution wanted, but still alarmingly severe given the nature of the incident. Given the brutality of the Russian prison system (in which almost half of the prisoners are ill with HIV or antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis and disfavoured prisoners, a category into which unrepentant enemies of the powers that be may end up being coerced, are singled out for brutal abuse), their chances of emerging two years later more or less OK don't look good.
The trial, if anything, has been a turning point, in that Russia has given up the pretence of being a liberal democracy, and publicly reasserted the Czarist autocratic model, with the Russian Orthodox church acting as a Caesaropapist arm of the absolute State. Der Spiegel has a piece on Russia's reembracing of autocracy:
In the summer of 1991, for example, when the Soviet realm was collapsing, Putin moved into his office in St. Petersburg and promptly had the portrait of Lenin removed and replaced with one of Peter the Great. A janitor had brought Putin two images of the czar. The first one depicted the young Peter, looking amiable and idealistic, a modernizer who wanted to open the "window to Europe" for his giant, backward country. Putin rejected the picture. Instead, he chose one of a serious-looking older czar, marked by many battles and conflicts, one who had expanded his realm with new conquests, and one whose rule was so ruthless that he had his own son tortured to death after accusing him of being involved in a conspiracy.Then again, as Twitter user @mrcolmquinn pointed out, "Next time you see a staged photo of Putin doing something macho remember he is scared of a non violent group of young women."
And in other news, Moscow's top court has banned gay parades for 100 years.