STANDING UP TO TYRANNY

The Moral Courage Of Pussy Riot

The anti-Putin protest group returns to America with a show opening Jan. 27 in Los Angeles

A recent Pussy Riot show in Iceland included a video clip of a member of the group hiking up her dress and urinating on a portrait of Vladimir Putin. Could there be a better metaphor for what people worldwide might have liked to do since the invasion of Ukraine?

More of Pussy Riot’s unique style of Putin-baiting will be on display this month when member Nadya Tolokonnikova’s first American solo show opens at the esteemed Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Los Angeles.

The conceptual-art exhibit will include a video inspired by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It shows Tolokonnikova leading the burning of a portrait of Putin by women clad in black slips and Pussy Riot’s signature balaclavas, which people are asked to wear to the show.

It might be easier to dismiss such actions as political stunts if they had been one-offs for a collective that began as a rock band and released its first album, “Matriarchy Now!” in August. But for Pussy Riot, anti-Putin activism isn’t a side-line — it’s central to its identity.

“No rock band — if that’s what Pussy Riot is, and that’s really only a slice of what they do — has ever been as consistently politically active and agitated as these women,” the music critic Jim Sullivan wrote in 2021.

Pussy Riot burst into global view in 2012 with a performance called “Punk Prayer” at Moscow’s Orthodox Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Evading security guards, the electric guitar-carrying members moved about the sanctuary singing a chorus that included the words: “Banish Putin, Banish Putin!”

Tolokonnikova and bandmate Maria “Masha” Alyokhina were arrested, convicted of hooliganism, and imprisoned for nearly two years in separate but similarly torturous penal colonies. They staged hunger strikes to protest the inhumane conditions.

After their release, the two women stayed in Russia despite further arrests and harassment. Pussy Riot members gave interviews, hung rainbow flags outside government buildings, and rushed onto the pitch when Russia hosted the World Cup in 2018.

But the invasion of Ukraine made their activism harder, Alyokhina said in a recent interview.

“They created several new criminal articles to provide censorship of the invasion…it’s impossible to do or say anything,” she told the arts critic Oliver Basciano.

Alyokhina found a sign on her door accusing her of being a traitor, and “the authorities charged her with a newly created crime, ‘propaganda of Nazi symbolism,’ ” involving a 2015 social media post that showed swastikas and women in hijabs. Facing more prison time, she disguised herself as a food delivery worker and sneaked out of the apartment where she was staying.

Aided by travel documents from an EU country she won’t name, Alyokhina made a perilous three-day trip across Russia’s ally Belarus to Lithuania and ended up in Iceland. In Reykjavik she worked on the exhibit “Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia,” which included the video clip of a member urinating on Putin’s photo.

Tolokonnikova has also left Russia, though she won’t say where she lives. She’s been leading a campaign that has raised millions in cryptocurrency for Ukraine. It’s unclear whether she will appear at the solo show of her work, “Pussy Riot: Putin’s Ashes,” which will be on display at the Jeffrey Deitsh from Jan. 27–Feb. 3, 2023.

In the meantime, Alyokhina has kept speaking out, to American and other media, in high-profile interviews with journalists like CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

A theme of her comments is that because Russians aren’t free to determine their fate, the war in Ukraine demands an international solution. It’s an interventionist view that, as arts critic Basciano noted, clashes with that of many on the left who might share her views on other subjects, such as feminism and LGBTQ rights.

But Alyokhina has a response for those who say that deeper involvement by the West might lead to World War III.

“I have a question for the people who say that they are afraid of a third world war,” she told Basciano. “If Putin’s state wins this war, what do they think will happen next? It’s very obvious from history what will happen next. More countries will be attacked, and then there really will be a third world war.”

@janiceharayda is an award-winning critic and journalist who has been the book editor of Ohio’s largest newspaper and a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle. Her work has appeared in many major print and online media, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, and Salon.

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