Why Pussy Riot Is The World’s Bravest Band

Alexei Navalny’s death again showed the courage of the protest group and its co-founder

Pussy Riot co-founder Nadya Tolokonnikova dyed her wedding cake black before she married her second husband in January. If that sounds brave, consider what she’s done in February.

Tolokonnikova had left Russia after an anti-Putin protest by her band led to her imprisonment for nearly two years in a penal colony. She’s been placed on the country’s “most wanted list,” faces arrest if she returns to see her family, and keeps secret where she lives today.

Yet a few weeks after her Los Angeles wedding, she took part in a demonstration outside the Russian embassy in Berlin that was protesting the death of the Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest critic, Alexei Navalny, in another penal colony. She told an interviewer:

“Navalny was my friend, but more than my friend, he was a beacon of hope for many residents, for millions of residents, who disagree with Putin but don’t have voices.”

You hear that kind of comment often after the death of a revered public figure. And Tolokonnikova made her remarks in an interview in a democracy a thousand miles from the Kremlin.

But foreign soil doesn’t protect Putin’s enemies. Two of the more recent examples: Double agent Sergei Skripal his daughter, Yulia, nearly died in Salisbury, England, after being poisoned with Novichok, a nerve agent developed in Russia. And Putin critic and Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko died in London after being poisoned with polonium-210.

The Berlin demonstration may have been the latest example of the courage of Tolokonnikova and the other Pussy Riot members who took part, wearing their signature brightly colored, ski-mask-like balaclavas. But the bravery of the group didn’t begin there.

Russian ‘ballots will be used as toilet paper’

In 2011, just before Putin became the Russian president, Pussy Riot members climbed scaffolding at a Moscow subway station and warned in a song that “Ballots will be used as toilet paper” in upcoming elections.

They later staged an anti-Putin protest in a Russian cathedral that led to the banishment of Tolokonnikova and bandmate Maria “Masha” Alyokhina to a penal colony. To protest unjust arrests, they stormed onto the field at the 2018 FIFA World Cup final wearing police uniforms.

Pussy Riot songs may be an acquired taste. An Associated Press reporter called them “badly recorded, based on simple riffs and scream-like singing.” A band member diplomatically told a Moscow newspaper that the group welcomed women with limited musical talents: “You don’t have to sing very well. It’s punk. You just scream a lot.”

Tolokonnikova aptly summed up the group when she told the music critic Jim Sullivan of the Boston station WBUR:

“It’s not a music band, it’s a movement. But it’s a movement that has a music project inside it. Some of the members could not care less about music, but for me it’s a priority because I’m leading the music project inside of Pussy Riot.”

The worse Putin looks, the better that movement looks for having taken a stand against him before his election. Last year Pussy Riot won the Woody Guthrie Award, given annually to an artist “who best exemplifies Woody Guthrie’s spirit and work by speaking for the less fortunate through music, film, literature, dance or other art forms and serving as a positive force for social change.”

With its protest in Berlin after the death of Alexei Navalny, Pussy Riot showed once again why it deserves honors like that one. Some may fault its music, but nobody can fault its moral courage.

Jan is an award-winning critic and journalist whose work has appeared in many national media.

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