Via the Atlantic, Miriam Elder at Buzzfeed with history lessons on Pussy Riot, “holy fool” protest artists, and the connivance between Putin, the Orthodox Church, and Russian biker gangs:
… I asked Masha what this global tour, this Amnesty show, could achieve back in Russia. It’s a country ruled, for now, by the will of one man. Masha and Nadya have often said so themselves, not least when they called their release from prison a “PR stunt” carried out by Putin to win him points ahead of the Olympics. So when Steven Hawkins, the executive director of Amnesty International USA, says things like, “Amnesty’s network of activists were instrumental in the outcome of their case,” does that not undermine things?
“You can see it as naive or idealized,” Masha said, staring through the windshield onto the slushy streets of New York. “But with each action, you see that you’re doing what you exist for.”
Nadya was more blunt. She turned from her computer and said, “Why are you so cynical?”…
They would spend another few days in New York before finally flying back home to Moscow. What’s set to follow are endless days of filing documents with Russian judges, prison administrations, and human rights ombudsmen. Masha’s and Nadya’s days will be filled with papers and stamps and fax machines as they seek to make incremental improvements in the lives of Russia’s growing number of political prisoners. It’s a thankless task, but one to which they’re committed.
Masha took to Facebook late Thursday night to voice her frustration, linking to a piece in The New Yorker about the Amnesty show. They’re talking and no one is listening, she wrote. People focus on the messenger not the message.
“We start every interview abroad with the fact that people in Russia are being jailed politically for the May 6 case. And there have definitely been more than 50 interviews this week,” she wrote. “Then we see how afterwards, the subject of May 6 is consistently wiped out from the final texts and we decide to talk only about this case. We turn any talk about the Olympics or Ukraine toward our political prisoners,” she continued. “And they don’t hear us.” She thinks she understands why. It’s “not by any fault of their own, but because it’s our domestic political problem.”
But maybe the real reason lies deeper. Pussy Riot always insisted on anonymity, not wanting their faces or personal backgrounds to interfere with their message. Now that they’ve been unmasked, they are rock stars.
I remembered what Masha said, standing in the Amnesty International office, right after having landed at JFK. On the drive into the city, she’d received news from a prison in Mordovia and managed to write a quick complaint to the prison administration; a small success. Meanwhile, New York City was streaming past her outside the car window. “There was a certain dissonance,” she admitted. “Of course my head is spinning.”
Long Read: “What Does Pussy Riot Mean Now?”Post + Comments (37)