The Yardstick Case Of Pussy Riot

We begin with an amusingly bland description from the intentionally-bland wikipedia: “Pussy Riot is a Russian feminist punk-rock collective that stages politically provocative impromptu performances in Moscow, on subjects such as the status of women in Russia, and most recently against the election campaign of Prime Minister Putin for president of Russia.”* In particular, they seem to dislike like that Putin has made an informal political alliance or understanding with the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church.

So as you may already know, the reason this punk rock group is presently a cause célèbre, and earning mentions on NPR (that earns double takes for treating the band’s name as utterly unremarkable) is their now-famous anti-Vladimir Putin cathedral performance:**

Let’s compare what’s happening in Russia to these young ladies to what we would expect would be happening to them had they done something similar in the United States.

In the United States, had this “collective” rushed the stage of a major church and performed their guerilla theater, they’d have been arrested and charged with trespass and disturbing the peace, both misdemeanors. The women would have been assigned lawyers at state expense and likely would have been released from custody on their own recognizance or with minimal bail within a day or less of being arrested.

Between then and their arraignments, they’d have been persuaded to plead guilty to the disturbing the peace charge in exchange for the trespass charge being dropped and a sentence consisting of “X” hours of community service for each of the performers. That is, unless some prosecutor or some judge along the way were to have said, “You know what? The only thing these ladies are guilty of is bad taste. Freedom of speech means something here, so get out here, girls, and try to show some better judgment in the future.” And it’s a more than reasonable possibility that would have happened, because a defense lawyer would certainly have made that motion somewhere along the way. So it would either end with a First Amendment motion to dismiss the whole thing or with a plea bargain to relatively mild community service.

And then, most everyone would have forgotten their silly stunt.

In theory, the owner of the church (because the church would not be government property, something about Russia that I do not assume to be true there) might have an action against them for trespass but would likely not pursue it because it would be more money than it would be worth to bother with such a lawsuit.

Their post facto claims that they didn’t want to offend anyone are too glib to be credible. They obviously did intend to offend, at least Putin supporters, and they could not but have thought that seizing the altar of a gender-segregated church and performing a punk rock song titled “Holy Shit” that includes lyrics translating to “shit, shit, shit of Lord God” would offend the faithful who had come there to worship. At some point you’d hope that one of their lawyers would explain Rule 1 to them — but there’s no guarantee of that since not all lawyers know or understand Rule 1 themselves, and it could very well have worked out that the whole thing would have ended before one of the defendants had a chance to even violate it.

But what actually happened is three of these ladies were arrested about a month after the incident, and then held for about five months in a jail. They were charged with “hooliganism,” the equivalent of a felony because it carries a sentence of up to seven years in prison. The very phrase “hooliganism” seems only to be used in Russia against people who riot after soccer games or people who embarrass the political authorities, by its very nature an inchoate and vague sort of criminal charge and its use here indicates that the embarrassment is what they are really being prosecuted for.

Which is why the song itself would not be a subject of prosecution here in the United States; not even the most regressive and pro-authority judge on our bench would think, even for a second, that public performance of an original song critical of the President or of a religious institution did not implicate the First Amendment. Russia’s 1993 Constitution includes a lengthy recital of absolute-sounding principles of human rights, things that we lovers of liberty ought to endorse and applaud:

Everyone shall be guaranteed the freedom of conscience, the freedom of religion, including the right to profess individually or together with other any religion or to profess no religion at all, to freely choose, possess and disseminate religious and other views and act according to them. … Everyone shall be guaranteed the freedom of ideas and speech. … The freedom of mass communication shall be guaranteed. Censorship shall be banned. … Citizens of the Russian Federation shall have the right to assemble peacefully, without weapons, hold rallies, meetings and demonstrations, marches and pickets. … Everyone shall be guaranteed the freedom of literary, artistic, scientific, technical and other types of creative activity, and teaching.

Yet, these women have been held for five months, with no bail, and the word “blasphemy” appears in nearly every media report of the trial. There is a hint that the lawyer is either inexperienced or otherwise not on an equal footing with the prosecutors: “In opening statements read by a defense lawyer, who sometimes struggled with the handwritten texts, they said they were protesting against Kirill’s political support for Putin and had no animosity toward the church or the faithful.” The last time I checked, Russia was a fully industrialized nation with computers; why would the lawyer be using handwritten notes? I’m sure there might be some good reasons; perhaps her clients gave her some notes, drafted in jail, right before the hearing. Even so, if I’d have been their lawyer, I’d have prepared my own statement after having met with my clients beforehand to discuss what defense strategy they wanted to pursue.

The legal proceedings themselves have at least one unreasonable dimension to them:

Monday’s court proceedings lasted about 11 hours with short breaks, and ended at about 10 p.m. Moscow time [6 p.m. GMT]. Group member Maria Alyokhina complained that the guards took the group to the detention facility late at night, leaving them little time for rest or preparation for future court sessions. [¶] “They were given no food to eat and were not allowed to sleep. It’s torture,” Alyokhina’s lawyer, Violetta Volkova, said.

“Torture” may be a bit of an exaggeration by Ms. Volkova, but I’d agree that an eleven-hour court session is unreasonably long for all involved and that especially towards the end of that time, everyone is going to be functioning not at their best. People have to eat every four to six hours and they have to go to the bathroom periodically; that’s just part of human physiology and if denied the opportunity to do those things, both body and mind function at less than optimum. Then again, there is a question regarding the neutrality of the court itself:

A defense lawyer for the musicians, Nikolai Polozov, said Medvedev’s comments were aimed at putting pressure on the court to “punish blasphemers”. [¶] “The court is being very one-sided, slanted towards the prosecution, which of course in our view is motivated exclusively by political bias in this case,” he said. [¶] Few Russians believe the country’s courts are independent, and Medvedev acknowledged during his 2008-2012 presidency that they were subject to political pressure.

So in the plus column, there is a trial going on, and the defendants have lawyers and the opportunity to speak through them and present evidence with which they might defend themselves. In the minus column, the proceedings are using unreasonable procedures and are before juicial officers who at least appear to be under the control of the same government prosecuting the defendants, and the charges appear to be in contravention to the Constitutional guarantees of human rights that the women appear to have been exercising.

And because the government is pressing down with its heavy boot of authority on these girls’ necks, it is calling international attention to itself. Impromptu punk rock protests in front of Russian embassies worldwide have been taking place. The Russian Federation itself is filled with controversy over the trial. There is no way that any who is not already a Putin supporter will view a guilty verdict as anything other than an injustice; the question is whether they will feel free enough to shrug it off as “the more things change, the more they stay the same” and compare this to something that would happened under Soviet rule, or whether they will get mad about it themselves and find a way to support the anyone-but-Putin candidate in the upcoming elections. By making a point out of prosecuting the punkers,Putin pushes people to remember them and perversely makes martyrs of them.

This, more than anything else, tells me that the Russians — at least the ones calling the shots — just plain don’t understand liberal democracy. Intellectually, they probably do; they’re educated people. But it seems to have not occurred to them that the best way of dealing with these protestors would have been to dismiss and ignore them. It is they, not the punkers, who have caused a stain on Russia’s reputation.

Post-Soviet Russia as a liberal democracy? The verdict appears to be, “They’re not there yet.” Watching them only take baby steps towards that goal is frustrating.

* And thus is created the challenge of finding an image matching the phrase “Pussy Riot” that isn’t going to raise too many eyebrows.

** I like the idea of the song more than their execution; they’re not the Replacements.