Pussy Riot's final statements

08/15/12, The Economist

LAST Wednesday, in the culminating day of their rather rushed, nine-day trial, the three defendants from the punk-art collective “Pussy Riot” had a chance to read out their final statements to the court. The women, Maria Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich and Nadezdha Tolokonnikova, face three years in prison for hooliganism, stemming from their performance of a pointed and crass protest song called “Our Lady, Chase Putin Out!” inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in February. The verdict will come this Friday.

No matter the exact outcome the often bizarre, at times absurd trial has elevated the trio into the realm of global dissident celebrities. With their last words to the court, the young women added their own, surely durable contributions to a very particular brand of Russian protest speech: the “last word” in court. They spoke of art, of freedom, of a search for meaning, peppered with references to the Gospels and to Montaigne’s "Essays" and to “ontological humility”.

Their speeches prompted Kirill Serebrennikov, a noted film and theater director, to comment last week on the “rare oral genre of literature” contained in the last statements of the accused in politically motivated trials in Russia, from the victims of the Stalin show trials of the 1930s, to the poet Joseph Brodsky, to the former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovksy. As Mr Serebrennikov put it, the statements of the three women from Pussy Riot are “already a classic of the genre”.

One of the most frequent openings in that genre is the refusal to speak directly to the charges at hand or to even acknowledge the legitimacy of the court proceedings, and instead to use the opportunity to speak about other matters entirely. In his final statement in 1968, Yuri Galanskov, a poet and activist on trial for publishing various samizdat journals said that, “I see no reason right now to prove my innocence in terms of the presented charges,” as they were “absolutely unsubstantiated and untrue.” Vladimir Bukovsky, a dissident activist who documented the Soviet state’s abuse of psychiatric institutions for political reasons, told the court in his final statement in 1972 that he was not going to “touch on the legal side of the charges”, because to him, the whole trial was “groundless”.

The women of Pussy Riot took a similar approach. Usually in a closing statement, said Ms Samutsevich, a defendant is meant to repent, express regret or voice some attenuating circumstances for his or her crime. But in their case such an approach would be “completely unnecessary”, Ms Samutsevich said, so instead she would use her statement to “voice some thoughts”. For her part, Ms Tolokonnikova added that, “the three members of Pussy Riot are not the ones on trial here.”

Instead, the Pussy Riot defendants used their last statements as platforms to issue a sort of combined manifesto about the intersection of art and protest, and to position the band as a philosophical collective as much as a musical one. Ms Tolokonnikova explained Pussy Riot as “dissident art or political action that engages art forms.” She went on to say that Pussy Riot were “the students and heirs” to the poets and artists in the short-lived OBERIU absurdist collective in the 1920s and 30s, who “unintentionally proved that they were right to consider irrationality and senselessness the nerves of the era.”

Indeed, declarations on the meaning and practice of the artistic craft come up again and again in the history of last statements. Mr Sinyavsky, who was on trial in 1965 for publishing anti-Soviet material abroad along with Mr Daniel, spoke of the need to study literary forms, to understand that “word is not deed; the artistic image is relative, the author is not identical to the hero.” He went on to talk of the need to separate “agitation and propaganda” from “artistic literature”.

Perhaps the most famous exchange on the artistic profession in a Soviet or Russian courtroom came during the trial of Mr Brodsky for “social parasitism” in 1964 (the dialogue took place as part of questioning, not during Mr Brodsky’s final statement). “Who recognised you to be a poet?” the judge asked Mr Brodsky. “No one. And who put me in the ranks of humanity?” he answered. Mr Brodsky went on to say that his chosen profession was “from God”.

Most final statements end on a note of hope. At the last statement in his second trial in 2010, Mr Khodorkovksy called hope “the main thing in life”. He spoke of hope as “the main engine of big reforms and transformations” and worried of a moment when hope would be “supplanted by profound disillusionment”. Mr Bukovsky closed his last statement by finding hope in noticing that the “process of society’s spiritual enlightenment has already begun”, and that once started, “stopping it is impossible”. In his own way, Mr Galanskov, too, displayed a certain kind of hope: he closed his statement by suggesting that a future, yet unknown appeal to overturn the verdict against him would “play a large role in proving the huge moral potential of socialism.” (That was not to be: he died in 1972 in a labour camp.)

In court last week, the timbre of hope from the members of Pussy Riot came in their belief that they, even in handcuffs and in the defendant’s cage, enjoyed more freedom than their accusers. “Truth really does triumph over deception,” said Ms Tolokonnikova. “We can say everything we want,” she said, whereas, pointing at the prosecutors and court officials, “their mouths are sewn shut.” Judge Marina Syrova will have her turn to speak on Friday.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2012/08/russian-politics-0