Pussy Riot in Translation

                This article centers on the Russian feminist performance group/band Pussy Riot, specifically on their February 21, 2012 event and its aftermath.  On February 21, 2012, 5 young women in bright dressed and tights with ski masks entered the Cathedral of Christ that Savior in Moscow, Russia. The women ran to the stage type area of the altar and began performing their song that began with " Virgin Mary, Mother of God, chase Putin out." Security grabbed Yekaterina Samutsevich, out of the cathedral before she could even start her performance and the other four women were rushed out of the cathedral after about a minute of their performance.

                After a period of hiding from arrest, 3 Pussy Riot members, Yekaterina Samutsevich, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Maria Alyokhina, were arrested and held without bail. The trial became an international sensation demonstrating the oppressive state of Russia and made Pussy Riot internationally famous. Alyokhina, Samutsevich, and Tolokonnikova received  two-year sentences for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.” During the trial, the prosecution picked and chose the lyrics it repeated in court, removing the parts of the song that were about Putin and focusing on the parts about the Orthodox Church in order to prove that Pussy Riot had committed an act of “religious hatred” rather than political protest. The women were also judged for exposing their bodies in a place where their bodies should be covered.

                Thier sentence produced international outrage and criticism from people like Amnesty International, Barack Obama, Madonna, Bjork, and other international celebrities, mostly musicians. The problem was that these people didn't really know what Pussy Riot was. Are they a musical group? Are they conceptual artists? No one really knew how to view them. Madonna and Bjork offered to play performances with Pussy Riot, but they refused because Pussy Riot doesn't want to perform as part of the capitalist system.

                Pussy Riot regained their popularity when Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina reported on the terrible conditions in prison. Tolokonnikova declared a hunger strike to raise awareness for the for the outrageous conditions in prison, a hunger strike for which she was eventually hospitalized. Even with all the popularity Pussy Riot was gaining internationally, they reached little sympathy in Russia and they might have actually done Putin a favor by strengthening support from core conservatives. Their performance was followed by discussion of sexualized corporal punishment, with suggestions of instead of being put in prison, the members of Pussy Riot should be spanked, pinched, stripped naked and whipped, covered in honey and feathers, and tossed out in the cold. These ideas are just highly sexualized and violent repercussions for little girls, instead of adult artists making a serious political statements.

                The article concluded with incidents happening to members of Pussy Riot. Now that Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina have been released from jail, some of their critics have managed to realize their sadistic fantasies. In Sochi during the Olympics, someone whipped the two women, and at a McDonald’s in Nizhny Novgorod, men threw trash and green antiseptic in their faces, calling them whores and telling them to go to America. In both cases, the men who attacked them did not cover their faces even though they were being filmed, and even though they were being filmed, no arrests were made.