Will Pussy Riot Get The Last Laugh?

Supporters of feminist punk band Pussy Riot hold posters reading 'I believe in justice!' outside a court building in Moscow on August 17, 2012. (ANDREY SMIRNOV/AFP

The prison sentence against the radical feminists chills freedom of speech but the backlash against the verdict might chill Putin as well. 

Russian summer doldrums were enlivened this year by the high-profile trial of three young women: Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich. Members of a radical feminist “performance art” collective named Pussy Riot, the three were ultimately sentenced to two years in a penal colony for the “hate crime” of performing in a priests-only section of Moscow's premier Orthodox cathedral an obscenity-laced “punk prayer” that called upon the Virgin Mary to rid Russia of Vladimir Putin.

Pussy Riot, formed about a year ago, is a breakaway group from Voina (War), whose politically charged (and sometimes vicious) street theater since 2005 has included actions like throwing live cats over the counter in a Moscow McDonald's restaurant “to break up the drudgery of the workers' daily routine,” and painting a giant penis on the side of a St. Petersburg drawbridge. They've had constant brushes with Russian law enforcement for activities that have sometimes caused genuine property damage, including the 2011 destruction of a police vehicle with a Molotov cocktail—which the group titled “Bonfire of the Vanities.”

But the Russian government had mostly treated them as a nuisance, and it had never before risked the exposure of a big public trial. Nor did Pussy Riot's early performances, including an impromptu anti-Putin “concert” in Red Square in January, earn them more than brief detentions. Indeed, when the three women were escorted out of Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior last February 21 after performing their 40-second “punk prayer” in the nearly empty church, police initially let them go.

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