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Title: Read & Riot
Author: Nadezhda Tolokonnikova
Date: 2018
Language: en
Topics: Pussy Riot, anarcha-feminism, how to, revolution, activism, guide
Source: Retrieved on 14th January 2020 from http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=7E6AD23300D55BED33AED5753AE67191

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova

Read & Riot

INTRODUCTION

preliminary statement

When I was fourteen, I showed up at a local newspaper’s office with a

piece I had written on pollution and climate change. They told me I was

a really nice little girl and not a bad writer, but wouldn’t I rather

write about the zoo? The piece on catastrophic pollution in my hometown

was not published. Oh well.

Many things have happened in my life since then, including my arrest and

the two years I spent in prison, but in fact nothing has seriously

changed. I keep asking uncomfortable questions. Here, there, and

everywhere.

These questions, while not always accompanied by answers, have always

led me to action. It seems to me that I have been doing actions all my

life. My friends and I began reclaiming public space and engaging in

political protest long ago, in 2007, when all of us were a laughable

seventeen or eighteen years old. Pussy Riot was founded in October 2011,

but it was preceded by five years that were chockablock with formal and

substantive research into the genre of actionism—five years of schooling

in how to escape from cops, make art without money, hop over a fence,

and mix Molotov cocktails.

I was born a few days before the fall of the Berlin Wall. One might have

thought at the time that after the assumed elimination of the Cold War

paradigm, we were going to live in peace. Hmm ... what we’ve seen, in

fact, is a cosmic rise in inequality, the global empowerment of

oligarchs, threats to public education and health care, plus a

potentially fatal environmental crisis.

When Trump won the US presidential election, people were deeply shocked.

What was in fact blown up on the 8^(th) of November 2016 was the social

contract, the paradigm that says you can live comfortably without

getting your hands dirty with politics. The belief that it only takes

your one vote every four years (or no vote at all: you’re above

politics) to have your freedoms protected. This belief was torn to

pieces. The belief that institutions are here to protect us and take

care of us, and we don’t need to bother ourselves with protecting these

institutions from being eroded by corruption, lobbyists, monopolies,

corporate and government control over our personal data. We were

outsourcing political struggle like we outsourced low-wage labor and

wars.

The current systems have failed to provide answers for citizens, and

people are looking outside of the mainstream political spectrum. These

dissatisfactions are now being used by right-wing, nativist,

opportunist, corrupted, cynical political players. The same ones who

helped create and stoke all of this now offer salvation. That’s their

game. It’s the same strategy as defunding a program or regulatory agency

they want to get rid of, then holding up its resulting ineffectiveness

as evidence that it needs to be folded.

If nationalist aggression, closed borders, exceptionalism of any kind

really worked for society, North Korea would be the most prosperous

country on earth. They have never really worked, but we keep buying it.

That’s how we got Trump, Brexit, Le Pen, Orbán, etc. In Russia,

President Putin is playing these games too: he exploits the complex of

rage, pain, and impoverishment of the Russian people caused by the shock

economy and the Machiavellian privatization and deregulation that took

place in the 1990s.

I may not be a president or congressman. I don’t have a lot of money or

power. But I will use my voice to humbly say that looking back on the

twentieth century, I find nationalism and exceptionalism really creepy.

Now more than ever we need to take back power from the politicians,

oligarchs, and vested interests that have put us in this position. It’s

about time we quit behaving like we’re supposed to be the last species

on earth.

The future has never promised to be bright, or progressive, or whatever.

Things may get worse. They have been getting worse in my country since

2012, the year Pussy Riot was put behind bars and Putin became president

for the third time.

No doubt Pussy Riot was very lucky that we were not forsaken and

forgotten when we were silenced by prison walls.

Every single interrogator who talked to us after our arrest recommended

we (a) give up, (b) shut up, and (c) admit that we love Vladimir Putin.

“Nobody cares about your fate; you’ll die here in prison and no one will

even know about it. Don’t be stupid—say that you love Putin.” However,

we insisted that we don’t love him. And many supported us in our

stubbornness.

I often feel guilty about the amount of support people gave Pussy Riot.

We had too much of it. There are many political prisoners in our

country, and unfortunately, the situation is getting worse. Their cases

don’t attract the attention they surely deserve. Unfortunately, prison

terms for political activists are seen as normal in public

consciousness. When nightmares happen every day, people stop reacting to

them. Apathy and indifference win.

The struggles, the failures, are not a good enough reason for me to stop

our activism. Yes, social and political shifts don’t work in linear

ways. Sometimes you have to work for years for the smallest result. But

sometimes, on the contrary, mountains can be turned upside down in a

second. You never really know. I prefer to keep trying to achieve

progressive changes humbly but persistently.

we are superpowers

In the United States, there is a lot of talk about Russia nowadays. But

not many know what Russia really looks and feels like. What’s the

difference between a dangerously beautiful country full of mind-blowing,

creative, and dedicated people and its kleptocratic government? Many

wonder what that’s like—to live under the rule of a misogynist

authoritarian man with almost absolute power. I can give a little

glimpse into that world.

The Russian-American relationship is a real piece of work. With a

strange quasi-masochistic twitch, I enjoy the journey I’m making in the

shadows of these two empires. My existence twinkles somewhere between

these giant imperialist machines.

I don’t care about borders (though borders do care about me). I know

there is power in an intersectional, inclusive, international union of

those who care about people more than money or status.

We’re more than atoms, separated and frightened by TV and mutual

distrust, hidden in the cells of our houses and iPhones, venting anger

and resentment at ourselves and others. We don’t want to live in a world

where everyone is for sale and nothing is for the public good. We

despise this cynical approach, and we’re ready to fight back. More than

that, we are not just resisting, we’re proactive. We live according to

our values right now.

When I try to find words to talk about a more holistic approach to world

politics, when I suggest thinking about the future of the whole planet

rather than the ambitions and wealth of nations, I inevitably start to

sound naive and utopian to many people. I thought for a while that it

was because of my poor personal communication skills, and maybe that is

part of the problem. But I see this failure of words as a symptom of

something larger. We never developed the language to discuss the

well-being of the earth as a whole system. We identify people by where

they are from, while never learning how to talk about people as part of

a larger human species.

We’ve survived the Cuban missile crisis, etc., etc. And now, we’re

happily falling back into the ancient Cold War paradigm. The Bulletin of

the Atomic Scientists has set the Doomsday Clock to two and a half

minutes to midnight. Global threats are the worst they’ve been since the

US Star Wars initiative in the 1980s. We’re so excited to be able again

to blame our counterpart, an external enemy.

When two people fight for a long time, they end up looking more and more

alike. You mirror your opponent, and it’s always possible that sooner or

later you’ll be indistinguishable from her/him. It’s an endless game of

copycat. It may be good for you when your opponent is a person of great

qualities, but when it comes to a relationship between empires, the

result is usually rather ugly.

When Putin needs to introduce a shitty new law to Russians, he refers to

US practices. When Russian police are allowed to behave violently toward

protesters, they say, “Why are you complaining? Look at America. You’d

have been killed by a cop already if you protested like that there.”

When I’m advocating for prison reform in Russia and say that no human

being should be tortured and deprived of medication, Russian officials

tell me, “Look at Guantánamo, it’s even worse!” When Putin pours more

money into the military-industrial complex instead of taking care of an

infrastructure that’s falling apart, he says, “Look, NATO! Look, drones!

Look, bombs in Iraq!”

True. Terribly true. My question here, I guess, is, Who made this

decision to copycat the worst, and when?

When my government hires thugs to beat me and burn my eyes with a

caustic green medical liquid, they say (a) you’re an anti-Russian bitch,

(b) your goal is to destroy Russia, (c) you’re getting paid by Hillary,

(d) go back to America. And when someone in America challenges power and

the official story line in a fundamental way, they’re labeled

anti-American. As Noam Chomsky says (and he knows), “So like in the

Soviet Union, ‘anti-Sovietism’ was considered the gravest of all

crimes.... As far as I know, the United States is the only free society

that has such a concept.... ‘Americanism’ and ‘anti-Americanism’ and

‘un-Americanism’ ... are concepts which go along with ‘harmony’ and

getting rid of those ‘outsiders.’”

It’s a gloomy show. It makes you think that politics are boring and

useless, and you don’t need to engage because you’ll never change

anything. But I say, we can clean it up. Just use actual human language.

It’s simple: health care, education, access to free-of-censorship

information. Stop spending our resources on drones, ICBMs, and

excessively voyeuristic intelligence services. Pay people who work; we

are not slaves. These are rights, not privileges. All this is

achievable—change is much more doable than we’ve been taught to think.

Putin is still in power, but not because everybody loves his governance.

We’re aware we’re getting poorer while Putin and his crew are getting

richer and richer. But (there’s always a “but”) what are we gonna do,

you and me? We are powerless to change anything. So they say.

If you have to point to an enemy, our greatest enemy is apathy. We’d be

able to achieve fantastic results if we were not trapped by the idea

that nothing can be changed.

What we lack is confidence that institutions can actually work better

and that we can make them work better. People don’t believe in the

enormous power that they have but for some reason don’t use.

Václav Havel, a dissident, an artist, and a writer, spent five years in

a Soviet prison camp as punishment for his political views, and later,

after the fall of the USSR, became the president of Czechoslovakia.

Havel wrote a brilliant, inspirational piece called “The Power of the

Powerless” (1978). The essay came into my life miraculously.

After I received my two-year prison sentence, I was transported to one

of the harshest labor camps in Russia, Mordovia. After only four weeks

of highly traumatic labor in the camp (when I still had more than a year

and a half of my sentence in front of me), I became lifeless and

apathetic. My spirit was broken. I was obedient because of the endless

abuse, trauma, and psychological pressure. I thought, What can I do

against this totalitarian machine, isolated from all my friends and

comrades, hopelessly alone, with no chance of getting out of here

anytime soon? I’m in the hands of people who own the prison, who aren’t

held accountable for the injuries and deaths of prisoners. They

literally own us. We’re their wordless and lifeless slaves, disposable,

somnambulistic shadows—shadows of what’s left of human beings.

But I’m a lucky woman.

Because I found “The Power of the Powerless.” I read it, hiding it from

the prison officers. Then, tears of joy. And the tears brought my

confidence back. We’re not broken until we allow ourselves to be broken.

Tears brought my courage back.

Havel wrote:

Part of the essence of the post-totalitarian system is that it draws

everyone into its sphere of power, not so they may realize themselves as

human beings, but so they may surrender their human identity in favor of

the identity of the system, that is, so they may become agents of the

system’s general automatism and servants of its self-determined

goals....

And further: so they may learn to be comfortable with their involvement,

to identify with it as though it were something natural and inevitable

and, ultimately, so they may—with no external urging—come to treat any

non-involvement as an abnormality, as arrogance, as an attack on

themselves, as a form of dropping out of society. By pulling everyone

into its power structure, the post-totalitarian system makes everyone an

instrument of a mutual totality, the auto-totality of society.

Words are powerful: Havel’s essay had a profound impact in Eastern

Europe. Zbigniew Bujak, a Solidarity activist, said:

This essay reached us in the Ursus factory in 1979 at a point when we

felt we were at the end of the road. Inspired by KOR [the Polish

Workers’ Defense Committee], we had been speaking on the shop floor,

talking to people, participating in public meetings, trying to speak the

truth about the factory, the country, and politics. There came a moment

when people thought we were crazy. Why were we doing this? Why were we

taking such risks? Not seeing any immediate and tangible results, we

began to doubt the purposefulness of what we were doing. Shouldn’t we be

coming up with other methods, other ways?

Then came the essay by Havel. Reading it gave us the theoretical

underpinnings for our activity. It maintained our spirits; we did not

give up, and a year later—in August 1980—it became clear that the party

apparatus and the factory management were afraid of us. We mattered.

When deeds are faltering, we find words to inspire us. So add this to

your checklist: remember to turn on your confidence. You do have power.

Together, as a community or a movement, we can (and will) make miracles.

words, deeds, heroes

What follows are some rules, tactics, and strategies I have found useful

in my own life. You must find your own way, but I hope you’ll find

something interesting in how I found mine.

I believe in the unity of theory and practice, of words and deeds. In

the beginning was the word, but deeds followed closely, as we all know.

This applies to my life as well. So I have written pieces about what

inspires me, or depresses me, or infuriates me. I also undertake actions

according to my beliefs, and each side of the equation—deeds and

words—grows and reinforces and shines a light on the other. Thus, the

structure of each rule in the book will look like this:

• Words

• Deeds

• Heroes

Watch out—magic boxes may appear from time to time.

Magic, witchcraft, and miracles are crucial in any fight for justice.

Major people’s movements, like the universe itself, don’t work according

to simple linear logic (I give you one dollar, you give me one piece of

justice). Understanding this will allow you to retain enough openness

and the naive ability to keep being amazed, keep wandering, and be

thankful for everything you’ve experienced. That includes prison terms.

The nonlinear logic of these social movements requires activists to be

attentive, sensitive, grateful, and open-minded creatures. They are

pirates and witches. They believe in magic.

Rule № 1. BE A PIRATE

Look for the truth that explodes existing boundaries and definitions.

Follow your instincts and you’ll get a chance to break prevailing rules

so beautifully you may even end up establishing a new norm, a new

paradigm. Nothing frozen is perfect.

In my own country I am in a far off land.

I am strong but have no power.

I win all yet remain a loser.

At break of day I say goodnight.

When I lie down I have great fear of falling.

FRANÇOIS VILLON

I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main

interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in

the beginning.

MICHEL FOUCAULT

Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without

regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is

to do good.

THOMAS PAINE, RIGHTS OF MAN <?quote>

• ** Words

• *** pirate people’s republic

“I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main

interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in

the beginning.” So says Michel Foucault.

If you are eager to eat your old identity and turn it into fertilizer

for somebody else, you’re going to burn, and your flesh will be

violently and rudely scattered all over the planet, and birds will peck

your liver. But it’s rewarding. You’re going to rise from the ashes,

renewed, young, and beautiful—forever.

I want to intensify my life. I want to reach maximum density, live nine

lives in one. It’s a search for lives, not experiences. As I see it, a

search for experiences is a Diet Coke, fat-free version of seeking to

have nine lives in one. There’s no time when I’m just living by default,

just because I was told “it’s supposed to be like that.” I don’t take

that as a valid statement.

Punk culture has taught us that being moderate and restrained is often

the wrong choice. When your intuition is telling you to leave moderation

behind, let it go.

• *** the international waters of piracy

I’m suspicious about all kinds of limitations that have been imposed on

me. Sex, nationality, race, hair color, the timbre of my voice, the way

I fuck or brush my teeth.

If I can be helpful at all, it is by offering the perspective of a human

being who’s not particularly Russian, or Chinese, or American, who’s

trying to live and breathe in her own way.

The perspective of a pirate.

As a pirate, I’m a sailor and an adventurer. But as a pirate I know too

how crucial it is to have your community, people you trust who are

committed enough to walk with you on a guerrilla’s path, if needed. My

home is in my heart and in the hearts of those in my tribe.

NEVER TRY TO GIVE A DEFINITION OF PUNK

Being a punk is about constantly surprising. It’s not about having a

mohawk hairstyle and keeping it your whole life. Being a punk means

systematically changing the image of yourself, being elusive, sabotaging

cultural and political codes.

Punk is a method. Bach and Handel are my main punk influences. I don’t

like the concept of a punk subculture, where you are really stuck in the

image. The performance artist Alexander Brener criticized a person who

wears skinny jeans, tears them, and considers himself punk as fuck. Punk

demands more. On the first day, tear your jeans; on the second, wear

stolen Louboutin shoes; on the third, shave your head; and on the

fourth, grow butt-length hair somehow. Undermine, transform, exceed

expectations. That’s what punk means to me.

Another job of mine is to be an investigator of life and political

orders. My art is to sharpen my mind and keep my eyes open and clear. I

promised myself to remain critical and, if I have to, be ready to

perform coldhearted analysis, dissection, penetration.... At the same

time I oblige myself to stay loving, open, and connected: sympathy and

compassion are the only truly reliable friends for someone who thrills

at being finely tuned to the world, who wants to resonate with the time

she lives in, who’s thirsty to hear the music and harmonies of the

universe that are being played on an incomprehensible variety of

strings.

“The intellectual as buccaneer—not a bad dream,” notes the philosopher

Peter Sloterdijk writing about Pasolini’s Pirate Writings. “We have

scarcely ever seen ourselves that way. The buccaneer cannot assume fixed

standpoints because he is constantly moving between changing fronts.”

It’s fascinating to see when somebody is trying to think about reality

in the clumsy and constipated terms that empires use. I never got it.

I’ve never understood the empty talk about enemies of the state,

external enemies ... the list is pretty much endless, for example:

................... ←insert your name here

................... ←insert your mom’s name here

When you want to see and tell the truth, you’re leaving the area of the

known (by default), so I can guarantee you’ll look ridiculous, sometimes

silly, not be well respected at all; and you should let yourself love

your failures, because they constitute your path to the sublime. Enter

the international waters of the unknown, where the only business is

being a pirate.

Nothing frozen is perfect. The queer, liquid world is real; it’s nice

here. Otherwise you have what? A belief that dog people should marry dog

people and cat people should marry cat people?

As a liquid you’re free to take any shape and to mix with other liquids

too. It’s no fun to be ice; I’d rather be water. Seduce and let yourself

be seduced into radical questioning.

• ** Deeds

• *** no borders

I was born in Norilsk, a very industrial and very Siberian city. Siberia

is the shape of a giant cock. My hometown is located at the head. Every

summer I’d go to my grandma’s place, which is right between the balls

and a four-hour flight away.

The air in my hometown consists of heavy metals with a little oxygen.

Life expectancy is ten years less than in other regions of Russia, the

risk of cancer two times higher.

I grew up around persistent, independent, focused adults. My mother is a

maximalist and has an incredible work ethic, as does her husband, my

stepfather. My mom can point at a dog and tell you it’s a cat, and you

know, you’ll believe her. She has a gift to convince and lead. My father

is in charge of all the divine insanity in my life. He’s a writer,

artist, cynical romantic, stoic, nomad, adventurer ... and, of course,

pirate. “When she was four,” my father writes about me, “Nadya

absolutely, consciously, strictly, and business-like said to me, ‘Papa!

Never force me anything.’ I don’t remember what the occasion was, but I

immediately understood it was a declaration of independence. And I have

never ‘forced her anything.’ I have only motivated her. My point of

departure was her inner willingness to do something. I cultivated her

from within, like a crocus blossom.”

My father is not a religious person in any usual fashion, but he

understands the importance of culture and a language that speaks about

transcendent experience. We would visit Catholic, Protestant, and

Orthodox churches, mosques, synagogues, and even Hare Krishna events

when I was a kid. My father imposed no dogmas on me. We would freely,

joyfully, playfully discuss our different impressions and write down

some of them.

Where am I from? I’m from the most polluted city on the planet. I’m from

the Milky Way. I’m from Russian literature and Japanese theater. I’m

from every city where I fought or fucked. I’m from jail and I’m from the

White House. I’m from punk records and from Bach’s compositions, from my

obsession with turquoise, coffee, and loud music.

When your teen crush is Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Russian revolutionary

poet, you’re fucked. Sooner or later you will end up in politics. I was

fourteen years old, and I thought the coolest thing in the universe was

doing investigative journalism.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” my parents’ friends would ask

me. I don’t like the whole idea of the question, that I have to define

right now once and for all who I’m going to be. “I want to study

philosophy,” I’d say.

“But that’s insane, who will pay you to be a philosopher? There is no

such job as a philosopher.” If I’m refusing to define myself anyway,

what makes you think I’d want to be labeled for a monetary reason? I

didn’t feel ready to wrap myself in glittery paper to be sold.

I didn’t read leftist books at that time. But our teenage intuitions

usually are purely to the left (and we’re right about them). I’m aware

that I do sound fantastically naive, but I’m not going to say sorry for

that. Naïveté eventually brought me perhaps the best things in my life.

“I don’t care. I’m going to study philosophy.”

“Why?”

“Because philosophy makes me happy?”

I left my Siberian town the second I got my high school diploma. I

jumped on a plane to Moscow.

Being a teenage pirate is hard. You’re struggling to find out who you

are. You’re bound by rules and bombarded with instructions and advice.

But I wasn’t about to be defined by anyone else. That was my job, and I

took care of it.

• ** Heroes

• *** diogenes

Diogenes of Sinope (aka Diogenes the Cynic or Diogenes the Dog) was a

Greek philosopher born in the fifth century BCE, about 2,400 years ago.

Living a life of poverty and simplicity, speaking truth to power and not

giving a shit about what anyone thought of him, he has plenty to teach

us today. He would walk around in daylight using a lantern to help him

find an “honest man.”

One account says Diogenes was inspired by a mouse that runs here and

there, not driven by looking for shelter or fancy food but simply being

a mouse. Diogenes slept in his cloak wherever he wanted, talked to

anyone, and lived in a giant wine jar. He was a “dog philosopher,” a

Cynic, which comes from the Greek word κυνικός—kynikos, or “dog-like.”

Diogenes didn’t like Plato, a contemporary of his. The biographer

Diogenes Laërtius shows Diogenes criticizing Plato for being too full of

himself and interrupting Diogenes’s lectures to make a point. Plato’s

crime was turning philosophy into pure theory, while for Socrates and

Diogenes philosophy was a combination of theory and practice. It was

real life. The father of philosophy, Socrates never wrote a line in his

life. Like Diogenes, Socrates liked walking around drinking and

chatting. Plato and Aristotle are responsible for our modern idea of

philosophy as something written on a piece of paper. But there was an

alternative branch of philosophy, practical philosophy, when a

philosopher taught by example, by his way of life. Deeds, not words.

When I was eighteen, I tried to convince my professors on the

philosophical faculty of Moscow State University to let me pass exams by

doing actions instead of writing a paper. We reached a compromise and I

wrote a paper on action philosophy.

Diogenes is credited by the playwright Lucian with the first known use

of the phrase “citizen of the world.” Diogenes is asked where he is from

and he says, “Everywhere ... a citizen of the world.” Ever the

subversive, Diogenes was saying that he belonged to the world of ideas

and not to any artificial political entity. Diogenes was a man with no

stable social identity, the exile and outcast par excellence.

He was even unimpressed by Alexander the Great, the legendary conqueror.

According to Plutarch, Greek statesmen and other celebrity philosophers

had fawned over Alexander when he announced a military campaign against

Persia. But not Diogenes. Alexander went to look for Diogenes and found

him sunbathing. Alexander asked Diogenes if he wanted anything, and

Diogenes said yes, stop blocking my sun. Fortunately, Alexander wasn’t

offended. Another time, Alexander the Great said that if he didn’t have

to be Alexander, he’d be Diogenes.

Diogenes urinated on people who insulted him, defecated in the theater,

and masturbated in public. On the indecency of this act he said, “If

only it were as easy to banish hunger by rubbing my belly.”

Diogenes was quite happy to be called a dog. After all, he said (as

quoted by Diogenes Laërtius), like a hound, “I fawn on those who give me

anything, I yelp at those who refuse, and I set my teeth in rascals.”

We followers of Diogenes behave like dogs too: we eat and make love in

public, go barefoot, and sleep in tubs and at crossroads.

He had no interest in money or status, and he thought that spending life

seeking artificial pleasures only made you miserable. But it’s possible

to find pleasure in the actual act of rejecting pleasure. So Diogenes

asked statues for money to get used to being turned down. He rolled in

hot sand in the summer and hugged frozen statues in winter to toughen

himself up. When he did allow himself to relax, it was the simplest,

most natural pleasures he looked for.

Diogenes Laërtius says of Diogenes, “Being asked what was the most

beautiful thing in the world, he replied, ‘Freedom of speech.’”

Diogenes died like a pirate too, on his own terms. Nearing ninety, he

killed himself by holding his breath. (Either that or he ate bad octopus

or died from a dog bite, which is too ironic for Diogenes the Dog.) It

is said he died on the very same day as Alexander the Great.

• * Rule № 2: DO IT YOURSELF

If you want to change something, you need to know how things work. An

activist should know this. You’re learning about how things work by

practicing them. Who wants to be that alienated (wo)man from the ivory

tower? Try. Win. Fail. Put on different roles, masks, personas. Don’t

wait until you’re told what you’re supposed to do. Choose by yourself.

And do it yourself.

The whole punk ethic was do-it-yourself, and I’ve always been very

literal, especially as a kid. When they said that anybody can do this, I

was like, “OK, that’s me.”

MICHAEL STIPE

To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed,

law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at,

controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by

creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do

so.

PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON, GENERAL IDEA OF THE REVOLUTION IN THE NINETEENTH

CENTURY

Anarchy is law and freedom without force.

Despotism is law and force without freedom.

Barbarism is force without freedom and law.

Republicanism is force with freedom and law.

IMMANUEL KANT, ANTHROPOLOGY FROM A PRAGMATIC POINT OF VIEW

• ** Words

• *** the diy ethos

The do-it-yourself ethos teaches you that it’s good to use your own

brain and hands. The DIY ethos keeps you sane: it saves you from

alienation. The DIY ethos says that it’s not fun to sleepwalk through

your life. It opens up endless possibilities, including the pleasure of

self-education. The DIY ethos tells you that each (wo)man is an artist.

The DIY ethos makes you happy.

Alienation happens when you have no idea about the bigger picture, when

you have no idea how the whole system works, but you mechanically

perform your duties. The DIY ethos encourages you to explore. There is

nothing in this world that’s beyond your ability to comprehend. The DIY

principle does not tell you that you never need experts. Sometimes you

need someone who has knowledge in a particular area, but the DIY

principle tells you that not only experts can deal with problems.

Your lifelong hassle has been about getting control over your day-to-day

life and therefore having freedom. The DIY ethos reminds us that the

most beautiful and life-changing things do not follow the logic of big

institutions. Love, thunder, sunrise, birth, and death, for example. The

DIY ethos is the decorporatization of the way you perceive reality. If

you learn that you’re the owner and manager of your every second, you’ll

become a pretty dangerous anarchist-hijacker.

We made Pussy Riot because we were inspired by riot grrrl punk zines.

How did a twenty-year-old Russian girl who lived under Putin in 2010

happen to feel so deeply connected with the American riot grrrl movement

from the 1990s? Who knows, but that’s what happened with me. It’s a pure

manifestation of the power and mystery of art.

Art creates connections and bonds that are not based on blood, nation,

or territory.

• *** junk politics

People think that junk is just about food, but there is junk music, junk

movies, and yes, junk politics.

Junk culture convinced us to think that shit that kills us is somehow

entertaining and amusing. Cola that is produced from highly acidic and

poisonous gray dust and Trump, who’s made from cheap bigotry and pure

hatred, work according to the same logic. Following this logic, millions

of impoverished workers in America keep voting for the most dangerous

organization in human history, the Republican Party.

Minimizing junk, maximizing joy and understanding are a question of

honor to me. At a certain point you say, fuck this shit, we can do

better by ourselves. The DIY principle might help here: it makes you

analyze, question, come up with alternatives. Start from scratch.

Bernie Sanders writes in Our Revolution about an experience he had in

South Carolina. He was talking with a young black man who was working at

McDonald’s: “He informed me that, to him and his friends, politics was

totally irrelevant to their lives. It was not something they cared about

or even talked about.” Like most Republican states, South Carolina had

rejected the Medicaid expansion provided by the Affordable Care Act.

People survive or die without access to health care, but they still

refuse to see how their participation in politics is directly connected

with their lives (and deaths). And then Bernie writes (it’s simple and

genius): “Frankly, this lack of political consciousness is exactly what

the ruling class of this country wants. The Koch brothers spend hundreds

of millions to elect candidates who represent the rich and the powerful.

They understand the importance of politics.” The Koch brothers and

Putin’s mob don’t want you to check on what’s going on with the money

they use their political influence to steal from us, the taxpayers, in

government subsidies and other concessions. It’s understandable.

The quality of political discussion has turned into junk. It’s all very

comforting for the Koch brothers and Putin’s friends, who can keep doing

their shady deals while we’re distracted with idiocy.

Across the globe, the same political trends are spreading like a

sexually transmitted disease.

In Russia there is no real politics. My country is a territory run by

thugs, and they do whatever they please. They’re not interested in

public debates or real public opinion; they know that convenient public

opinion can be easily manufactured. It’s easy to make an opinion poll in

Russia: the administration picks numbers they like and announces them

through state-controlled media. So we can’t really expect to have

high-quality debates in Russia. We can’t expect it, but that doesn’t

mean we’re not trying to re-create Russian political discourse by

ourselves.

I remember thinking that in other countries, where unfake elections are

going on, everything must be so different from what I’ve seen in my

country and much more complicated, and I will never be able to

understand it. I was nervous when I talked about politics in front of,

say, American students. Everything changed (for America and me) when

Trump showed up. He dumbed down American political discourse. He did it

bigly.

I used to pay more attention to details and facts in the United States,

but after Trump, I lost any wish to do so. I became lazy in a way. I

don’t feel that I even have to read the news in Russia every day,

because everything is clear: we have selfish thugs in power who want to

make our country authoritarian again, and they are doing that in order

to extract as much profit as they can for their own pockets.

The Trump phenomenon criminally simplifies political conversation. I was

ruined by the level of the presidential debates. Keep your words close

to your deeds, be clear and coherent, don’t try to bullshit me (I’m not

an idiot though I may look like one), serve the people, be

transparent—or fuck off. You’re public property when you’re an elected

representative; if you don’t like it, fuck off again and don’t go into

politics. Or, as Noam Chomsky puts it, “That is what I have always

understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the

burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be

dismantled if that burden cannot be met.”

Isn’t it both funny and desperate when punks end up being those who

require a work ethic and professionalism from politicians?

We surely need more of the DIY ethos in politics. The DIY ethos in

politics means more direct democracy. There are certain issues that

citizens can and should decide by themselves.

REBEL’S GUIDE

At some point I was holding master classes on shoplifting in Moscow.

It is more convenient to work in pairs in supermarkets. You put the

groceries in a cart, find a safe place in the store, and put them in

your bag. Expensive and compact items like meat and cheese are easier to

pack on your back or stomach, cinching them tight with your belt. Then

you grab a loaf of bread or box of oatmeal from the shelf and head for

the checkout counters. You pay for the bread or the oatmeal.

When you exit the supermarket and turn the corner, put the stolen items

in your camping backpack. Your shoulder bag should be ready for the next

store; always keep it empty. You must not go into the next store with

items taken from the previous store. If you are found and detained, the

list of stolen goods will include what you brought in with you.

• *** lady simplicity: poor art

I have a lust for simplicity, purity, and minimalism of form in art. I

like to consider this approach to art as the art of simple living.

Art is being overproduced, overpolished. The market overproduces pieces

of art because of its own fears. The fears of the market are simple:

What if not enough products are sold?

It breaks my heart when young artists who are not really involved in the

market are working hard to overproduce. They are castrating themselves,

diluting their own works of art. They’re forced by the market-driven art

world to start down their artistic paths with money hanging over their

heads. They have to think about where they can suck up more money by

producing more art instead of thinking about the art itself—the shadows,

the sounds, the colors.

These kids spend tens of thousands of dollars on equipment they don’t

even need. I understand why Sony or Time Warner needs a RED camera and

professional lighting. The entertainment industry is an industry. It’s a

factory, fast-food art, mass produced. To make a shitty hamburger for

McDonald’s you need to have a factory, and you need giant, expensive

facilities to produce a piece of shitty art. So I understand why Sony

needs CGI, but I don’t really understand why I and other artists who are

not connected with corporations need to reproduce corporate aesthetics.

Nevertheless, I see more and more outsiders who, instead of developing

their own radically new path, are copying deadly mechanical and

overproduced aesthetics. If you think you need thousands of dollars to

make a video, it means you were fooled. It’s the idea, vision, feeling,

and integrity that counts. With or without money.

It’s all about the idea, or skill, or passion, or courage, or radical

honesty without any glitter or special effects. With zero unnecessary

gestures or expensive equipment. Art requires hellish amounts of

concentration and self-discipline, and you’re totally in charge—there’s

nobody around to tell you what to do. There are no safety belts. No

insurance or guarantee. But that’s where the edge is.

MONEY ACTION!

• Vote with your money. Every time we spend our money on something, we

vote for this thing to exist in our world. Purchasing something sends a

message to the marketplace, affirming the product, its ecological

impact, its process of manufacture. Money is power, and with this power

comes responsibility. If we spend our money differently, we can change

the world.

• Live beneath your means. It provides a sense of security to live on

less than you earn. It also proves that you are not an insatiable

consumer.

• Avoid debt. Beware of credit cards. Banks are generally very eager to

offer us credit, because it’s a good way to chain us to them. Beware of

debt.

• The 30-day money experiment. Spend a month taking note of everything

you purchase. At the end of the month, categorize your expenses into

rent, food, electricity, wine, coffees, lunches, etc., then multiply

those categories by twelve to get a rough idea of the yearly cost of

each of the categories. Small things add up to significant sums over a

year. This means that small changes in spending habits can produce

significant savings.

• Rethink your spending. Perhaps by spending less or more carefully you

will be able to work less? Consider reducing your working hours. Many

people are locked into forty-hour-per-week jobs even though they’d

prefer to work shorter hours and receive less money. This locks people

into over-consuming lifestyles. In Holland there is a law that allows

employees to reduce their working hours simply by asking their employer.

The employer is required to accept this request unless there is a

sufficiently good business reason to deny it (which happens in less than

5 percent of cases). By protecting part-time employment, Holland has

produced the highest ratio of part-time workers in the world.

(Adapted from The Simpler Way: A Practical Action Plan for Living More

on Less by Samuel Alexander, Ted Trainer, and Simon Ussher.)

• ** Deeds

• *** kill the sexist

We created Pussy Riot out of confusion. My friend Kat and I had been

invited to give a lecture. We told the organizers the topic would be

“Punk Feminism in Russia.” We started preparing for the lecture the

night before and suddenly discovered that Russian punk feminism did not

exist. There was feminism, and there was punk, but there was no punk

feminism. The lecture was less than a day away. There was only one

solution: invent punk feminism so we would have something to talk about.

Our first song was “Kill the Sexist” (October 2011).

KILL THE SEXIST

You’re tired of rancid socks,

Your daddy’s rancid socks.

Your husband will wear rancid socks,

His whole life he’ll be wearing rancid socks.

Your mom is up to her neck in dirty dishes,

In dirty dishes and rancid grub.

She washes the floors like an overfried chicken.

Your mom lives in a prison.

In prison, she washes potties like shit.

There is never freedom in prison.

A hellish life, male domination:

Hit the streets and free women!

Sniff your socks yourself,

And don’t forget to scratch your ass.

Burp, barf, binge, shit,

And we’ll happily be lesbians!

Go on, suckers, envy the penis yourselves.

Even your beer buddy’s long penis,

And the long penis on the boob tube

Until the shit hits the ceiling.

Become a feminist, be a feminist.

Peace to the world, and an end to men.

Be a feminist, destroy the sexist.

Kill the sexist, wash away his blood!

Be a feminist, destroy the sexist.

Kill the sexist, wash away his blood!

We didn’t have any musical instruments. We snipped a sample from an

English Oi! punk song and duplicated it. To record the vocals, we took a

Dictaphone and locked ourselves in the bathroom. But Kat’s dad kicked us

out. Then we went outside to record. It was autumn, three in the

morning, and raining. We took refuge in a playhouse on the playground,

our heads butting against the ceiling. A bunch of druggies were sitting

on a nearby bench.

“You’re sick of rancid socks.... And we’ll happily be lesbians,” rang

forth from the playhouse.

A few of the druggies poked their noses in the window.

“Girls, what have you been smoking? We dosed up too, but it didn’t get

us as high as you are. Maybe you could share with us?”

“Leave us alone, we’re busy.”

Pussy Riot began rehearsing in a basement belonging to a Moscow church.

It was the autumn of 2011. Construction work was going on. We would be

recording songs, and workers with jackhammers were walking around us.

We rehearsed a number thoroughly and for a long time. Unlike punk groups

who perform in clubs, we had to get the musical part down, but we also

had to unpack and pack the equipment as quickly as possible. We not only

sang during rehearsals but also tried to learn how to continue playing

and singing when guards or police were grabbing our legs and trying to

drag us away.

Time passed, and the renovation of the church basement was finished. The

church decided to rent it to a store, and we wound up on the street. We

went to rehearse in a pedestrian underpass from which we were constantly

kicked out.

But after a couple of months, the harsh winter was setting in, and it

was impossible to rehearse outside. We set up shop in an abandoned tire

plant. We went there every day during the New Year’s holidays. We

started work on January 1, 2012, as the country was sleeping in after

the big party and MPs were sunbathing in Miami. The guards at the

entrance to the plant always asked us the same thing: “Can’t sit still

at home, girls?”

“Why should we stay at home?” Kat would ask, surprised.

“To make pies and cook soup.”

After hearing a full lecture on the history of the feminist movement a

couple of times in response to their questions, the guards elected not

to talk to us anymore and would just let us in without saying a word.

That is just what we wanted.

Journalists were slightly intimidated by us at that time. Moscow News

wrote, “Finding Pussy Riot is not easy. The soloists do not give out

their telephone numbers, and they constantly change the place where they

rehearse. I managed to contact them through the internet. We agreed to

meet near a subway station. At the appointed time, a tall young man came

up to me. He did not wish to reveal his name and silently led me off. We

soon turned down an alley and descended into a dilapidated basement. A

single lamp lit the room, and beneath it sat two young women in masks,

bright tights, and short dresses.”

How much does it cost to put on a Pussy Riot concert? Nothing. The

equipment—microphone, cables, amp, guitar—is borrowed from our punk

friend; the dresses, tights, and hats, from our girlfriends who like

colorful things. We ask video and photo journalist friends to shoot the

concerts. To edit the videos, we download a pirated program and do the

work ourselves. Food expenses amount to a loaf of bread and a bottle of

water. You should always take this ration with you to a concert in case

you are locked up at a police station overnight.

For a pittance we got hold of some decently powerful car speakers. We

picked up some aluminum trim at the market and built cabinets for the

speakers.

We powered our DIY speakers with a car battery. Once, on my way to a

concert, I noticed something was running down my back and that something

was burning. It turned out my backpack was leaking. The rubberized

bottom was liquefying: acid flowing from the battery was eating through

it. There was nothing I could do: I couldn’t throw the battery away! So

I kept going, feeling the contents of my backpack slowly dripping into

my panties.

Early on, I discovered that when I’m wearing a mask I feel a little bit

like a superhero and maybe feel more power. I feel really brave, I

believe that I can do anything and everything, and I believe that I can

change the situation. We played at being superheroes, Batwoman or

Spider-Woman, who arrive to save our country from the villain, but we

were choking on laughter looking at ourselves: a fur hat pissed on by a

cat with narrow slits for eyes, a nonworking guitar, and for the audio

system a homemade battery that leaks acid.

When I put on the balaclava—that fantastic sensation when I did my first

performance—I understood that happiness could be this, among other

things. When you enter that certain moment, you really appreciate it.

• *** creating a political feminist punk band: the basics

An artist, just like a philosopher, is a junkie for critical thinking.

And he knows (allegedly) how to turn the results of his analytical

activity into cultural forms.

Some people are inspired by exactly the same things in Pussy Riot that

irritate others: directness, frankness, and shameless dilettantism. You

say we’re making shitty music? That’s right. We consciously stick to the

concept of bad music, bad texts, and bad rhymes. Not all of us have

studied music, and the quality of performance has never been a priority.

The essence of punk is an explosion. It is the maximal discharge of

creative energy, which does not require any particular technique.

But why the bright colors? It was a really dumb reason: we just didn’t

want to be taken for terrorists in black balaclavas. We didn’t want to

scare people; we wanted to bring some fun, so we decided to look like

clowns.

• ** Heroes

• *** d. a. prigov

I refer to D. A. Prigov as Pussy Riot’s godfather. Or, possibly, fairy

godmother. D. A. Prigov didn’t care about definitions. The opposite is

true too: he enjoyed definitions, but he liked to juggle with them.

When somebody called D. A. Prigov a painter, he would say, “Oh no, no,

no, I’m actually a poet!” When he was called a poet, his reaction would

be, “You may have misunderstood something. I’m a sculptor!” And if

somebody referred to D. A. Prigov as a sculptor, he’d claim to be a

musician. He actually started to play in a music band at some point in

order to escape the earlier definitions. They created a fake

contemporary art band called Central Russian Upland (when Pussy Riot

started to do illegal street performances, we borrowed a microphone from

this band—it was a big blessing). D. A. Prigov was also a performance

artist, fiction and nonfiction writer, and political columnist, and he

worked with video art too. He took part in movies as an actor.

D. A. Prigov created himself as a conceptual art project. He was

thoughtful and original about every role he took. His whole life was his

project. A DIY project in a way. It requires a lot of self-reflection

and outstanding self-control to build your whole life as an art project.

D. A. Prigov did it. DIY is not about being easy on yourself—quite the

opposite: it means that you’re demanding as fuck of yourself. Always

follow your own axioms, as D. A. Prigov says.

At the beginning of the 1990s, he decided to write 24,000 poems by the

year 2000. Twenty-four thousand because he wanted to produce one poem

for each month of the next two thousand years. Prigov calculated how

many poems he needed to write in a day and religiously followed his

plan. He never skipped a day. And what do you think, he killed it!

Always follow your own axioms.

Nobody refers to Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov just by his first and last

names. He always wanted people to use his middle name, Aleksandrovich,

with his first name. He treated his whole life as a work of art: his

project was Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov.

D. A. Prigov came to my little hometown to give a lecture when I was

fourteen.

I went to the festival where he would be lecturing and saw his artworks

that were exhibited. There was a video where he talked to a cat, trying

to make the animal say “RUS-SIA.” If you’d like to hear my

interpretation, this is a brilliant commentary on all-consuming Russian

exceptionalism and imperialism. Russia’s “domestic kitchen nationalism”

as we call it here—Russian exceptionalism—is huuuge.

Another video of D. A. Prigov’s was exhibited, “A Cop and the People Are

Molding the Face of New Russia.” In it, a cop and a half-naked man were

kneading dough. This was during the first presidential term of Vladimir

Putin, when he was trying to figure out how he should handle all the

power he’d suddenly received. Putin and his circle tried different faces

for his new Russia—and the easiest one surely was to return to

neo-Soviet/Cold War/police state imperialism.

In his lecture, D. A. Prigov started to read a poem by Pushkin. Because

Pushkin was unhappy to be used by an oppressive state ideological

apparatus on a regular basis, he was praised as a shining light, the

actual sun, of Russian poetry in Soviet times and in Putin’s Russia.

Understandably, when you hear something like that about the sun and

stuff, especially if you’re a kid who had to learn tons of this sun’s

poetry in school—you want to throw up immediately. So D. A. Prigov

started to read Pushkin’s poem, but it was hard to recognize the sweet

poet: he read this piece of poetry in the manner of a Buddhist mantra,

in Chinese, Muslim, Orthodox Christian styles; he would sing and scream

like an odd magic creature. It was a whole new Pushkin.

I met D. A. Prigov a few years later, when he was sixty-four and I was

seventeen. It was a big deal. I wanted to be his apprentice, wash his

floors—just be around him. I asked him for advice. He told me, “Don’t

live within the lie.” Later, when I was reading literature on dissent in

prison, I found out that these were not D. A. Prigov’s own words—they

were the words of Václav Havel. But I did not know all of that when I

was seventeen. I was just so happy to hear “Don’t live within the lie”

from Prigov that I got drunk right away and ended up reading the book of

Revelation out loud till I fell down, sleeping in the snow.

Six months later, we agreed to do an action together. My

colleagues—performance artists—and I had a plan to carry D. A. Prigov,

who would be sitting inside a cabinet reading his poetry, up to the

twentieth floor of a building. We had to do it with our own hands,

climbing the stairs. DIY in action. Our point was that an artist should

not lie around on a sofa—the artist should work harder than anyone, not

excluding hard manual labor. D. A. Prigov wrote a fantastic prophetic

text about a new generation of artists carrying him back to heaven. And

then he died. He died on the way to our performance. It was a heart

attack.

• * Rule № 3: TAKE BACK THE JOY

Smile as an act of resistance. Smile and say fuck you at the same time.

Laugh in the face of your wardens. Seduce your hangman into your

beliefs. Make prison wardens your friends. Win the hearts of those who

support the villain. Convince the police that they should be on your

side. When the army refuses to shoot into the crowd of protestors, the

revolution wins.

We shall live with Love and Laughter

We, who now are little worth

And we’ll not regret the price we have to pay

RALPH CHAPLIN, “COMMONWEALTH OF TOIL,” 1918

(FOR THE WOBBLIES, INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD)

Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to

abandon oneself, to be light. Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing.

FRIDA KAHLO

• ** Words

• *** we shall live in love and laughter

Here is a chapter dedicated to all sorts of pleasure that you can find,

both earthly and otherworldly pleasure. Joy is my ultimate capital, but

it resides in me and not in a bank. I find joy in my art, which is

barbaric and primitive political cabaret. It might not look joyful, but

I get joy out of it. I even found joy in prison, briefly and secretly.

Your tormentors are easy to spot when you are in prison. Less so when

you live a comfortable enough life in the free world. But there are

tormenters out there all the same. They are the ones who preside over a

system that dumps trillions in debt on students and gives tax breaks to

billionaires. They sell off public land and drill nature reserves. They

make sure the 1 percent gets rich and the 99 percent stays poor,

relatively. They start wars and turn cities into no-go areas. You know,

the politics.

Call out someone in power and rejoice when they are taken down. Resist

and smile with meaning.

There is a popular misconception: people keep thinking that political

struggle is boring. That it’s something you have to do with a sad face

and for five minutes a week, and then you walk away from it, as far as

possible. It’s like brushing your teeth in the early morning—you have to

do it, but it’s not a super pleasurable thing.

They think you do a political action like you go to your boring office,

and then you rest, then your real life starts. In fact, the truth is

completely opposite. You just need to find a way to recognize it, this

ultimate joy of uniting efforts. I actually start to worry about myself

sometimes, because I may be addicted to this feeling of being involved.

I’m an activist junkie.

• *** dada

Dada is how absurd political melancholy manifests itself in a joyful

manner. “The absurd has no terrors for me,” said Tristan Tzara,

philosopher of Dada, in his 1922 “Lecture on Dada,” “for from a more

exalted point of view everything in life seems absurd to me.”

Dadaists lived in an awkward period: the time between two world wars.

Since the Industrial Revolution, the West had been seriously obsessed

with the idea of progress. Progress had replaced God. But during and

after World War I, it all started to look pretty confusing. People were

working sixteen hours a day, kids were toiling in poisonous factories

and losing their eyes and hands, often to produce more weapons for

people to kill each other. This surely was not pleasing, and it left a

number of people feeling fooled.

The artists who would go on to form the Dada movement were really upset

about philistinism and the idolization of mechanics and progress. It was

a turbulent, dangerous, nonlinear time, the time after World War I and

before the rise of Hitler in Germany. They were on to something.

Real art is that obscure dream you’re too confused to talk about even to

your psychoanalyst. In its collages, ready-mades, and performance

pieces, Dada made a salad of public consciousness.

It’s all more than just politics. It’s always more than merely politics.

Especially when it comes to art. Dada was also about new nonlinear

physics. It was a reaction to the total failure of the Newtonian model

of the world.

Newton came up with a couple of idealizations to describe the world, but

it looked like they couldn’t solve a growing number of questions about

the nature of reality. In particular, he wondered if light is a particle

or a wave. People were confused. It turned out that light can be both a

particle and a wave. What? The new revelation that the atom is not

really the ultimate building block of the universe, not the simplest

thing in the world, stepped onto the stage. Later all of this business

in physics gave birth to quantum mechanics and string theory and so on.

Dadaists rejected the reality and logic of the uber-modernist society.

Life was falling apart right in front of their eyes. They ran into the

arms of nonsense, absurdism, making playful collages, sound art,

sculptures, and the like.

It was said that Lenin visited the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. (Cabaret

Voltaire was the artists’ nightclub where Dada began.) Lenin was making

his revolutionary plans for Russia in a nearby apartment and allegedly

would stop by the club to play chess.

What’s exciting about Dada? Artistic courage, freedom, introducing new

techniques of not just making art but possibly thinking about the world

itself. There was a lot of hype about postmodernist technique in

literature, hypertext, and Roland Barthes’s “death of the author” idea

some years ago, but I feel that dadaists had proclaimed this method for

a long time, as early conceptual artists.

Dadaists used scissors and glue rather than brushes and paints to

express their views of modern life through images presented by the

media. Dada collage technique is beautiful to me, subversive, playful,

flirty, coquettish. It’s based on collecting ready-made objects, and it

can claim that it simply reflects reality. Though as usually happens

with any process of making a collection or classification, metadata (a

set of data that describes and gives information about other data) gives

you much more information about intentions and moods than the data

itself does.

Artistic classifications of reality are my all-time favorite, because

through their absurdity and insanity they reveal the simple fact that

any process of putting things in order is biased from the very

beginning. Collage as an artistic attempt at a random classifying of

information helps us not normalize and take for granted other types of

classifications—stupid ones like “male behavior” and “female behavior,”

“free world” and “non-free world,” “educated” and “uneducated.”

Cut-ups are like collages but with words rather than pictures. Pussy

Riot uses this technique extensively. When we decided to start a band,

we hated the idea of writing poetry (we were suspicious about poetry

because we came from a conceptual art background), but we still had to

create lyrics for our songs. We ended up composing our lyrics from

quotes of our favorite philosophers and media headlines.

Tristan Tzara describes this cut-up technique in the Dada Manifesto on

Feeble Love and Bitter Love (1920):

TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM

Take a newspaper.

Take some scissors.

Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your

poem.

Cut out the article.

Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and

put them all in a bag.

Shake gently.

Next take out each cutting one after the other.

Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.

The poem will resemble you.

And there you are—an infinitely original author of charming sensibility,

even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.

When life was broken apart, these cutups were one response to that

displacement and hopelessness. Hugo Ball wrote in a manifesto in 1916:

“How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms,

everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, Europeanized,

enervated? By saying Dada.”

• ** Deeds

What’s up with Pussy Riot? Why are we constantly changing our methods

and mediums? Illegal concerts, articles and books, speeches, drawings,

posters, music videos ... what else? It’s nothing but a diversification

of art protest in action. The artist doesn’t constantly hit the same

spot but is listening all the time. I’m ready to explore new mediums and

will inevitably fail in that, be an amateur, be a fake artist, fake

musician, fake actor.

“We share the same label of anti-state artists,” artist and activist Ai

Weiwei told me.

“And another one: ‘fake artists,’” I added.

“Yes!” He got excited. “Anti-state and fake ones.”

Pussy Riot are conceptual artists, that’s why we may feel more free

about music than most musicians. There is a popular idea among musicians

that it is important to stick with some particular genre of music. I

don’t feel like I have to. When I meet new people with whom I am about

to record a song, they ask me, “What do you want to do?” I tell them

that I want to do something I’ve never done before. Today we could do a

Chordettes-influenced song, tomorrow we could do hard rock, and then the

next day we could do a classical piano ballad. Every song should be so

different that people won’t believe it’s the same artist. That’s the

kind of freedom conceptual art gives you, when you don’t really care

about craft. “Can I do it or not?” This question just doesn’t exist for

you. If you want to do it, you can do it, and there is joy in this

absolute freedom.

• *** if the kids are united

But there’s no bigger joy than seeing how your voices and powers are

amplifying and growing into something bigger. There’s this weird,

fantastic, nonlinear mathematics of people’s movements: 1 voice + 1

voice + 1 voice may equal 3 voices, but 1 voice + 1 voice + 1 voice may

also equal a whole new social and cultural paradigm. It happened in the

1960s; it happened with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

I find myself in activist depression from time to time. What helps get

me out of my hurricane of self-doubt is good solid action. You’re

turning from a frog into a beautiful prince, from a jellyfish into a

fighter. When you’re climbing onto a roof loaded down with musical

equipment to perform the song “Putin Has Pissed Himself,” you don’t have

time to fuck with your brain anymore. You think about the audience, your

guitar, and trying to understand how many minutes you have until the

cops will come. This feeling is joyful and priceless. It’s a pure divine

orgasm and a moment of supernatural clarity, maybe even clairvoyance.

What I’ve learned from people who were going through genuinely difficult

situations in their lives—prison, disease, poverty—is that they often

learn better and faster about the currency of joy than those who lead

“prosperous” lives. Life has an end point, so why don’t I take back from

sorrow and sadness those minutes and hours that I have? For me, I

remember that this works perfectly in prison.

Friends ask me now, “Hey you, you are a helpless, crying baby, you can’t

make a phone call without bitching about your phone phobia. How did you

survive prison?” It’s pretty easy. You simply don’t have the option to

be helpless in prison. The danger is real: you fight for your life. You

fight for your life with a smile. You grab your happiness back or you

die. You may die physically or you may be buried in your own apathy. You

formulate it to be crystal clear: my government wants me to lose all

these years, okay, so what can I do? Human life is pretty short, and I

understood early—at fourteen or so—that I have no desire to merely

survive, I want to live. In Erich Fromm’s words, I want to be rather

than have.

So I stayed committed to living a full life in prison. It was my

full-time job, though not an easy one. I gained even more from my prison

years than I would have gained from those years had I been free. Learn

more, feel more, act more. Make the bigger difference. It’s your

decision—if you want to intensify your life, flood it with passions and

beautiful details, or not.

It wouldn’t be a lie if I said that I probably got the most important

revelations about my consciousness, modern culture, human relationships,

and power hierarchies while I was sitting in the cell during my pretrial

detention. I learned more about my body too, doing lots and lots of

push-ups and stretching. I didn’t know what would happen to me tomorrow.

I was facing seven years in a prison camp. I lived every day as if it

was the last one. I felt every minute of my life. Every meal, every bowl

of porridge, every piece of bread. I was conscious of processes that

were going on in my mind and in my body, I was working on balancing

myself. I vowed to stay a happy warrior.

I learned what it means to care and be attentive. I was able to see

green leaves for about thirty minutes the whole summer. I was able to

catch sunlight through the prison bars for ten minutes several times a

week. I did it religiously every time I had a chance to see the sun. I

caught rare raindrops and cried happy tears because of the shining

beauty of the rain.

The white-blue penitentiary light is always on in the cell. At night

they have the light turned on: guards have to see the prisoners, and

prisoners should always remember that they are being watched. Once a

week a female guard who was friendly had her shift, and she’d secretly

turn off the light in our cell. It was a glimpse of surprise solidarity,

one you’re truly grateful for. We looked out our window and saw the

whole prison filled with light—we were the only ones who had the luxury

of darkness. I’ve never been happier in my life than at those moments.

It was a privilege higher than the highest of earthly privileges. And I

was just sitting in a cell with no lights on, greeting the sunset

without the stark white prison lamps, embracing the pale light of the

Moscow evening summer sky. We’d sit still, afraid to even say a word. We

did not want to interfere in this breathtaking magic—we would drink the

evening, its subtle semitones.

Any given system of power is built on an assumption (which of course is

trying to portray itself as an axiom) that to receive joy you need to

pay or obey. The ultimate act of subversion is thus finding joy in a

refusal to pay and obey, in an act of living by radically different

values. It’s not an act of deprivation or austerity, it’s not a vow,

it’s an act that reveals joy that transcends given boundaries. And

that’s the way to go, the way to attract people to what we’re doing. Who

can possibly be excited about the politics of austerity anyway?

Bring joy back into the act of resistance. For some weird reason

political action and fun have been basically separated for decades. It

comes from the professionalization of politics. I believe we’ve lost the

connection between our existence, something that personally touches us,

and politics. Look back at what was going on in the 1960s: we used to

know how to combine the very core of our human existence and politics.

Perhaps that’s why radical politics changed so many things in the

political structure back then: those amazing, brave, and beautiful

beings knew how to live passionately, how to treat political action as

the most exciting and pleasurable love affair in their lives.

Nothing will change if we prefer to sit around and complain that

politics is boring and because it is boring we don’t want to take part

in it. It’s up to us to reshape what politics is. Take it back. Bring it

back to streets, clubs, bars, parks. Our party isn’t over.

• ** Heroes

• *** 1968

Can a period of history be heroic? I absolutely think so. There was

something in the air in 1968 that made people use their imaginations to

find new ways to revolt. Thinking about that year gives me chills.

People knew how to dream about social justice, peace, and equal

opportunities. There were labor unions, the civil rights movements in

Russia, France, Japan, Egypt, Czechoslovakia, America. Words and deeds

came together in new and inventive ways.

The world today is heavily influenced by events that happened in 1968.

MAY 1968, PARIS

It was a year when everybody realized that it was time to rebel against

the conservative archaic world. They felt that the ruling aesthetics,

political regime, and official cultural codes did not represent them

anymore.

Charles de Gaulle was president of France in 1968. He was one of those

paternalistic, patriarchal leaders. Women were not allowed to wear pants

to work. Married ladies had to get a husband’s permission to open a bank

account. Abortions were illegal. Homosexuality was considered a crime.

Workers did not have rights, and unsatisfied ones could simply be fired.

The education system was rigid and conservative. There was just one TV

channel in France, and all information was subject to government

censorship.

For young people from the baby boomer generation, it was not enough to

believe in utopia, that another world is possible. They were keen to

experience utopia, to live in it.

It began as a series of protests and occupations by students. The agenda

was a polyhedral constellation of anticonsumerism, anarchism,

pro-imagination.... Students occupied the Sorbonne and said it was now

the “people’s university.”

Students were joined by striking workers who staged wildcat strikes

throughout the French economy. Up to 11 million workers took part—a huge

number that represented about a quarter of the population of France at

the time. The strike was the largest in French history and lasted for

two weeks.

In a wildcat strike, workers walk off the job with no warning and often

without authorization or support from the union. In this sense they are

“unofficial.” (By the way, “wildcat strike action” is the best name

ever, isn’t it?) Wildcat strikes have been considered illegal in the

United States since 1935 (of course). In 1968, they were the main tactic

of the protesting workers.

The workers’ demands were serious and structural. They wanted to see a

change in how things worked, how things were governed. It was a radical

agenda—not better wages and conditions but a plan to kick out the

government and President de Gaulle and to have the ability to run their

own factories. When the trade union leadership negotiated a one-third

increase in minimum wages, the workers occupying their factories refused

to return to work. It wasn’t enough. It was a sellout. After union

leaders made the deal, workers started to treat their own leaders as

traitors and collaborationists.

“The largest general strike that ever stopped the economy of an advanced

industrial country, and the first wildcat general strike in history;

revolutionary occupations and the beginnings of direct democracy; the

increasingly complete collapse of state power for nearly two weeks ...

—this is what the French May 1968 movement was essentially, and this in

itself already constitutes its essential victory,” proclaims an article

titled “The Beginning of an Era” (Internationale Situationniste 12

[September 1969]). The piece goes on to say that 1968 brought all the

criticisms of existing ideologies and the old way of doing things into a

single holistic unity. This was a new world—there was no need for the

concept of property when everyone had a home everywhere. In the free,

open spaces where the participants of 1968 met, there was genuine

dialogue, completely free expression, a real community in the common

struggle.

Take a look at the slogans. They appeared as graffiti, chants, and

posters during revolutionary events in Paris 1968. To me they seem to be

a perfect manifestation of rebellious collective consciousness,

precisely the kind of group action that makes regimes uncomfortable.

When I’m trying to formulate what would be perfect poetry to me, I think

about these words.

They are (a) a result of collective effort, (b) eclectic, made using a

collage technique, and (c) anonymous. They are highly ambitious and

question the very basis of existing society, but they’re not about

anybody’s personal ambitions. You would never suspect that these words

were spoken with an intention to only appear to be radical and to push,

say, T-shirt sales (like today). They smell like a revolution, with all

its insanity and unknowability. This spirit cannot be sold, because it

cannot be quantified.

Another thing that strikes me when I read these slogans is their

wholeness and coherence. Created by different authors, together they

look like a solid, powerful piece of art. Everybody knows how hard it is

to write something with anyone else, especially a big collective.

Collective writing is liable to destroy the artistic soul of each

author. Take a look at the lifeless monsters created by the

entertainment industry. The slogans of 1968 teach us that there is

another, miraculous form of collective writing: when all your thoughts

are genuinely focused on achieving progressive and poetic changes in

your culture, crowds start to write communal street poetry.

For all the hope that 1968 brought, there have been many events in the

following years that beat back progressive causes around the world. Just

to look at a few of the changes in government ... Nixon was elected that

same year and again in 1972. There was the overthrow and death of

President Allende in Chile in 1973, the right-wing coup in Argentina in

1976, the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Reagan (1980, 1984);

the Bushes (1988; 2000 and 2004) and of course Putin (2000 and 2012) and

Trump (2016).

Okay, Chris Hedges says in this same book that you are holding or

reading on your phone that Nixon was the last liberal president of the

United States. Chris’s point is that nothing ever changes without people

exerting pressure. Emmeline Pankhurst makes the very same point in this

book. It’s a universal fact. Ask Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, or Dr.

Martin Luther King Jr., or W. E. B. DuBois, or Margaret Sanger.

The pressure has to be maintained, because the opposing powers are

massive and they’re not used to losing. Even if society has changed for

the better—thanks to 1968 in many cases (racism is illegal, voting

rights are protected, free speech is enshrined in law)—the movement to

return society to what it was around 1868 gathers momentum. (Actually to

1862, just before the Emancipation Proclamation.)

This is why we have to remember 1968 fifty years later. No gain is

secure.

The lasting impact of what was gained in ’68 was the belief around the

world that if the government wouldn’t listen, you had the right and

obligation to make yourself heard. It happened in Paris; it happened in

Czechoslovakia in the Prague Spring, when people took to the streets to

support their government’s reforms and were met with a full-scale Soviet

invasion. It happened on American university campuses with protests

against the Vietnam War and in Chicago when police and the National

Guard were sent to deal with demonstrators at the Democratic National

Convention. It happened in Tokyo and Berlin and Mexico City. The

circumstances may change, but there is still latent potential in the

world like there was in 1968. It just needs to be ignited ...

• * Rule № 4: MAKE YOUR GOVERNMENT SHIT ITS PANTS

Those who have power need to live in fear. In fear of the people. Meet

the main characters of this chapter: power, courage, laughter, joy,

belief, and risk. The main characters may well also be inspiration,

fairness, struggle, heretics, witches, dignity, faith, masks, and

mischief.

Think back 120 years ago, when workers in this country were forced to

work seven days a week, fourteen hours a day.... Think about the

children—ten, eleven years of age, losing fingers in factories, and what

the working people of this country said. Sorry, we are human beings, we

are not beasts of burden. We are going to form trade unions and

negotiate contracts.

BERNIE SANDERS, SPEECH IN CARSON, CALIFORNIA, MAY 17, 2016

This is why it is important to remember that the New Deal did not come

only from kindly elites handing it down from on high, but also because

those elites were under massive popular pressure from below.

NAOMI KLEIN, QUOTED IN HUFFINGTON POST, DECEMBER 3, 2008

• ** Words

• *** question the status quo

Your job is to ask annoying questions.

Socrates did it. He was a bizarre bearded creature who’d approach people

on the street to ask them, “What is life, dignity, and love?” These were

fair questions, but the government didn’t feel like letting Socrates do

his thing. The government rarely approves of the sort of dangerous,

subversive activity that’s called thinking. The government always feels

suspicious when someone behaves like a free person. And Socrates ended

up being sentenced to death and forced to drink poison.

There is power in asking simple questions. Dear Mr. President, if you’re

so powerful, rich, and smart, why are your people living in poverty? Why

is the snow in my hometown black? Did journalists who report on

pollution deserve to be beaten to death?

Their goal is to make you believe that it’s in your best interests to

maintain the status quo. Your goal is to make them scared. Force them to

share with you what they have—power, capital, and control over natural

resources.

Elites don’t enjoy resistance, and they respond by getting angry and

taking revenge. By not accepting their rules, we cause them greater

damage than their revenge causes us, because it starts to dawn on

everyone in your vicinity that the emperor really has no clothes.

We must reclaim language and ideals that the government has stolen from

us. Those in government claim to be “the real patriots,” but they lie,

cheat, and steal. They claim to care about religion, but they break

every commandment. They say they represent the people, but they care

only about their own wealth. They judge, condemn, and kill. “It is

important for people to consider that authoritarianism, though it claims

all the national symbols, is not patriotism,” notes the historian and

Yale professor Timothy Snyder.

Pussy Riot started doing political punk because our state system was

rigid, closed, and dominated by castes. In Russia, current policy is

dictated by the narrow corporate interests of a handful of officials to

such a degree that the air itself hurts us, making us feel as if we had

been skinned.

What we were looking for was real sincerity and simplicity, and we found

them in our punk performances. Passion, candor, and naïveté are superior

to hypocrisy, deceit, and feigned modesty. Take childish, anarchic

freedom with you wherever life carries you. Take it with you to the

streets, take it to dusty prison cells. Humor, buffoonery, and

irreverence can be used to reach the truth. The truth is many sided, and

many different people lay claim to it. Challenge your government’s

version of the truth, tell your own, and if you can, damn the

consequences.

• ** Deeds

• *** don’t talk baby talk

We looked around us and did not see a willingness to sacrifice, to be

humble, to be aggressive and fight, that combination of extreme and

dissimilar states of being in whose absence humans would differ little

from tapeworms. We examined the art world, where I had expected to see

madness and the search for the absolute. We found hundreds of people

leading a comfortable existence, people who knew how to do nothing

except play at being bohemians without being real bohemians (if the

authenticity of bohemians is measured by the degree of their internal

dissent, their anguish, and the sharpness with which they perceive

reality).

So if it didn’t exist, we sought to create something that can have at

least the tiniest resemblance to what we were looking for in the art

world.

Here are a few of the earliest actions.

THE STORMING OF THE WHITE HOUSE, NOVEMBER 7, 2008

LOCATION: RUSSIAN WHITE HOUSE

SIZE OF THE SKULL PROJECTED ON THE RUSSIAN WHITE HOUSE: 60 × 40 METERS

We have our own Russian White House. It stands on the banks of the

Moscow River. In 2008, Putin, who was then the Russian prime minister,

controlled the White House, the seat of the Russian government. We set

ourselves a goal. On Revolution Day, November 7, we would project a

gigantic Jolly Roger, sixty by forty meters, on the White House with a

laser cannon, and then a team of us would storm the White House by

climbing over the six-meter-high fence surrounding it.

We taught ourselves to evade the police by rolling under a car in three

seconds. We could jump into Dumpsters while on the run and cover

ourselves with garbage at one fell swoop. We were ready for the

eventuality that when we climbed the government’s six-meter-high fence,

we would be zapped with a high-voltage charge.

About eight hours before the practice run, we realized that most of the

participants had wimped out. One person had diarrhea; another was having

her period. Someone was found drunk. We had to find people to replace

the wimps. We split into groups and began combing the city.

I asked students at a contemporary art school, the Rodchenko School of

Photography and Multimedia. It was my first time there. I approached a

group of students sipping tea on the stairs.

“Who is going with us to storm the White House today?”

“What would we need to do?”

“We are going to go to the White House, project a skull and crossbones

on it, then climb over the fence onto the grounds.”

“Has this been cleared with the administration?” a female student asked

me.

“Of course not. That’s the whole point.”

The students remained silent and continued to suck on their tea. I threw

on my coat and headed for the door.

“I’ll go with you. When and where do we meet?” said one of them,

suddenly approaching me. His springy gait, like that of a wild animal,

gave him away as someone who had physical training and stamina.

“Come with me now.”

We left the Rodchenko School together. I traveled to the White House

with this guy, whose name was Roma. That evening we gave him a new name,

Bomber. He was one of three people who managed to get over the

six-meter-high fence that night and, after dashing across the grounds of

the Government House, successfully disappeared amid Moscow’s courtyards

and squares.

At four in the morning, the dark canvas of the Russian White House was

flooded with green rays from the roof of the Hotel Ukraina, opposite the

White House on the other side of the Moscow River, and the Jolly Roger

was traced on the building. The group of shock troops ran across the

porch of the Government House and, after jumping from a height of six

meters, fled the scene.

Several minutes later, burly government security guards appeared on the

grounds of the White House, scouring everything in the vicinity with

long-range searchlights looking like dozens of pillars of light bustling

around the building.

CLOSING OF THE FASCIST RESTAURANT OPRICHNIK, DECEMBER 2008

LOCATION: THE MOSCOW RESTAURANT OPRICHNIK, OWNED BY PRO-PUTIN,

ULTRACONSERVATIVE JOURNALIST MIKHAIL LEONTYEV

The restaurant Oprichnik opened in Moscow. We immediately set ourselves

the goal of closing it by welding a metal plate to the front door. Why?

In the sixteenth century, Ivan the Terrible used the oprichnina to

advance his policies in Russia. To wit, he stabbed, hacked, hanged, and

poured boiling water on his enemies. Ivan and his oprichniks used

red-hot frying pans, ovens, tongs, and ropes. This reign of terror was

called the oprichnina. In Russia, calling a restaurant Oprichnik is like

naming a nightclub Auschwitz in Germany.

We practiced welding doors in the tank-strewn back alleys of Victory

Park in Moscow. Day by day, a handful of people learned how to weld in

the freezing December weather amid garages and snowdrifts.

Our activist collective had split into two parts.

The first was the industrial workers. We were in charge of the physical

work—finding a huge pile of metal and welding it to the door of our

restaurant. We had a wide range of engaged citizens: anarchists, social

democrats, feminists, advocates for transgender rights, and those who

simply shared our general irritation with Vladimir Putin. Weirdly

enough, years afterward I found out that one of those anti-Putin

activists was secretly super-conservative, and the nature of his

disapproval of Putin was that Putin was not tough enough. Well, shit

happens.

The second half of our group was a distraction group. Their role was to

enter the restaurant and play a drunken crowd to attract the attention

of security workers. The action was to happen at the end of December,

close to New Year’s eve, so the distracters were dressed as bunnies,

kitties, and Santa Clauses. We rehearsed a song that our crew would

start to sing when welding started. They had to sing super loud,

otherwise security would hear the welding and prevent the action.

Finally, one more activist, a prominent organizer of LGBTQ prides in

Moscow, had to stand on the street corner, close to the restaurant, to

hand passersby stickers on LGBTQ issues. His mission was to distract

potential secret or not-so-secret police officers.

And you know, we did it, we did it successfully—we closed that shameful

restaurant. We came back there after the action, at night, after a few

hours had passed, to take a look at them trying to tear our welded sheet

of metal from their door and open it.

Now the restaurant is completely gone. Sometimes I walk down that street

and wonder whether that’s connected with our action or not.

• *** art in action

The urban environment is highly underrated as a venue for exhibiting

artworks. The subway, trolleybuses, store counters, Red Square. Who else

has such colorful and spectacular stages?

We debuted with a tour of public transport. We discovered that the best

times for performing on public transport are during the morning and

evening rush hours. We performed under the arches of the Soviet

underground and atop trolleybuses. With all our equipment (guitars,

microphone stands, amps) in tow, we clambered atop scaffolds that had

been erected to change lightbulbs in the middle of subway stations.

In the middle of a song, I would rip open a pillow, and feathers would

rain down on the subway station, then be wafted upward again and again

by the currents of air that accompany the trains in the underground

tunnels. I would pull a large firecracker filled with multicolored

confetti from my panties (Where else can you store it if you need to

pull it out quickly during a performance without stopping the show to

rummage through your backpack?) and set it off. A layer of colored foil

and paper covered stunned passengers, who pressed the “record” button on

their phones and pointed them at us.

Nearly every performance ended with our being detained after we

descended the scaffolding.

We looked really strange at police stations, wearing torn bright

pantyhose and white lace-up Doc Martens and lugging huge hiking

backpacks with bundles of cables poking out of them. Bored cops would

come out of their offices to gawk at us.

Once, while we were rehearsing “Putin Has Pissed Himself,” the speakers

started to burn and smoke. This apparently was a sign from above that he

really had pissed himself.

PUTIN HAS PISSED HIMSELF

A column of rebels heads to the Kremlin

Windows explode in FSB offices

Behind red walls the sons of bitches piss themselves

Riot proclaims, All systems abort!

Dissatisfaction with male hysteria culture

Savage leaderism ravages people’s brains

The Orthodox religion of the stiff penis

The patients are asked to swallow conformity

Hit the streets

Live on Red Square

Show the freedom of

Civic rage

• *** sexists are fucked

In November and December 2011 we undertook an antiglamour concert tour:

Sexists Are Fucked, Fucking Conformists Are Fucked. We performed at

places where rich Putinists and conformists gather, e.g., on top of

Jaguar automobiles, on tables in bars, in shops selling expensive

clothing and furs, at fashion shows, cocktail receptions. We performed

only one song, because you have time for only one song before you’re

arrested. The song was called “Kropotkin Vodka,” and it featured calls

to carry out a coup d’état in Russia. “Kropotkin Vodka sloshes in

stomachs, / You’re fine, but the Kremlin bastards / Face an uprising of

outhouses, the poisoning is deadly,” we sang.

Whereas during the previous concert series we ripped up old feather

pillows, this time around we decided to work with flour. Our plan was to

riff on new bits of everyday life in our performances, things women

encounter every day. We went to a fashion show armed with flour. It was

not easy to get in. The show was invitation only, and members of the

conservative pro-Putin artistic elite were among the audience.

“We are from BBC Radio,” we muttered to the guard. We waltzed into the

room, our faces tense. Skinny, long-legged young women, curtains wrapped

round their beautiful bodies, were pounding up and down the catwalk.

We climbed onstage and launched the performance.

“Sexists are fucked, fucking Putinists are fucked!” we screamed.

The models huddled in the corner. We grabbed a bag of flour and tossed

its contents into the air. The white flour fanned out over the stage.

Suddenly, something burst and there was machine-gun fire. A bunch of

balloons noisily popped. We were enveloped in a pillar of fire. Our

balaclavas smoldered and smoked. It was hot. We could not drop

everything and run, because another chance to perform at a fashion show

might not present itself.

It was only later that we realized a fire had started because flour

suspended in air is quite flammable. The catwalk at the fashion show had

been ringed with candles, and when we threw the flour in the air, it

caught fire. But we could have cared less why the flour caught fire,

because we were already on our way to our next performance.

“DEATH TO PRISON, FREEDOM TO PROTESTS!,” DECEMBER 14, 2011

LOCATION: MOSCOW DETENTION CENTER N^(o) 1

When the police arrested 1,300 of our fellow activists after mass

anti-Putin protests, we were incredibly pissed. Our relatives, friends,

comrades were locked up. Being angry is a good thing sometimes—it

motivates you. We wrote a song in a day and hastily rehearsed it. The

next day, we went to the detention center.

We showed up on the rooftop of the prison to perform “Death to Prison,

Freedom to Protests!”—a concert for political prisoners.

When we showed up at the venue, we saw that a riot police bus, a traffic

police car, and a car containing plainclothes police officers had

surrounded the detention center. Nevertheless, we decided to go through

with the performance. The concert at the detention center marked the

debut of Pussy Riot’s new soloist, Serafima, a militant feminist.

“Cops or no cops, we’re going to perform,” she said right away.

We took out our banner (“FREEDOM TO PROTESTS!”) and deployed it right on

the barbed wire encircling the detention center. We climbed up to the

roof of the facility. The heads of astonished staff poked out from the

windows. There had never been a music concert there before, apparently.

A policeman approached us from behind, from the yard, and demanded we

get down. Several plainclothes officers came from the same direction and

recorded the proceedings on camera.

The gay science of seizing squares

Everyone’s will to power, without fucking leaders

Direct action is humanity’s future

LGBT, feminists, defend the fatherland!

As we chanted, “Death to prison, freedom to protests! Free the political

prisoners,” the prisoners peeked out of the windows of their cells. They

quickly picked up our slogans, and the detention center was shaken by

their yells. The bars shook: the prisoners were trying to rattle them

loose with their bare hands. When we got to the lines, “Force the cops

to serve freedom.... Confiscate all the cops’ machine guns,” two

policemen went back into the building, nervously shutting the door

behind them.

Toward the end of our performance, we chanted, “Turn Putin into soap!”

and “The people united will never be defeated!” Then we calmly climbed

down from the roof on our magical folding ladder and disappeared into

the nearby streets. The officers with the video cameras had gone,

apparently to buy doughnuts at the nearest store, and we quietly left.

• ** Heroes

• *** dr. martin luther king jr.

Making your government shit its pants does not require force. Dr. Martin

Luther King Jr. led the civil rights movement starting with the bus

boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 that led to the Supreme Court

ruling that racial segregation on public transport was unconstitutional,

and he continued to fight peacefully for change until his assassination

in 1968.

Nina Simone sang after Dr. King was killed:

Once upon this planet earth

Lived a man of humble birth

Preaching love and freedom for his fellow men

.....................................

He was for equality

For all people you and me

Full of love and good will, hate was not his way

He was not a violent man

Tell me folks if you can

Just why, why was he shot down the other day?

Dr. King’s own leadership credo was detailed in his “Letter from a

Birmingham Jail,” written in 1963 when he was incarcerated for

protesting in an Alabama city where segregation was brutally enforced.

King was responding to white clergy who criticized his actions. He was

here, he wrote, because injustice was here. “I cannot sit idly by in

Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice

anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an

inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

The Reverend Dr. King was a man of God who actually followed what is

written in the Bible. “Whoever oppresses the poor shows contempt for

their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God,” says Proverbs

14:31. How many people go to church looking to make themselves feel

better for doing well? To King, the worst enemy was not the KKK but

white moderates who preferred order to justice. The southern church had

failed to support his cause, he wrote, and sanctioned the way things

were. Members of the early church had been prepared to sacrifice

themselves, but he saw few around him who were prepared to support his

cause.

Campaigning for a guaranteed basic income in 1968, Dr. King named

racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism as our main enemies, and

argued that “reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be

faced.”

In the jail letter, Dr. King described why he insisted on nonviolent

direct action—it’s how you create the tension that forces the other side

to negotiate. “It is a historical fact that privileged groups seldom

give up their privileges voluntarily,” he wrote. Making them do it

nonviolently was a statement of strength, not of weakness. Dr. King was

clearly tired of waiting, tired of lynchings, of hate-filled police

killing black brothers and sisters, tired of 20 million African

Americans living in poverty and sleeping in cars because motels wouldn’t

take them.

Dr. King was called an extremist. Was not Paul an extremist, said King

in response, and Amos, and John Bunyan and Abraham Lincoln and Thomas

Jefferson? Even Jesus Christ was “an extremist for love, truth and

goodness.”

From 1963, King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference

participated in a whirlwind of action and success. That year, the March

on Washington included Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The Civil

Rights Act was passed in 1964, the Voting Rights Act in 1965—could they

have been passed without Dr. King? Then he attacked the Vietnam War and

took on the cause of economic justice, until he was gunned down at the

age of thirty-nine.

Who knows what he might have achieved had he lived. A broad-based

movement for racial, social, and economic justice led by Dr. King would

have shifted mountains. Stop, wait a second. He did shift mountains. He

keeps doing it after his death. Through his followers all over the

earth.

• * Rule № 5: COMMIT AN ART CRIME

The magic of art is that it elevates your voice and amplifies it.

Sometimes it happens literally, with a microphone and speakers. Art is a

miracle-making machine. Art opens up alternative realities, and that’s

extremely helpful when we have a crisis and multiple failures of the

political imagination.

New meditations have proved to me that things should move ahead with the

artists in the lead, followed by the scientists, and the industrialists

should come after these two classes.

HENRI DE SAINT-SIMON, LETTRES DE H. DE SAINT-SIMON À MESSIEURS LES JURES

All innovative work is theatrical.

ALEKSANDRA KOLLONTAI

We have to create ourselves as a work of art.

MICHEL FOUCAULT, ETHICS: SUBJECTIVITY AND TRUTH

• ** Words

It usually stays behind the scenes when somebody is talking about Pussy

Riot, but first of all we are art nerds. Moscow conceptualism and

Russian actionism of the 1980s and 1990s were important influences for

us.

One of our favorite artists from the 1990s was the wildest one, Oleg

Kulik, who is known for running around Moscow naked, barking and biting

people like a dog. He said incredibly warm words at the time of our

trial in 2012. It was very important for us to be supported by our

family of Russian conceptual artists, where we basically came from.

Kulik said righteous things about the importance of the mutual double

penetration of art and politics. Kulik described how Pussy Riot

resonated because they belonged to a great tradition of Russian

political artists. As comparisons he mentioned Varvara Stepanova

(1894–1958), a photographer, graphic designer, artist, and stage

designer associated with the Constructivist movement, the great painter

Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935), and the revolutionary architect Vladimir

Tatlin (1885–1953). Pussy Riot themselves referenced the artists of the

1990s when asked what they were doing, Kulik said, but art will always

be art even if politics is always changing.

Art may be an important reason Pussy Riot’s case attracted such

miraculous support. Art goes beyond existing boundaries and talks about

the inexplicable. You don’t need to know any Russians or details about

Russian politics to understand what our punk prayer is about and to feel

sympathy for some girls who live on the opposite part of the globe. Art

unites. I can smell it: art, protest art in particular, can become an

important driving and unifying force for the global activist movement,

the human movement.

• *** the human as a political and artistic animal

Is what Pussy Riot does art or politics? For us it’s one and the

same—art and politics are inseparable. We try to make art political and

at the same time enrich politics with developments from art.

Try to solve any problem through art first, then with all other means at

your disposal. Art is the best medicine, both for you personally and for

society.

Antigovernment punks may not have much craft. Even when our music

technically sucks, we still have an insane purity of impulse. Any living

being can smell it, and therefore, they will trust a punk gesture, be

inspired and motivated by it. So if you’re thinking about creating a

punk band or an art collective, never allow yourself to be stopped by

the imperfection of your craft. Impulse, energy, drive are what’s

priceless.

They ask Pussy Riot, “When and why did you decide to combine art and

politics for the first time?” But when and why did they decide to

separate art and politics? Art and activism?

“It seems that art as art expresses a truth, an experience, a necessity

which, although not in the domain of radical praxis, are nevertheless

essential components of revolution.” The Aesthetic Dimension (1978) by

Herbert Marcuse is a theoretical poem on the radical transformative

nature of art. How can we break through the alienation of social

existence, inauthenticity, and the treatment of a human being as a thing

among things? How can we create a radical response to reification and

oppressive social circumstances, which militate against the possibility

of human self-realization?

Art helps to create a radical subjectivity, the key element in any

political transformation. Art is a realm that helps us fight forces

which try to mechanize people, forces which see humans as things that

need user instructions and should be placed on the shelf of a store in a

shopping mall.

I’ve never seen the point of separating art and political engagement.

Perhaps because I’ve always been in love with the avant-garde. I’m a

girl from the beginning of the twentieth century, a time when politics

and art were organically connected.

At that time, artists were looking for primordial, pre-Christian, pagan,

organic, simple forms and means of expression, and new methods were

intended not just to change dramatically the art field, they were meant

to create an explosion in a social space. It was an epoch of major

shifts in collective consciousness, and artists were willing to be in

the avant-garde of these changes. It was not an exception, but a norm at

that time: an artist who is a revolutionary rather than a decorator.

“Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the

point is, to change it.” As Marx said.

“We were all revolutionists,” said Sergey Diaghilev, whose Russian

Seasons, an explosive and exotic Russian ballet, was conquering the

world in the first decades of the twentieth century. “It was only by a

small chance that I escaped becoming a revolutionist with other things

than color or music.”

If Russia is to collude with the world, it should be done by means of

art, not with nuclear power, tanks, or financing Trump and Le Pen. And I

believe that Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, not Putin, should be the

symbol of Russia.

By making and experiencing art, we get our chance to revisit that

feeling of raw freedom, bare courage, and naïveté that allows us to

dare, along with the unrefined creativity and mischievous investigation

that we used to have when we were kids. The tired, irritated, and lonely

police officer gets his chance to go back to this magic playground

through art. A woman who struggles, working two waitress jobs to pay her

bills, gets her chance. A prisoner who’s about to serve twelve more

years, who’s abandoned by relatives and friends, who’s being treated

like she’s already dead—she finds her joy and hope in making art from

toilet paper and bread.

Art is that magic stick we’ve been looking for, which could help you

transcend languages, borders, nations, genders, social positions,

ideologies.

Art elevates us by giving us the most valuable capital in the world: the

right and the confidence to ask disturbing questions about the very core

of our animal, political, social existence.

Surprise is freedom, accident is freedom. Thus, art is freedom.

Art allows a creature who’s involved in it to be unique, but the nature

of art requires us to stay strongly connected with the world, catching

ideas, symbols, emotions, tendencies, archetypes. We’re standing

together, but we’re not part of a faceless crowd.

I’ve seen that art is capable of giving hope and meaning to those who

are desperate. I played in a Siberian prison rock band, and I know how

precious those moments are, when art brings you back to life, art steals

you from a world of apathy and obedience. “He who has a why to live can

bear almost any how,” Nietzsche said.

HOW TO COMBINE ART AND POLITICS

A million protest actions are possible:

kiss-in: A form of protest in which people in same-sex or queer

relationships kiss in a public place to demonstrate their sexual

preferences.

die-in: A form of protest in which participants pretend that they’re

dead. This method was used by animal rights activists, antiwar

activists, human rights activists, gun control activists, environmental

activists, and many more.

bed-in: A protest in bed. The most famous one was done by Yoko Ono and

John Lennon in 1969 in Amsterdam, where they campaigned against the

Vietnam War from their bed.

car/motorcycle caravans: A group of cars/bikes move through the city

with lots of symbols, posters, and noise. Used, for example, by the Blue

Buckets movement in Russia to protest the unnecessarily frequent use of

flashing lights and roadblocks by motorcades and vehicles carrying top

officials.

repainting: In 1991, Czech sculptor David Černý painted a Soviet IS-2

tank pink.

replacing: Swapping “normal” mannequins in shop windows with “abnormal”

mannequins.

shopdropping: Covertly placing your own items in stores.

refusing to accept management’s absurd orders and laughing in response

to them

laughing in response to abuse by police or guards

laughing to protest a trial

(Ridiculing power is one of the best means of democratization; we call

it methods of laughter.)

.............................................

.............................................

.............................................

(add your own items to the list)

To spark people’s lives with meaning, art should not exist only in the

form of an art market, as it mostly does now. A market—by

definition—creates exclusive, not inclusive, experiences. Art belongs to

everybody. We should be able to create more art in the street, in public

spaces. We should have free communal art centers, where anybody who’d

like to can create an artwork. You say that it’s a utopia, I say look at

Sweden in the 1980s and ’90s. They had communal cultural hubs, where

every person who walked in could learn how to, let’s say, play the

guitar.

• *** destroy the (fourth) wall

How can I break the fourth wall that separates the artist from the

audience?

Breaking the fourth wall is a good and healthy thing to do. It’s a sign

of real hospitality, an invitation to think and create together. Trust

your audience, treat them as equals, involve every guest in a journey,

an investigation, and a conversation. They are part of the work of art

too.

“What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become

something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to

life,” writes Michel Foucault. “That art is something which is

specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t

everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house

be an art object, but not our life?”

You share your artistic responsibility with the audience. It’s political

theater—it’s a theater of cruelty where nobody is just an observer.

You’re breaking the society of the spectacle by turning a spectacle into

society. The audience will be thankful to you. They’re also tired of

being force-fed junk by the entertainment industry. They want to share

responsibility. Freedom grows through pressure, so give them pressure.

They want to be in your mob.

We feel disconnected from reality. How can my little action possibly

make any difference? If I could unite five or ten people through art, if

I could make them believe in their power, that’s my prize and that’s my

victory.

Guy Debord, Jean-Luc Godard, and Bertolt Brecht were seeking a form of

art that could break down the wall between the actor and the audience.

According to them, the elimination of this wall would make it possible

to involve an audience in action and critical analysis.

“Bourgeois dramatic art rests on a pure quantification of effects: a

whole circuit of computable appearances establishes a quantitative

equality between the cost of a ticket and the tears of an actor or the

luxuriousness of a set,” writes Roland Barthes in Mythologies (1957).

This kind of art is not going to ask the audience inconvenient

questions. The audience has paid to feel comfortably numb.

“Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to

shape it.” That’s Bertolt Brecht.

I have no interest in art that does not disturb. Being radically honest,

I would not even call it art. The goal of art is not to protect the

status quo. Art is development and investigation. By definition, as an

act of creation, art is change, change that affects artist and audience

alike.

Making political art or music videos is not really that different from

making any other type of art. The slight differences are:

• You’re aware that intelligence services are closely following your

every move.

• You act according to the knowledge that intelligence services are

following you.

• As an honest (wo)man, you have to be sure that you warn every single

person who’s involved in a production at the very first meeting: you

have to be ready to (a) be fired from your job, (b) be beaten, and (c)

be sentenced to several years in prison.

• After you’ve released the piece of art, you casually check the news

feed just to see if a criminal case has been opened or not.

• You have to be ready to help those who are in danger because they

participated in your political artistic enterprise.

That’s it, I think.

• *** a prayer

If the theory of superstrings is right and we all consist of strings

that vibrate, it explains why music can touch us so deeply. Because we

do not consist of solid things, as we used to think. If we are just

strings of energy—and quantum physics says that we are—we would

resonate. If you could feel it, you could project ideas and feelings and

perceptions of reality. Music is a prayer.

Music brings you closer to your animal state. The heartbeat of rhythm

organizes your thoughts and visions, organizes effortlessly and

elegantly, making them more impactful and mesmerizing. We cannot fake a

spell, we must let a spell invade us, and then a spell is ready to be

cast and may work very well. That’s what shamanism looks like. Music has

always been—and will always remain—a prayer at its core.

“As a little girl,” Einstein’s second wife, Elsa, once remarked, “I fell

in love with Albert because he played Mozart so beautifully on the

violin. He also plays the piano. Music helps him when he is thinking

about his theories. He goes to his study, comes back, strikes a few

chords on the piano, jots something down, returns to his study.”

• ** Deeds

• *** pussy riot church

You might think that on the day you committed a crime that resulted in

two years of prison, you should feel something special. In fact, on my

day, I felt ridiculous and stubborn. Honestly, I feel this way every day

anyway, so nothing seemed special for me on the 21^(st) of February

2012.

When we arrived at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, it didn’t feel as

if we were doing anything wrong. Later, we were told by the court, the

investigators, our president, the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox

Church, and various outlets of Russian propaganda that what we did in

the cathedral was blasphemy, a felony, an attempt to destroy Russia ...

that we in fact had declared war on Russian values, traditions,

morality. We crucified Christ a second time; we sold our homeland to

America and let NATO tear it apart. That’s what they told us.

WHERE TO STAGE AN UNSANCTIONED CONCERT

Wall Street

Physical structures (construction scaffolding, lampposts, roofs)

In the air (balloon, tightrope, helicopter)

In flames (either by belching flames or dancing amid them)

Government buildings (police stations, city administrations)

A blocked-off street; you can block it with trash bins

Military installations (e.g., the musical Hair)

The woods

Boat (e.g., Sex Pistols on the River Thames, 1977)

Prisons

Psychiatric institutions (Nina Hagen plays a lot of concerts there these

days)

Interrupting a lecture in a college

The Pentagon

FSB HQ

Red Square

On public transport

On a tank, in front of a tank

On a military submarine

Interrupting an official event

During protests

We didn’t foresee any of that when we came to the cathedral. It wasn’t

as if we were planning to overturn the entire state. It was a windy

winter day—there’s really nothing good I could say about the weather.

But everything besides the weather felt just fine. I felt confident. I

had heard from my government officials that I was living in a free

country, so I could come to any public space and communicate to those in

power whatever I’d like. Right?

That morning, we met at the Kropotkinskaya subway station (named after

the Russian anarchist Kropotkin). Five women in colorful tights and

colored hats.

For three weeks, we had been rehearsing quickly laying out the

footlights and connecting them to a portable battery while

simultaneously setting up the microphone stand and getting the guitar

out of its case. However much we rehearsed, it took us fifteen seconds

to set up the performance, which was way too long, of course.

“Careful planning of joint actions by the accomplices of the criminal

group, attentive planning of each stage of the crime, and use of the

necessary props made it possible to successfully complete all stages of

the planned action and commence with its final stage,” read the verdict

of Moscow’s Khamovniki District Court, August 17, 2012.

I had never thought that a concert could lead to a prison term, but you

know, never say never—never stop wondering, life is truly full of

unknowns. We entered the church and “began devilishly jerking [our]

bodies, jumping, hopping, kicking [our] legs high, and wagging [our]

heads,” as it says in our criminal case.

“After Nadya had crossed herself while kneeling, a guard came up to her

and tried to grab her, and she very nimbly and girlishly slipped from

his arms and ran off like a rabbit,” says my father, who was with us in

the cathedral.

The performance lasted forty seconds. After the action, we picked up our

belongings and left.

The next day, Putin and the patriarch get on the phone. The presidential

administration called the right people. The main question in the Pussy

Riot case was, Who was more offended by the Punk Prayer, Vladimir Putin

or the patriarch? Putin knows that church and state are constitutionally

separate in Russia, but he believes that they are one and the same. As

quoted on inoSMI (November 7, 2017), he said: “How many European

countries have deviated from their roots, including Christian values,

that lie in the very core of the Western civilization? They deny moral

principles and everything traditional on the national, cultural, and

even sexual level.... The West quickly goes backward and down to the

chaotic darkness, to the primitive state.”

“Through their actions they demonstratively and pointedly attempted to

devalue ecclesiastical traditions and dogmas cherished and revered for

centuries,” said the judge at my trial.

“I have vouchsafed God’s revelation and that the Lord condemns what

Pussy Riot has done. I am convinced this sin will be punished both in

this life and the hereafter,” said archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, head of

the Russian Orthodox Church’s press service (RBK Group, June 25, 2012).

God’s law, the most important law, had been violated by this action, by

this sin. “For the wages of sin is death,” the Bible says, meaning

eternal damnation in hell.

I feel that the action in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior was

horrible on the whole. We didn’t accomplish most of what we intended—we

didn’t even get to the refrain of the song. We did not have enough

footage to make a good music video. We were extremely disappointed.

Oddly enough, we were sent to prison for the worst Pussy Riot action

we’d done. Apparently, Putin simply didn’t like it. He thought,

Damn—what a load of shit! Put them in jail!

A PUNK PRAYER: MOTHER OF GOD, DRIVE PUTIN AWAY

Virgin Mary, Mother of God

Drive Putin away

Drive Putin away

Drive Putin away

Black cassock, golden epaulettes

Parishioners all crawling to pay their respects

The phantom of liberty in heaven

Gay pride dispatched to Siberia in shackles

The KGB boss, their principal saint

Escorts protesters to jail

So as not to insult His Holiness

Women must have babies and sex

Shit, shit, shit, holy shit

Shit, shit, shit, holy shit

Virgin Mary, Mother of God

Become a feminist

Become a feminist

Become a feminist

The Church praises rotten leaders

A sacred procession of black limousines

A preacher is coming to school today

Go to class and bring him money!

Patriarch Gundyayev believes in Putin

The bitch had better believe in God

The Virgin’s Belt is no substitute for rallies

The Virgin Mary is with us at protests!

It was just a prayer. A very special prayer. “The most important

dictator, Putin, is really afraid of people,” as Pussy Riot member

Squirrel says. “More specifically, he’s afraid of Pussy Riot. Afraid of

a bunch of young, positive, optimistic women unafraid to speak their

minds.”

We exposed the brutal and cruel side of the government, but we didn’t do

anything illegal. It’s not illegal to sing and say what you think.

People don’t call it the Cathedral of Christ the Savior anymore, but

rather the Pussy Riot church or, alternatively, the trade center of

Christ the Savior. You can rent a holy conference hall and a press

center and a concert hall with a VIP green room. Restaurants, a laundry,

and a VIP car-washing service are located under the altar in the

basement. It also houses a company that sells seafood. Tourists are sold

Fabergé eggs at 150,000 rubles a pop, and the cathedral does a brisk

trade in souvenirs. And since no one supervises or taxes them, the

Russian Orthodox Church has decided to dabble in cheap Arabian gold. “If

you want to be sure that your venture will go well, do it with us.”

That’s what I read on the website of the “holy place.”

The Orthodox Church’s patriarch, Kirill, renowned for his tobacco

business and his alleged fortune of $4 billion, spoke out often before

the elections against political activism on the part of the rank and

file. “Orthodox people are unable to go to demonstrations. These people

do not go to demonstrations. Their voices are not heard. They pray in

the quiet of their monasteries, their monastic cells, and their homes,”

said His Holiness.

The patriarch had been unashamedly campaigning for Putin, referring to

him as president of Russia before the presidential elections took place

and saying that Putin had allegedly “fixed history’s crookedness.” If

Putin has fixed anything, it would be the pockets of his minions—for

example, the pockets of His Holiness Kirill.

So Pussy Riot’s only crime was that we did not rent a room at Christ the

Savior Cathedral. The church’s website features a price list for room

rentals. Any wealthy official or businessman could afford to hold a

banquet at the church, because he is a man, has money, and is not

opposed to Putin. These are the three secrets to success in Russia.

Someone in a crowd once asked Saint Francis of Assisi if he ever thought

about getting married. “Yes, a fairer bride than any of you have ever

seen,” he answered.

Christ comes to church, throws out the merchants, and overturns

moneylenders’ tables. Christ doesn’t sell jewelry in the church. Or

operate a car wash. The church we have is fucked up, has sold out, and

is corrupted. If you have eyes, you’ll see it.

• ** Heroes

• *** the yes men

If there are superstars of the place where art and politics collide with

irony and subversion, then the Yes Men are those stars. The Yes Men

skewer their victims by making perfectly believable public

pronouncements that only reveal their devastating satire when you sit

down and think about it for a second.

I met the Yes Men at a gala event in Berlin. It was that kind of

charitable dinner where they invite celebrities, etc., etc. Pussy Riot

was expected to give a speech. We were sitting with our purses full of

drugs next to the minister of interior affairs of Germany and overall

felt a bit weird.

If Christ were resurrected now in Russia and went around preaching what

he had preached before, he would be

• registered as a “foreign agent”;

• sent to jail for thirty days for violating the law on rallies;

• sentenced to six months in jail for insulting the feelings of

religious believers;

• sentenced to a prison without parole under Article 282 of the Russian

Criminal Code (“Incitement of hatred or enmity, as well as abasement of

dignity of a person or a group of persons on the basis of sex, race,

ethnicity, language, origin, attitude to religion, as well as

affiliation to any social group, if these acts have been committed in

public or with the use of mass media”);

• sentenced to four and half years in prison for involvement in rioting;

• sentenced to fifteen years in prison for extremism;

• whacked upside the head with a pipe.

Our acquaintance started when I ran into a giant polar bear backstage.

The bear was having trouble with the authorities, and guards were trying

to throw the bear out. A man named Igor Vamos was standing behind the

bear—arguing with the guards. There were two naked people covered in

sweat inside of the bear’s fur. Their plan was to get on the stage, get

out of the bear, and talk about climate change, about melting ice caps.

Why naked? Animals are naked—why aren’t we?

We did not think twice; of course we took the bear under our protection.

We spoke to Bianca Jagger, and Bianca also became a strong bear

supporter. She was saying that the bear is right and we need to care

about climate change. Don’t we?

It did not work out, though, in that instance. The guards were

unbeatable and the bear did not make it to the stage. But Pussy Riot met

the Yes Men.

Every time you think about actions, about pranks, remember how many of

them were rehearsed and carefully planned but simply prevented by

authorities. In my experience this covers about 40 percent of actions.

It can be rather frustrating, but that’s the rules of the game. Perhaps

I should make a whole catalog describing our art protest actions that

were prevented by police or FSB.

The Yes Men are Jacques Servin, Igor Vamos (the man with the bear), and

lots of friends and supporters, other activists who prefer to stay

unknown. The Yes Men have been doing actions for twenty years. They have

made excellent movies: The Yes Men (2003), The Yes Men Fix the World

(2009), and The Yes Men Are Revolting (2014). They promoted a supposed

Halliburton product called a “SurvivaBall,” which protected against

climate change–related natural disasters. They produced their own fake

edition of the New York Times, dated July 4, 2009—80,000 copies of which

were given to people on the streets of New York and Los Angeles. The

paper imagined an alternative future that had already arrived, with

headlines like “Iraq War Ends” and “Nation Sets Its Sights on Building

Sane Economy.” “All the News We Hope to Print,” said the tagline on the

front page. There were stories about establishing universal health care,

a maximum wage for CEOs, as well as an article in which George W. Bush

accuses himself of treason for his actions during his years as

president.

In 2004 Servin, in character as a Dow Chemical spokesman, went on the

BBC and said Dow was going to give $12 billion to the untold thousands

of victims of the Bhopal chemical plant disaster in India in 1984. Which

is what Dow Chemical should have done. The financial market’s reaction

was to tank Dow stock to the tune of billions. Oh no! Money for

deserving victims?

Jacques Servin is a professor at the Parsons School of Design in New

York, and Igor Vamos, an associate professor of media arts at Rensselaer

Polytechnic Institute. In 2014, students at Reed College invited Vamos,

an alum, to give the commencement address. During the address and backed

by a press release, Vamos announced that Reed was divesting its $500

million from fossil fuels. It wasn’t, but students had been pushing the

trustees to do so.

• * Rule № 6: SPOT AN ABUSE OF POWER

We can identify specific abuses of power and bring them to everyone’s

attention.

First there was Greek civilization. Then there was the Renaissance. Now

we’re entering the Age of the Ass.

JEAN-LUC GODARD’S PIERROT LE FOU

President? My big toe would make a better president.

SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS

• ** Words

• *** lie, cheat, steal (everybody’s doin’ it); or, who is mr. putin and

what does it have to do with mr. trump?

If we measure the success of a politician by his/her ability to reflect

the main tendencies of her/his time, then Trump and Putin are

triumphant. They both manage to reflect the worst impulses that the

times have brought us—they are greedy, ethics-free, uncaring.

“Oligarchic elites, while they may disagree on just about everything

else, are firmly united in their desire to defend their wealth,” German

economic sociologist Wolfgang Streeck says in the book How Will

Capitalism End?

If you ask me what I would like to say to President Putin, I’d tell you

that I don’t feel like talking to him. To my mind he is a waste of

space.

Putin, the man who has co-opted the ideology of Russia today, doesn’t

even have a coherent set of beliefs. “I cannot imagine my country being

isolated from Europe,” said Putin in an interview with the BBC in March

2000. He didn’t mind Russia being a part of NATO, either. Today,

antagonism with Europe, America, and NATO seems to be Putin’s favorite

game in his playground.

Stealing money from the Russian people may be Putin’s only enduring

idea. As a former KGB agent, Putin simply doesn’t believe in beliefs.

Anyone who “believes” could be bribed or intimidated and is therefore

vulnerable. And you can’t arm yourself with a belief. Money, prison, or

a gun can neutralize any “conviction.”

Putin remains an ordinary KGB agent, and—paradoxically—that’s the secret

of his success. Putin came into his enormous power by pure accident. He

was appointed by the oligarchs in 2000, with the oligarchs believing

that Putin would be their puppet. They believed it because Putin is a

truly unexceptional human being.

Putin is petty, uncaring, spiteful, incapable of love and forgiveness,

and incredibly insecure. He’s nervous, especially when he tries to hide

his tremor under a hypermasculine bravado. Trust, compassion, and

empathy are second-rate emotions in Putin’s world—that is, in a KGB

agent’s world.

Somebody told me an anecdote about the KGB. I believe this story might

be true.

Candidates come to the KGB to apply for a job. They have passed the

basic exams, and now they are told they have to take one last test, and

everyone who passes it will be hired.

Each is shown a room in which he sees his wife. The examiner says, “Here

is a gun. Go in and shoot your wife for the sake of the Motherland, and

you’re hired.”

Everyone refuses except for one man. Shots are heard from the room, then

shouts, scuffling, and sounds of a struggle.

The candidate emerges from the room and brushes himself off.

“The rounds turned out to be blanks, so I had to smother her,” he says.

Putin will never allow himself to be creatively or intellectually open.

He is a well-trained agent. Anything that may make him emotionally

vulnerable is harmful. Thus, having a heart is harmful.

He is a professional at corrupting people’s souls with material goods,

opportunities, and if needed, fear. Good intentions and honesty don’t

exist in reality, Putin thinks. A pragmatic, smart, effective player

could not let sentimentality decrease his productivity. Remember the

main hero of Bertolucci’s The Conformist? He embodies the banality of

evil. He is a pale, insignificant opportunist who nevertheless has

enough power to crush beautiful, sophisticated worlds. If he finds a

flower in his hands, he’ll destroy it: its beauty is alien and

intimidating to him.

Putin claims to be a religious person. He’s not. The same with most of

the Republicans in the United States, who are killing freedom and rights

in the name of God. If they opened the New Testament and actually read

it, it would become clear to them that Christ would throw up if he saw

what they are doing.

Putin condemned Pussy Riot for dancing in a church and protecting

women’s rights, saying that he’ll save Christianity from devilish

witches like us. It seems that Putin has no clue about early

Christianity; otherwise he would know that Christ and his followers were

rebels and not Caesars. Putin is not able to conceive of the virtues

that constitute the heart of every pure religion: the readiness to give

yourself away, willingness to sacrifice, an unconditional lust for truth

and justice. Putin understands only the safe, comfortable, bureaucratic

type of institutional religion that confirms the status quo.

Religion is a useful facade, a masquerade for Putin. Maybe that’s why he

doesn’t seem to remember that he came from the KGB, which has

prosecuted, arrested, and killed hundreds of thousands of Soviet people

just because they dared to believe in God. Now Putin has changed face:

now he’s friends with the deeply corrupt and infected institution of the

Russian Orthodox Church. Obviously, facades are interchangeable. There

is no person who is irreplaceable, as Stalin liked to say. Or: there is

no person I cannot fire to save my petty ass, right?

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested

in the good of others,” George Orwell writes in 1984. “We are interested

solely in power, pure power. The object of persecution is persecution.

The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.” And

power that exists for its own sake is by definition an abuse.

When I’m going through Putin’s qualities and can’t find anything of

worth, I unwittingly start to think about another petty person I know.

Trump is his name.

Putin and Trump share a bunch of qualities (besides business and

political connections and being dangerously corrupt and crooked). They

share a belief that people are motivated only by self-interest. They are

distrustful of human sincerity or integrity, selfishly and callously

calculating the profit from every social transaction. They believe that

all connections have to be profitable transactions. And they believe

this religiously. Trump is maniacally obsessed with “winning.” He was

able to simplify the whole wide world to the degrading alternative of

win or lose. And the KGB agent Putin also knows that you have just two

options: you eat someone or you’ll be eaten. In Trump and Putin’s world,

we don’t really care about human dignity; we care about human capital.

Dignity is not profitable.

“In general it is possible to divide mankind into two categories,” wrote

Vladimir Bukovsky, a dissident who spent twelve years in psychiatric

prison hospitals, labor camps, and prisons within the USSR, “those you

could share a cell with and those you couldn’t.” I don’t think I could

share a cell with someone for whom a human is just a number, a pawn that

can be manipulated for their personal gain.

There is one set of laws and regulations for the 1 percent, and another

for the 99 percent. It leads to the relentless exploitation of both

“human capital” and the environment for short-term profits. It leads to

kleptocracy, to private profiteers sucking money out of education and

health care, assaults on women’s rights, imperial adventurism, and the

demonization of the other.

Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote in an article titled

“Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%” (Vanity Fair, May 2011):

1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an

inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.... In terms of wealth

rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Twenty-five

years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent.

Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs [see?] and

Iran. Governments would compete in providing economic security, low

taxes on ordinary wage earners, good education, and a clean

environment—things workers care about. But the top 1 percent don’t need

to care.

As Bernie Sanders puts the main principle of our political era, “When

you see a social problem, you financialize, you privatize and you

militarize.”

The wealthy have their own version of political struggle. This struggle

manifests itself in their stinky, shady financial schemes, which ruin

the lives of opponents, killing them sometimes. Finding sneaky ways to

not follow their own laws or simply creating new ones (a favorite trick

of Putin’s).

“In this world laws are written for the lofty aim of ‘the common good’

and then acted out in life on the basis of the common greed,” Saul

Alinsky wrote in Rules for Radicals. And the wealthy are fantastically

well organized. Again, if we need to pick up what elites all around the

world know very well how to do, it is how to protect their own wealth.

Everybody has a right to be my servant, they think. If we, the left (or

“the up” or “the high,” as my friends who don’t like binary oppositions

call it), progressive activists, want to oppose them somehow, we have to

learn how to be fantastically organized too.

There is no friendship or comradeship in the world when only power and

profit are worshipped. No trust, love, or inspiration. There are

business and political alliances based on a recognition of each other’s

power and influence, i.e., deeply based in mutual fear and mistrust.

It’s scary to lose power in such a toxic environment. Once you lose

protection, your fall toward the abyss starts. Those who licked your ass

yesterday will be happy to use your skull as an ashtray today.

• *** alt-right fascists

“Fascism was right since it derived from a healthy national-patriotic

sensibility, without which a people can neither lay claim to its

existence nor create a unique culture.”

This is a quote from Ivan Ilyin, Putin’s favorite philosopher.

“It is not Russia that lies between the East and West. It is the East

and West that lie to the left and right of Russia,” says Putin

(Komsomolskaya Pravda, December 5, 2013). Any imperialist exceptionalism

is about as unexceptional in my eyes as it gets.

When Noam Chomsky was asked by the Nation (June 2, 2017) what’s the

story with Brexit, Trump, Le Pen, Hindu nationalism ... nationalism

everywhere, he said yes, it’s a real world phenomenon. “It’s very clear,

and it was predictable.... When you impose socioeconomic policies that

lead to stagnation or decline for the majority of the population,

undermine democracy, remove decision-making out of popular hands, you’re

going to get anger, discontent, fear [that takes] all kinds of forms....

People are very angry, they’re losing control of their lives. The

economic policies are mostly harming them, and the result is anger,

disillusion.”

It’s a simple plan. First, create inequality and structural violence.

Second, scapegoat the “others” as an explanation of what’s wrong. Third,

offer nativism and more privileges for the privileged as a solution.

That’s how we got Trump, Brexit, Le Pen, Orbán, etc.

Putin’s playing these games too: he plays on the complex of rage, pain,

and impoverishment of the Russian people caused by the Machiavellian

privatization and deregulation that happened in the 1990s. “Do you want

to go back to the ’90s?” It’s his main trick. The same old story: using

fear to get the power and the money.

We are all victims of a strange misunderstanding that politics and our

everyday lives are somehow disconnected. I meet people here and there,

in different countries, who say that they don’t care about political

issues because the issues don’t have any significant influence on their

lives. Interesting.

The professionalization and elitism of politics went much too far. The

atomization of the people went too far. These are two sides of one coin,

and you know for sure that the coin doesn’t belong to us either. The

situation is predictably getting worse, because the less we participate

in collective actions, the less we believe that we have any power as

individuals who can join forces and fight back. Sometimes it feels like

“united” is just an airline that asks you to pay money for your

backpacks and leg space.

Margaret Thatcher said, “There is no society, only individuals.” Noam

Chomsky reveals that she was paraphrasing Marx, who in his condemnation

of repression in France said, “The repression is turning society into a

sack of potatoes, just individuals, an amorphous mass can’t act

together.” That was a condemnation. For Thatcher, it’s an ideal. There

is no society, only atomized consumers.

When we believe it’s up to professionals to decide how to run our

countries, we start to think that even political revolution or radical

change can be effected by another professional instead of us. A

professional revolutionary, I guess. It makes us think that we can

delegate somebody to clean up our shit in politics, like we pay someone

to clean our place after a huge messy party, while we’re dying in bed

devouring Advil.

Wrong. We can outsource ugly factories, but we cannot outsource

political action. Lack of involvement and engagement brought us to the

point we are at right now, a moment of political desperation and social

alienation, a situation where “equal opportunity” sounds like a joke. We

cannot hand over responsibility, even to Bernie Sanders or the ACLU. It

simply will not work. Bernie, the ACLU, or Bikini Kill will do their

best, but we’d all need to become Bernie ourselves if we wanted to get a

real new deal.

It may be calming to think there is somebody wise and powerful who will

take care of us. I’m Russian, and we have an insanely strong traditional

desire for paternalism. There has to be someone who’ll come and make the

world a better place. But more often, they will not come. And if they

do, there is a very good chance they will be assholes. Absolute power

turns everybody into an absolute shit.

Some more advice from one of the most brilliant of political organizers,

Saul Alinsky. “It is not enough just to elect your candidates. You must

keep the pressure on.” “The separation of the people from the routine

daily functions of citizenship is heartbreak in a democracy.” I tend to

trust these words.

Putin and Trump, these men devoid of convictions or beliefs, happen to

be perfect figures for the twenty-four-hour hyped news cycle, where we

are ping-ponged back and forth between indifference and hysteria.

The media universe fills us with a feeling of total helplessness, total

defeat. We don’t know what is truth and what is a lie, especially when

we are fed lies labeled as truth and vice versa. We’re constantly being

fed shocking stories that leave us feeling hopeless, isolated, and

powerless. Pure despair. All-inclusive blackouts. No surprise that we

have anxiety attacks.

When I turn on the TV, I feel miserable. The universe is falling apart,

and I don’t know how to keep it together. It’s against our nature to be

overwhelmed with bad news and to not have the power to fix it. It leads

to frustration, rage, desperation. What every human being needs is to

have a set of tools to overcome the horror. Our aim should be to create

this set of tools.

What makes me hopeful is that I experienced something in my life that

tells me this separation could be overcome.

I will never forget the atmosphere at the giant protests against Putin

in Moscow in 2011. We were grateful to each other for coming out of our

houses and creating a new, incredible, clever political animal and force

for good that filled the streets and squares. We were in love with each

other and with the feeling that suffuses everyone involved in major

emancipatory social movements.

“We had grasped the great truth that it was not rifles, not tanks, and

not atom bombs that created power, nor upon them that power rested,”

says Vladimir Bukovsky, a Soviet dissident. “Power depended upon public

obedience, upon a willingness to submit.”

There are cultures of eating, film viewing, and book reading, and there

is the culture of revolt, the ability to pose awkward questions, cast

doubt on things, and change them. Feed the latter. Even the best, most

perfect president will serve you fuck-all on a silver platter. It’s

self-service in these parts.

“It is not simply a question of making the ‘other’ change; the painful

truth is that we, too, will have to change,” writes Paul Verhaeghe, a

Belgian professor of clinical psychology and psychoanalysis and author

of What About Me? The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society

(2012). “Instead of being merely consumers, we must once again become

citizens—not just in the voting booth, but above all in the way in which

we lead our lives.... If we want politics to be governed by the public

interest—and that is more necessary than ever—we ourselves must promote

that public interest, rather than private concerns.”

Verhaeghe points out a paradox of the (post)modern individual, “a

strange type of dissociation, a new form of split personality”: we are

hostile to the system and at the same time feel powerless to change it.

On top of that, “we act in a way that reinforces and even extends it.

Every decision we make—what to eat and drink, what to wear, how to get

about, where to go on holiday—demonstrates this. We are the system that

we complain about.”

Erich Fromm distinguished two ways of living: being and having. The

“having” mode of existence is a product of consumerist culture, when

someone believes that a human being is an empty vessel to be filled with

different commodities. If it’s not filled, then anxiety, crisis,

psychological blackout happens.

If you read Fromm, many things about oligarchy, celebrity fascism,

Trump, and Putin become clear. Fromm points out how the development of

the industrial economic system radically shifted the values of our

civilization. With industrialization, he says, came the idolization of

growth and profit. We’re not longing to be anymore, but to have, to have

the maximum pleasure and fulfillment of every desire (radical hedonism),

which results in the egotism, selfishness, and greed of people.

In 1956 Fromm wrote The Art of Loving, where he fairly states, “Modern

man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life

energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit,

considering his position and the situation on the personality market. He

is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main

aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself....

Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of

fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume.”

I’m concerned with the idolization of economic growth. Why did we even

start to think that we have to grow endlessly in the first place? We

aren’t inflatable ducks or unicorns. “The truth is that, for developed

nations, continued economic growth as conventionally measured is

incompatible with climate stability,” writes Samuel Alexander, a

researcher at Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute. “A safe climate

requires that we now need a phase of planned economic contraction, or

‘degrowth.’ This does not simply mean producing and consuming more

efficiently and shifting to renewable energy, necessary though these

changes are. It also requires that we produce and consume less—a

conclusion that few dare to utter.” What we need to do is to find a way

to make a shift to a stable, postgrowth economy.

We need a shift in values, we need a change of paradigm. Happiness is

bigger than growth and profit—on the scale of the planet, on the scale

of history. I’m sure that if something may be changed at this point, it

would never come from the government, it’d never come from the top 1

percent. It will be something requested by mass movements of the people.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “Thus, the word is more essential than

cement. Thus, the word is not a small nothing. In this manner, noble

people begin to grow, and their words will break cement.�� When I am

weak, then I am strong. Just like Solzhenitsyn, I believe that in the

end the word will break cement.

But if we are to do so, we also need more democracy, and when I say

“democracy” I mean “direct democracy.” It’s ridiculous and hysterically

unfunny that with the internet spread all around, we do not have in our

hands more effective methods to directly participate in everyday

political decisions. Our political systems are still structured in a way

that pretends the internet does not exist. The authorities cannot

guarantee the security of the electoral process. And in fact, many

Republicans are more interested in disenfranchising voters than ensuring

free and fair elections. We elect representatives once every four or six

years and then they are free to do whatever the fuck they want, to take

bribes from lobbyists, destroy the public infrastructure, and most

importantly, wreck our planet. Don’t expect that these rights to

participate in direct democracy will be handed over to you, though. The

Koch brothers and Putin’s buddies, oligarchs like the Rotenbergs, will

make sure that we won’t get them. We need to gnaw out these rights.

In his final lectures, Michel Foucault spoke of the need for parrhesia,

the courage to speak out (one of Diogenes’s favorite ideas). “We tend to

interpret this lazily, for instance by sniping at the Catholic Church,

or venting our opinions (bristling with exclamation marks) on internet

forums,” writes Paul Verhaeghe.

Some would say that we should just rearrange our private lives and it’ll

be fine. I say that’s like making the bed in your cabin on the Titanic

when the ship is already underwater.

The future is not going to be bright if the driver’s seat is occupied by

petty assholes. We have to call to account those who are abusing power

in our name. We need to grab the power back.

The old Communist cult of personality is still alive in North Korea. If

you wish to mention former leader Kim Jong-il in print, one of his many

titles and a special typeface must be used. Either something large and

out of place (Brilliant Leader Kim Jong-il blah blah blah) or something

in a different and incongruous font (FATHER OF THE PEOPLE KIM JONG-IL

blah blah blah).

Although all the names listed below are used to refer to Kim Jong-il,

they are equally applicable to any paternalistic fantasy of an almighty

figure about to come and save us. If we want to be saved, we may

consider undertaking our own action and doing it ourselves. “Nothing

will work unless you do,” as Maya Angelou said.

A list of people we don’t need:

Superior Person

Dear Leader

Respected Leader

Wise Leader

Brilliant Leader

Unique Leader

Dear Leader, who is a perfect incarnation of the appearance that a

leader should have

Father of the People

Guiding Sun Ray

Leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces

Guarantee of the Fatherland’s Unification

Fate of the Nation

Beloved Father

Leader of the Party, the Country, and the Army

Ever-Victorious, Iron-Willed Commander

Great Sun of the Nation

World Leader of the 21^(st) Century

Peerless Leader

Bright Sun of the 21^(st) Century

Amazing Politician

Great Man, Who Descended from Heaven

Glorious General, Who Descended from Heaven

Invincible and Triumphant General

Guiding Star of the 21^(st) Century

Great Man, Who Is a Man of Deeds

Savior

Mastermind of the Revolution

Highest Incarnation of the Revolutionary Comradeship

• ** Deeds

• *** bite off your tongue

Let me tell you what happens as the result of an abuse of power.

Politically motivated arrests, for example.

“What should I say if I am beaten during interrogation?”

“You should say it is bad to beat people,” advises a lawyer, “and put up

with it.”

“That’s it?” I asked.

It’s 2012, one week before our arrest. Coffee shop in Moscow. Pussy

Riot’s activists are here with overstuffed backpacks, our eyes red after

a sleepless night. We already know the Russian state has decided to

arrest Pussy Riot and prosecute us for a crime punishable by up to seven

years in prison. The criminal case has been opened, and we’re on the

lam. I’m trying to get used to the idea that I’ll end up in prison soon.

I eat one cake after another.

“As long as they are beating you, you should say you will bite off your

tongue, but you will not testify.”

“That I will bite off ... what? My tongue?”

“Yes, that you will bite off your tongue.”

“But I’m not going to bite off my tongue!”

“Well, at least say it convincingly.”

Everyone looks at the table.

“Let’s try hitting each other in the face with a bottle and find out

whether it hurts,” my friend suggests.

“No, let’s not do it now. We’ll scare people.”

“Let’s step outside then. What, you think you’ll have a lot more time to

prepare for interrogations?”

The next day we escape from the police to the countryside and find

ourselves in a quiet place where the white snow crunches underfoot. If

you walk down the hill, atop which the house stands, to a narrow stream,

you smell smoke from the Russian stoves, and you hear watchdogs barking

from behind old wooden fences.

We go into the apartment and plop down on the floor. We stare straight

ahead.

“We need to get some sleep.”

“Yes.”

The five of us curl up together on a double bed and, huddled together

like dogs in the cold, we fall asleep.

We spent two days in the countryside. In the mornings, I descended the

hill to jog along the river. When I was warming up, I shadowboxed and

shadowkicked the air opposite shattered old brick buildings that had

been factories sometime in the distant Soviet past. I greedily breathed

in the rural air, and it made me dizzy. I responded by jumping and

flogging the empty space more energetically with my fists.

Despite the cold, the thin stream at the foot of the hill did not freeze

over because of the toxic industrial waste dumped into it. I halted on a

bridge over the river and listened. I was aware of wooden houses, spruce

trees, barking dogs, the smell of woodstoves, the sun, the blinding

snow, and water running over stones.

And what if, I thought, swinging my leg, I don’t see this sun and this

river again for several years? I need to muster my strength and soak up

the sun’s warmth while I can.

I froze, like a dandelion that turns to face the sun. If I am,

nevertheless, imprisoned, I will definitely come back here, to this

bridge, because it is my river and my air and my world, and no louse can

take them away from me.

This was what I thought as I stood on the bridge, waiting for my arrest.

When the state decided to arrest us, we were not professional

politicians, revolutionaries, or members of an underground cell. We were

activists and artists, a bit naive and straightforward, as is common

among artists.

When we were arrested, we were more like cartoon characters than

characters from Salt or Tomb Raider. We laughed at our pursuers more

than we feared them. We would burst out laughing thinking about the

pettiness of the circumstances. A huge team of well-trained and

well-paid state investigators was tracking down a group of pranksters

and freaks with ridiculous bright hats pulled over their faces.

We, the five women who performed the Punk Prayer, sat glued to our

rucksacks drinking coffee, gradually getting used to the idea that every

sip of coffee could be the last sip we took on the outside.

A few days later, about one hour before my arrest, I painted my

fingernails and toenails red, did my hair, and put on a white-and-blue

polka-dot ribbon. I left the house to buy a gift for my daughter, Gera,

whose birthday was the following day, March 4. Her father, Peter, and I

had already bought a set of tiny toy badgers, a whole family (mom, dad,

daughter, and son), for her. We had to find furniture and a kitchen for

them, and a family of hedgehogs to be their friends.

“Freeze! Hands on the wall!”

Ten men in plain clothes jumped Peter and me near the glass doors of a

subway station.

Peter was hurled against the wall.

“Over here, you louse!”

They dragged me away.

They shoved us into a community police office. The men in plain clothes

flashed badges from the Moscow CID. Dressed in Adidas sneakers and

tracksuits, they were around six feet tall.

I ripped the page from my notebook containing the password for Pussy

Riot’s mailbox. I crumpled and swallowed it. The paper stuck in my

throat.

“Could I get some water?” I asked.

“You don’t deserve good treatment, whore!” a CID officer replied.

I reacted by pulling my hood over my head and lying down on the bench in

the police office. The thought of chatting with these guys from Moscow

CID did not thrill me. I had a long road ahead of me. I had to gather my

strength.

“Get used to sitting up, bitch!”

Another officer, also dressed in a tracksuit, grabbed me and jerked me

up.

I took out a book.

Peter managed to make a five-second call to a lawyer with his phone. The

cops, enraged because they hadn’t been keeping track of him, confiscated

the phone and dismantled it.

One of the Moscow CID officers nodded at me, maliciously grinning.

“She’s fucking pretending to read.”

“I am reading.”

I smiled and straightened my polka-dot ribbon.

In all psychologically damaging situations, I read. It helps, I’ve never

had a panic attack in my life. So far. When Trump won the election in

America, I read for two months. I was seriously overwhelmed.

• *** take back the streets

Streets are our veins. Walls—skin. Roofs, windows—eyes. Trees are lungs.

Benches are our butts. Traffic is a burp. We’re becoming the town we’re

living in. We’re quite alienated from making decisions about how the

city we live in will look. It’s ridiculous. How can someone possibly

decide how my city will look just because he or she has money and I

don’t?

If you’re living in the city, the quality of your life depends on the

quality of public spaces much more than on your furniture. I love cities

with lots of graffiti. They have vitality, sexual animal energy, those

towns. Every city is a dragon of a million faces, and we should be able

to see it on the streets. If we see only the footprints of billionaires

and corporations, it means that the dragon is sick, and it needs an

anarchist angel doctor. I don’t understand cities that have been

completely taken over by commerce. They look like shopping malls where

only zombies can stay alive. I don’t like it when I can’t sit on the

ground.

“It looks like you’re hanging out here,” guards tell me. Yes, I am.

That’s what I call life, hanging out here and there, leaving traces.

Take back the streets, make them beautiful, different, controversial,

strange. The streets are an open ongoing conversation. The streets are

open relationships too.

Occupy Wall Street is one of the most inspirational things that has

happened so far in the twenty-first century. I could not believe my ears

when I heard about it for the first time. The 1 percent understood the

power of this movement too, and they did their best to shut down this

magic situation of reclaiming streets.

It was May 6, 2014, and we were about to have a meeting at the US Senate

in Washington when we learned about Cecily McMillan’s case, one of the

most brutal decisions against Occupy protesters. Cecily McMillan was

convicted of felony second-degree assault after she was arrested and

assaulted by a New York City police officer. She said that her breast

was grabbed and twisted by someone behind her, and she responded by

reflexively elbowing her attacker in the face. The police officer

disputed Cecily’s version of events, and the jury sided with him. As a

result, she was facing seven years in jail. Pussy Riot faced seven years

for our protests too.

At the Senate we were supposed to be raising awareness about human

rights abuses in Russia, but we were so shocked by Cecily’s case—we

considered her an American political prisoner—we decided to go broader

and speak about her as well, in the Senate and then at our a press

conference on Capitol Hill.

Instead of calling Capitol Hill “Capitol Hill,” we happened to call it

“Capital Hell.”

On May 9, a few days after our hearing in the Senate, I met Cecily

McMillan in the Rose M. Singer Center on Rikers Island, New York City’s

offshore complex of ten jails that can house up to 15,000 prisoners.

Cecily has an amazing political charisma, a trait not every social or

political activist can successfully cultivate. Cecily’s efforts are

aimed at undoing social indifference: her ideals are volunteering,

solidarity, and mutual consideration of other people’s struggles, but

her ideals were nowhere to be found in that court.

The judge who presided over the case, Ronald Zweibel, seemed to be

siding with the prosecutors from the beginning—time and time again he

forbade the defense from presenting evidence to show the jury that

Cecily’s physical action of using her elbows against the police was not

without just cause. The cops’ use of force to disperse Occupy activists

was not an isolated event, and Cecily was adamant that she was

personally reacting against sexual harassment. The judge limited the

jury’s access to information during the trial. On May 5, Cecily was

found guilty.

Despite the fact that nine of the twelve jurors wrote a letter to the

judge asking that she not be incarcerated, Cecily could have been

sentenced to seven years in prison. On the day Cecily was sentenced, the

jurors were not aware of the article used to accuse Cecily, nor were

they aware that the article stipulated imprisonment. The jury’s change

of heart calls to mind a quote from Luke 23:34: “They know not what they

do.” The fate of Cecily McMillan is a perfect example of why her efforts

as an activist are needed: the inability of the jury to accept Cecily’s

problems as their own and to take the time and consideration during her

trial to seek justice resulted in her imprisonment.

Me and my Pussy Riot colleagues Masha and Peter went to visit Cecily on

Rikers Island. She might be the happiest prisoner we ever met.

Cecily told us with great pride that her ability to talk to people of

different social categories and groups is one of her most valued traits.

Her ultimate goal is to find points of contact between closed social

clusters and create a platform for shared, collective action. At various

times in her life, Cecily has found herself in completely different

strata of American society, switching from one layer of language and

experience to another. This is the heart of Cecily’s interest—to master

these “other tongues”; to understand social circles outside of that in

which she was born, raised, and made her career; and to understand other

people’s experiences.

Cecily wants to gradually recover the lost social dialogue between the 1

percent, who basically own everything, and the 99 percent, who have to

live in their shadow. She also opposes the policies of Wisconsin

governor Scott Walker, who, in an effort to further restrict trade union

rights, gave the green light to arrest hundreds of people whose only

fault was singing in the State Capitol. (I spent two years in prison for

singing a song about Putin. I can’t understand how anyone could be

arrested for singing.) If it is Walker’s goal to weed out undesirable

voices, then it is Cecily’s goal to return those voices to the people

who have been deprived of them.

Cecily McMillan’s case reflects global politics. Judge Zweibel’s verdict

marked a dangerous new direction in the United States and countries

indirectly impacted by US domestic policies.

“May Judge Zweibel avoid becoming a link to these practices and, like a

true patriot, may he admit his fault and rescind such a shameful

judicial precedent?” I asked myself after visiting Cecily in jail.

P.S. After three months in Rikers, Cecily was released; she got five

years of probation.

Step into the streets and take back what’s ours. Streets, squares,

corners, yards, shores, and rivers—they are public; education, health

care, transport, and natural resources are public too. We just have to

remember that.

We have more than enough signs that changes are ready to be made, that

people are willing to share their time, energy, brains, and hearts to

reach their dreams. The massive support for progressive forces all

around the globe is obvious to anyone who breathes—for Jeremy Corbyn,

who won the votes of the young generation in Britain, Bernie Sanders in

the United States, the Podemos party in Spain. And Russia too, where

there have been huge protests against Putin and his fellow oligarchs, a

mind-blowing grassroots campaign for an alternative future for our

country.

“All over the world, people are rising up against austerity and massive

levels of income and wealth inequality,” Bernie Sanders said at the

People’s Summit in Chicago right after Corbyn’s Labour Party’s stunning

result in the UK election in June 2017. “People in the UK, the US and

elsewhere want governments that represent all the people, not just the 1

percent.”

• ** Heroes

• *** the berrigan brothers

As an activist, I am often asked, What are you fighting for? Why should

we organize?

We have solid answers that are reasonable enough: we need real

democracy, a better quality of life for the 99 percent, free independent

media, broader opportunities, access to medication and health care,

environmental responsibility. But there are times when you’re exhausted

as an activist, as a human being. Sometimes you’re just tired.

Then you find your source of inspiration in muses who are walking

through life so elegantly, meaningfully, bravely, fighting beautifully

and politely and without compromise. They’re not mythological figures or

the product of fairy tales or miracles. They’re real. Look around you.

Shake off pain from your shoulders, let it fall to the floor, and go

march with your muses. Make an effort to speak in “the unlikeliest and

rarest of tongues: the truth,” as Daniel Berrigan put it. People like

the Berrigan brothers, Daniel and Philip, are muses for an activist.

Philip Berrigan served in the US Army in World War II, then became a

priest in 1955. Daniel Berrigan, the intellectual and theologian, was

ordained in 1952.

Daniel Berrigan gives us one of the best possible reasons to keep being

motivated to spot abuses of power. “But how shall we educate men to

goodness, to a sense of one another, to a love of the truth? And more

urgently, how shall we do this in a bad time?” (as quoted on the cover

of Time, January 25, 1971). “After a given time, we cannot so much as

imagine any alternative human arrangement than the one we are enslaved

to—whether educational, legal, medical, political, religious, familial.

The social contract narrows, the socialization becomes a simple

brainwash. Alternative ways, methods, styles are ignored, or never

created,” he writes in The Nightmare of God: The Book of Revelation. As

an antiwar activist and the first-ever priest on the FBI’s “most wanted

list,” Philip and Daniel collaborated with Howard Zinn and Martin Luther

King Jr., led antiwar demonstrations, and resisted American military

imperialism in the turbulent times of the Vietnam War. In his lifetime,

Philip Berrigan served eleven years in jail for his protest actions.

In 1967 Philip Berrigan and his comrades (the “Baltimore Four”—two

Catholics and two Protestants, one of whom was an artist and two

ex-military, including Berrigan, a former infantry lieutenant) occupied

the Selective Service Board, a military building in Baltimore where the

draft was organized. The men poured human and chicken blood over records

in a sacrificial act meant to protest “the pitiful waste of American and

Vietnamese blood in Indochina.” Philip Berrigan and others were arrested

for this action. Their trial took place at the same time as the

assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the subsequent riots in

Baltimore and other American cities. Berrigan was sentenced to six years

in federal prison. Their nonviolent action laid the foundation for more

radical antiwar demonstrations.

“I think that [the] word [of the church], on the modern scene, is one of

liberation from death. We are learning something of the price of that

word, in repeated trials and jailings,” writes Daniel Berrigan.

In 1968, Philip Berrigan was released on bail. Of course, the brothers

did not stop. Philip and Daniel, joined by seven other activists (the

group became known as the “Catonsville Nine”) walked into the offices of

a draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, removed six hundred draft

records, doused them in homemade napalm, and burned them in front of the

building.

“We confront the Roman Catholic Church, other Christian bodies, and the

synagogues of America with their silence and cowardice in the face of

our country’s crimes. We are convinced that the religious bureaucracy in

this country is racist, is an accomplice in this war, and is hostile to

the poor,” they said.

The brothers were convicted of conspiracy and destruction of government

property. They were sentenced to three years in prison. They went into

hiding but were caught and forced to serve the sentence.

Our courageous priests’ story is far from its conclusion at this point,

but I’ll shut up and let you explore it by yourself. Do it during the

tough times when you feel like you have way too many troubles as an

activist. What if you don’t?

One of the biggest challenges in resisting abusive power is that you

constantly have to look for more inspiration and motivation. They beat

you, and you don’t just bear it, but you find in yourself enough courage

and mischievous energy to laugh. The key is consistency. Power is

abusive pretty consistently. We should be consistent in spotting it and

building alternative futures.

• * Rule № 7: DON’T GIVE UP EASY. RESIST. ORGANIZE.

When you say that the emperor is naked, you may end up being punched in

the face by the emperor’s people. You’ll be labeled demented and insane;

a crazy, perverted, dangerous idiot. But you’re the happiest sort of

idiot—an idiot who knows the divine joy of telling the truth.

Art and liberty, like the fire of Prometheus, are things one must steal,

to be used against the established order.

PABLO PICASSO

Prison can be ecstasy.... They say even in DC Jail, you can’t go lower

than we’ve gone. We’re in deadlock: 24-hour lockup, two in a cell hardly

large enough for one, sharing space with mice, rats, flies and assorted

uninvited fauna. Food shoved in the door, filth, degradation.

And I wouldn’t choose to be anywhere else on the planet. I think we’ve

landed on turf where the breakthrough occurs. I think it’s occurred

already.

DANIEL BERRIGAN, THE NIGHTMARE OF GOD

A man possessed of inner freedom, memory, and a sense of fear is the

blade of grass or wood chip that can alter the course of the

swift-flowing stream.

NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM, HOPE ABANDONED

• ** Words

What makes us act out? I for one am really angry because Russia’s

principal political institutions are law enforcement, the army,

intelligence agencies, and prisons. Run by a lone insane

quasi-superhero, riding horseback half-naked, a man who is not afraid of

anyone (except gays). A man so generous that he has handed half the

country over to his closest friends, all of them oligarchs. What kind of

act is this?

By working together, we can build institutions different from these.

We don’t want to be passive squares, boring phonies, or conformists

seduced by comfort, trapped in a repetitive, endless ritual of

consuming, who keep buying shit that’s thrown to us as a bone, who

forget how to ask honest and important questions, who are just trying to

make it through the day.

• *** take your beatings as a badge of honor

They will try to shut you up and shut you down.

It’s useful to have the ability to transform obstacles and tragedy into

strength and faith. If you can get it, do it. I’m not sure where they

sell it, but if you come across this thing, no matter what it costs, you

must pay, and then pay some more. It’s worth every penny.

Me and the other Pussy Riot members acquired this superpower during our

arrest, trial, and jail time. Ironically, by locking us up we found an

almost sublime liberation. Despite the fact that we were physically

imprisoned, we were freer than anyone sitting across from us on the side

of the prosecution. We could say anything we wanted, and we said

everything we wanted. The prosecution could only say what the political

censors permitted them to say.

Their mouths are sewn shut. They are puppets.

Stagnation and the search for truth are always opposites. In this case,

and in the case of every political trial, we see on the one side people

who are attempting to find the truth, and on the other side people who

are trying to fetter the truth seekers.

It was our search for truth that led us to the Cathedral of Christ the

Savior. We were persecuted in the name of Christianity. But I think

Christianity, as I understood it while studying the Old Testament and,

especially, the New Testament, supports the search for truth and a

constant overcoming of oneself, the overcoming of what you were before.

But I did not see evidence of forgiveness at our trial.

It would serve us well to remember that a human being is a creature who

is always in error, never perfect. She strives for wisdom but cannot

possess it. This is why philosophy was born. This is ultimately what

forces the philosopher to act, think, and live, and most importantly,

maintain a sense of poetry in their outlook on the world.

In poetry and political trials, there are no winners and losers.

Together, we can be philosophers, seeking wisdom instead of stigmatizing

people and labeling them.

The price of participation in the creation of history is immeasurably

great for the individual. But the essence of human existence lies

precisely in this participation. To be a beggar, and yet to enrich

others. To have nothing, but to possess all.

Do you remember what young Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to death for?

His guilt rested on the fact that he was fascinated by socialist

theories, and during meetings of freethinkers and friends, on Fridays in

the apartment of Mikhail Petrashevsky, he discussed the writings of

Charles Fourier and George Sand. On one of the last Fridays, he read

aloud Vissarion Belinsky’s letter to Nikolai Gogol, a letter that,

according to the court that tried Dostoevsky, was filled “with impudent

statements against the Orthodox Church and the supreme authorities.”

Dostoevsky was taken to a parade ground to be executed, but after “ten

agonizing, infinitely terrifying minutes awaiting death,” it was

announced that the sentence had been commuted to four years of hard

labor in Siberia followed by military service. The same day Dostoevsky

wrote his brother, “Life is everywhere, life in ourselves, not in what

is outside us.”

Socrates was accused of corrupting youth with his philosophical

discussions and refusing to accept the Athenian gods. He had a living

connection with the divine voice, and he was not, as he insisted many

times, by any account an enemy of the gods. But what did that matter

when Socrates irritated the influential citizens of his city with his

critical, dialectical thought, free of prejudice? Socrates was sentenced

to death, and having refused to escape Athens (as his students

proposed), he courageously drank a cup of hemlock and died.

Injustice in the name of religion. Labeling truth seekers as crazy. Even

Christ himself, characterized as “demon-possessed and raving mad” (John

10:20), was sentenced to death for crimes against the church: “It is not

for good works that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy” (John

10:33).

If the authorities, tsars, presidents, prime ministers, and judges

understood the meaning of “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” (Matthew

9:13), they would not put the innocent on trial. Authorities, however,

are still in a hurry to condemn, but in no way to reprieve.

If you let someone define what is the center for you, you’re already

playing somebody else’s game. But if you try to live your life right,

you can look any (wo)man in the face and tell her/him to go to hell.

TERMS ALL MEMBERS OF THE RESISTANCE SHOULD KNOW

GREED. An emotion that tells you money and fame are the most important

things. If you don’t fight it actively, it’s easy to get caught up in

greed. It sneaks up on you, and then you find yourself doing shit you

never would have dreamed of as a kid. When greed has crept in, you lose

a clear vision of things. You become a proud member of the league of

bastards. But pigs cannot fly, even if they are genetically altered.

IMPEACHMENT. Something you should demand if your president is a

dangerous, uncontrollable asshole, every day getting more backward than

he was to begin with.

CELEBRITY FASCISM. A disease that should be eradicated by any means. An

ultracorrupted state of mind in which someone believes that money and

status will always let you get away with being an asshole and committing

crimes. “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do

anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.”

CLITORIS. A very important part of the human body that has been

extensively repressed by patriarchal culture. It’s something that is

either ignored by phallocentric society or destroyed through barbaric

procedures of mutilation.

OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE. One of the main methods of handling the country

and managing law enforcement agencies’ job, according to Putin. Trump

shares Putin’s views on that.

FREE TUITION. Something we should all have.

ORGANIZATION. A must for activists. The only way to go. Occupy streets

and squares, and do not leave until your requirements are fulfilled.

Plot, demand, persist. There is a monster inside all of us, and the

monster wants honesty.

PUSSY. Something that you’re not going to get without a riot. No riot,

no pussy.

PUTIN. A tiny malicious KGB agent, whose main goal in life is to steal

more and more money from the Russian people and who would love to see a

patriarchal, ethics-free oligarchy spread all around the globe.

• ** Deeds

• *** freedom is the crime that contains all crimes

Arrest is an almost religious experience. The moment you are arrested,

you are abruptly purged of the self-centered confidence that you can

control the world. You find yourself alone and faced with a vast ocean

of uncertainty. Only high spirits, a smile, and calm confidence can help

you sail across this ocean.

We are not told what we have been arrested for, and I don’t ask. Goes

without saying. Keys, telephones, notebook, and passport are all

confiscated.

After all the necessary formalities have been observed, we are sitting

with the political police case officer in the hallway of the police

station. “By the way, you hid very well. We knocked ourselves out

looking for you. Way to go.”

My first interrogation is at 4:07 a.m. I refuse to testify. An hour

later, I am taken to the Temporary Detention Center at Petrovka, 38.

Prisoners move around stiffly in handcuffs, escorted by guards. The next

confiscation steals my shoelaces, scarf, boots, bra, and polka-dot

ribbon.

A blond female cop orders me to strip, spread my legs, and bend down,

and she pulls my butt cheeks apart with my hands.

“And hurry, hurry, you’re not in kindergarten!” says the blonde’s

partner, a brunette.

I write an official announcement that I am going on indefinite hunger

strike.

I am already hungry as hell.

My mind is swimming as I scribble my thoughts. It’s what I was thinking

at that time, but I didn’t have to write it down to remember it all my

life:

“There are so many things I haven’t managed to do. I had so many ideas.

I have done so little for my age. If I had only known I would be thrown

in jail when I was twenty-two.... Are headache tablets permitted in

jail? I need them. I take them every day. And ... and there is a text I

still haven’t finished writing. Tomorrow is my daughter Gera’s birthday.

We never finished buying her presents. What will she think? How is she

doing without me? When will I be able to come back? Will I be able to?

Where am I? What happens when a person is imprisoned? It’s like she is

dead to other people, right?”

Your first jail cell is a relief. Finally, cops and investigators no

longer surround you. There are no more questions. It is just you and the

wall opposite you.

I turn on the radio. “Members of the controversial group Pussy Riot, who

disturbed the peace in Christ the Savior Cathedral, have been detained

and placed in a temporary detention facility. They are under

investigation,” reports Radio Russia.

“Thanks, goddamnit, for the news. We didn’t need you to tell us,” I say

to the radio as I shiver on my bunk.

Three days after our arrest we are brought to the court

that—surprise!—decided to keep us locked up during the investigation

(the investigation of a highly dangerous criminal activity—girls jumping

around for forty seconds).

This is what was written in my criminal case, case no. 17780: “Pretrial

restrictions not involving detention cannot guarantee the accused will

honor the obligations imposed on her by the Criminal Procedure Code and

will permit Tolokonnikova to escape, obstruct the investigation, and

continue to engage in the activity that has led to the filing of these

criminal charges.” That’s what law enforcement people normally say in

situations when they need to hold someone for a long time. And it’s not

like what they said was untrue: no doubt if I stayed out of prison, I

would indeed “continue to engage in the activity that has led to the

filing of these criminal charges.” No doubt about that at all.

Women’s Pretrial Detention Facility No. 6 is a place of magical,

malicious beauty. The old, fortresslike brick building is constructed in

the shape of a rectangle. It contains a huge yard where, in a concrete

structure divided into sectors, suspects, defendants, and convicts are

walked.

It’s a clammy brick castle pervaded by the never-fading stench of

rotting garbage. And by the chimes coming from a nearby church on

Sundays.

Some jail cells contain fifty-four people, even though they have only

forty-one beds. Girls sleep under benches, come out from under the table

in the morning. A pregnant girl sleeps on a broken cot. The cells are

full of yelling and shouting.

New arrivals are led into a gloomy room with dark-green walls and old,

dusty lights. In its depths sits a woman who is either very young or

going on forty. It’s hard to say, because the expression of indifference

and hopeless fatigue imprinted on her face would age even an

eighteen-year-old woman. She issues you a mattress.

Hugging the mattress and swaying after ten days without food, you climb

to the third floor. A semicircular brick wall patterned with narrow

windows made of thick, opaque glass frames the staircase.

With each passing day of the hunger strike, your blood pressure falls.

Headaches have become so bad it is hard to get out of bed. For the first

time in your life you can feel your own kidneys (because they are sick

too), and your skin is dry, and your lips are cracked.

Finally, you chew a piece of prison bread, washing it down with the

local tea, a sweet, light-brown, lukewarm liquid. After your hunger

strike, you respect the prison bread from that day on.

I’ve learned some things in jail. I used to never be able to do

push-ups, touching my breasts to the floor. In prison, I can pump them

out. During strolls, I wear myself out by doing hundreds of exercises.

Six months after our arrest, the court bailiffs’ dog, which had sat next

to our cage for three hours with a sad, tormented expression on its mug,

suddenly stiffened, its body twisted in a light convulsion, and spewed a

puddle of vomit on the courtroom’s parquet floor.

The bailiffs glanced at the dog reproachfully, and the judge paused for

a moment, but the trial went on without a hitch. The people in the

gallery laughed. We watched the dog sympathetically for the rest of the

court day. Who knows why, but the puddle was not cleaned up for another

three hours.

“Hold still! No sudden movements!”

In the basement of the lockup at the court building, we are under attack

by another dog and its master, a sullen, wiry man resembling both the

anti-intellectual hero of a Hollywood action movie and a porn actor

playing the role of a rough, simple man. The dog barks its head off and

tries to attack us. The guy digs his sinewy legs into the floor and uses

his whole weight to try and pull the dog away. The dog continues to

yowl.

“Excuse me, but why is your dog so agitated?” I ask.

“She has been trained to react to jail smell.”

Great. Now even dogs will treat me as an inferior because I am in jail.

A lot of strange things happened while we stayed in pretrial detention.

I was locked in a cell with a former police investigator. She was one of

those people who had followed her heart and joined the police after

watching a TV series about good cops in her childhood. During the 1990s

she investigated crimes, saving citizens from malevolent cops, and she

was happy. In 2003 she resigned, because she lost interest. Nobody

needed crimes solved. Instead, total submission and unconditional

loyalty were all that were required, even the willingness to break the

law. Her ex-husband, also a cop, put her in jail for a crime she did not

commit. She was accused of being a fraud. But in fact her ex-husband

openly told her that her criminal case was bullshit, and if she’d give

him a flat she owned, he’d make this case disappear and she’d be free.

She refused to give him the flat. So she was in jail.

One day during the Pussy Riot trial, she had a revelation that what John

the Evangelist had written about would come to pass, purging Russia of

the Putinist abomination.

Meanwhile, a priest who wanted to apologize to Pussy Riot was banned

from the ministry by the church.

A man who claimed to be a supporter of Pussy Riot tried to kill with an

ax the judge who had given permission to arrest us.

Orthodox activists were walking around the court chanting, “All power is

from God! Send the witches to the bonfire.” People dressed like Cossacks

attempted to light a fire for the witches.

PENITENTIARY NEW YEAR RECIPES

OLIVIER SALAD

Instant noodles (substitute for potatoes because boiling potatoes is

restricted)

Pickled cucumbers

Canned peas

Onion

Mayonnaise (a lot)

Canned fish/beef (instead of popular Doktorskaya sausage)

NEW YEAR’S EVE CAKE

Cookies

Butter

Condensed milk (a lot)

Put the ingredients in the mayo container (there are no other bowls

anyway) and combine.

Enjoy your meal! Happy New Year!

The court was surrounded by people who supported us. And by some who

hated us—Orthodox Christian activists who were asking for ten years of

prison for us and were walking around in “Orthodox Christianity or

death” T-shirts.

Our judge complained that she was being publicly shamed for fulfilling

her duties. Indeed, activists who saw her walking the corridors of court

would start to scream, “Shame on you! Shame on you!” The day before the

verdict in the Pussy Riot trial was announced, our judge was assigned a

personal government security detail.

The cells are located in the court basement, where you wait until guards

bring you to the courtroom. These cells are always outstandingly dirty,

dark, and small. So you’re sitting there chewing your crackers, reading

notes that have been left for you by other prisoners: “Russia will be

free,” “Sun shines for thieves, sun does not shine for cops,” “ACAB,”

prison love poetry (the whole genre).

You sit on a dirty bench. Guards are shooting idiotic comments at you

and you’re swallowing it. You’re trying not to lose a sense of

self-respect, though. You’ll be brought to your friends, relatives, all

your supporters who wait outside. You don’t want to show them how

humiliating and discouraging your whole experience in jail is. You’re

smiling and your smile is an act of resistance. It’s a matter of

principle, if you wish. It’s tough and gloomy here in jail, but you

don’t give those who put you here joy in observing your sufferings. Fuck

you, dear government. My smile is my ultimate weapon.

It’s awkward to hear your own sentence being read out. I’d only seen

things like that in movies before. You’re expected not to sleep the

night before your sentence. I resisted this tradition in my own fashion

and slept like a baby. If you’re about to be transported to a prison

camp where you’ll have to work as a slave, you’d better get some good

sleep while you have the chance.

When they read your sentence, you have to be handcuffed. For four hours

you stand, handcuffed, listening to the bullshit that your judge did not

even write herself. This kind of decision comes from the administration

of the president. You’re listening to your sentence and know

already—from your interrogators, from prosecutors, from Putin’s comments

on your case, and from TV propaganda—that you won’t get out of prison

soon.

“Defendants’ behavior cannot be corrected without isolation from

society,” says the judge, and you know what this formula means. You’re

going to a labor camp. And then she adds, “Two years.” It sounds like

forever. Every day in prison lasts forever.

We were transported back to the detention center surrounded by five

police cars and a couple of police buses. They literally blocked roads

to transport us to the facility, because they were scared that

protesters would try to free us. I was thinking about my future life in

a penal colony and trying to convince myself that it was an exciting

challenge to me as an activist.

• ** Heroes

• *** emmeline pankhurst

The fight for women’s suffrage—the right of women to vote in

elections—has been long and hard. The white male oligarchs who hold

power have been reluctant to give the vote to anyone other than

themselves—even today, look how hard they are working to take the vote

away from poor and minority voters in the United States. So at the turn

of the twentieth century, when women came together to demand rights

similar to men, it was clear: the struggle was going to be difficult.

One of the great pioneers of the women’s vote was Emmeline Pankhurst. I

learned about Pankhurst when I was a schoolgirl. There was an English

language lesson and I had to pick an influential historical figure to

talk about. My affair with Emmeline started from me misspelling her

surname: I was sure for a while that it was “Punkhurst,” which sounded

super dope to my Russian ear, more like “Punk Thirst.” As a result, I

believed that Pankhurst was the mother of English punk.

Emmeline Goulden was born in Manchester, England, in 1858. The man she

married, Richard Pankhurst, was a lawyer who supported voting rights for

women and drafted a suffrage bill in the 1860s. With her husband’s

support, Emmeline founded the Women’s Franchise League and won the right

to vote in local elections. After his death, she founded the Women’s

Social and Political Union, which included her daughters Christabel and

Sylvia. The organization worked for social reforms, in particular the

vote. Give us the right to vote, the women said, and we will fulfill our

obligation as citizens.

Frustrated by an immobile government, the women got “militant”—which is

what men say when women misbehave. Emmeline was arrested often, and when

she went on hunger strikes in prison, she was force-fed. When my prison

doctors approached me on my eighth day of hunger strike to say I was

about to be force-fed, I thought about Emmeline.

Christabel organized a group of women arsonists. Women all over the

world began doing organized radical actions. They poured acid in

mailboxes, broke windows, and chained themselves to railings. In the

most dramatic action, a woman named Emily Davison went out on the

racecourse during the biggest horse race in England, the Derby, and was

trampled to death.

Although male onlookers were horrified by such unladylike actions, the

suffragists were absolutely fearless. The British government decided it

didn’t look good to stick feeding tubes down the throats of ladies in

prison to stop them from starving themselves to death, so they passed

the “Cat and Mouse Act.” Women who went on hunger strike were released

and rearrested when they regained some strength. Emmeline was let out of

prison and arrested twelve times in a year under this act.

Emmeline described herself as a “soldier.” She was clear on what had to

be done to get women to be treated as human beings. The government was

going to have to either kill women or give them the vote.

In 1913, she made a speech to supporters in Hartford, Connecticut.

(Women suffragists were jailed and force-fed in the United States too,

of course.) “You have two babies very hungry and wanting to be fed,” she

said. “One baby is a patient baby, and waits indefinitely until its

mother is ready to feed it. The other baby is an impatient baby and

cries lustily, screams and kicks and makes everybody unpleasant until it

is fed. Well, we know perfectly well which baby is attended to first.

That is the whole history of politics.”

Then came World War I. It was hard for even the most reactionary

government to deny the contribution made by women to the war, and women

in the United States and Britain got the vote shortly after, but only

those over thirty in the United Kingdom (along with millions of men over

twenty-one with no “property”). In 1928, the year Emmeline Pankhurst

died, the women’s voting age was brought into line with the men’s.

Like a lot of rights unwillingly granted by states, the right to vote is

fragile. Women only got the right to vote in Swiss national elections in

1971. Don’t even ask about Saudi Arabia. A woman’s right to choose is

being taken on nationally and locally. Seven US states have only one

legal clinic licensed to perform abortions. How secure is gay marriage?

Or Medicare and Medicaid? Rights hard won by women like Emmeline

Pankhurst aren’t won forever. We have to not only work for new rights

but protect the ones we already have. Like hungry babies, we must kick

and scream and raise hell to be fed.

• * Rule № 8: BREAK OUT FROM PRISON

The modern prison system, in the form in which it exists in Russia, the

United States, China, Brazil, India, and many, many other countries—as

an island of legalized torture—should be destroyed. That’s it.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its

prisons.

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD

I’m suggesting that we abolish the social function of prisons.

ANGELA DAVIS

While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal

element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

EUGENE V. DEBS, STATEMENT TO THE COURT UPON BEING CONVICTED OF VIOLATING

THE SEDITION ACT, SEPTEMBER 18, 1918

Have not prisons—which kill all will and force of character in man,

which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any

other spot of the globe—always been universities of crime?

PYOTR KROPOTKIN, ANARCHISM: ITS PHILOSOPHY AND IDEAL

Oh bondage! Up yours!

X-RAY SPEX, “OH BONDAGE UP YOURS!”

• ** Words

• *** the prison-industrial complex

It’s a well-known fact: when you extract profits and then label yourself

a savior, you’re the worst sort of douche—you’re a hypocritical douche.

People like this use desperation and poverty, discrimination and racism

to build one of the most profitable of all global enterprises, the

prison-industrial complex. It’s been said that prisons are here to help

us, but this is not so—we don’t get much help from them. We’re silenced,

enslaved, and used. They say that it’s about “rehabilitation,” but often

prisoners don’t even have the freedom to read books, talk to relatives,

or go to church—they are too busy working, making profits for the

penitentiary owners.

Hopelessness partnered with cynicism and cruelty is what I’ve seen in

the eyes of those who have to go through the prison system as it exists

in modern Russia and in modern America. During the two years I spent in

Russian prisons, I dreamed of another, alternative prison system that

would give prisoners a chance to explore their inner worlds, get

educated, read, create art. I literally had dreams about it: dreams

about a penal colony where inmates would learn about other

cultures—Chinese, Indian, Iranian, Japanese cultures. A strange thing

happened: I woke up with the English word “REVIVAL” pulsing in my head.

In my dream, it was written on a chalkboard in a prison class. I had no

idea what this word meant at that time, but I wrote it down. I explored

its meaning later.

In reality, the nightmare of prison couldn’t have been more different

from what I witnessed in my dreams. It was dehumanizing, barbaric. “The

prison ... is not only anti-social, but anti-human, and at best is bad

enough to reflect the ignorance, stupidity and inhumanity of the society

it serves.” That’s from Eugene V. Debs (from his book Walls and Bars,

published in 1927, after Debs’s death), a political organizer and labor

union leader who ran for president from prison, where he spent six

months as the result of his socialist activity.

“It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that

even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison

system survive it and hold on to their humanity,” writes Howard Zinn in

You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.

The prison system I know can produce only two things: first, profits for

bureaucrats or corporations; and second, masses of people who hate the

government, who will never trust anybody from an official institution.

If your goal is to increase crime, that’s the way to do it. I know my

time spent in Russian prisons made me anything but apologetic, anything

but obedient to the system.

Since my Pussy Riot colleague Masha and I got out of prison, we have

visited many prisons all around the world, spoken with prisoners and

ex-prisoners, with activists and organizations whose goal is to create

real resocialization for ex-prisoners. We have been amazed by how

closely the Russian and US prison systems resemble each other. The Cold

War made our countries similar in a lot of ways, not just in aggressive

imperialism, militarism, and huge inequality, but in the attitude of our

governments to those people who have no power, who are behind bars.

We studied how Baltic countries, which used to be under Soviet rule, are

exploring other ways of dealing with prisoners rather than those popular

in the gulag, how the old type of prison is being replaced with new

ones, which want to help a human being rather than destroy his or her

will.

We visited a former Stasi (East German security service) prison in

Berlin and witnessed how they’re working with their past, remembering

the torture and murder. There is a female prison in Berlin too with a

very respectful attitude to inmates (good conditions, legal same-sex

partnerships in prison, no obligatory jobs).

We’ve seen Scandinavian prisons and their rehab centers, shelters for

ex-prisoners, and social workers who help them find a job. We know it’s

possible: a situation where an inmate sees a social worker not as an

enemy but as someone who’s there to help. It’s not the case in a Russian

prison. Or an American prison.

The United States leads the world in a lot of areas. It has the largest

economy, the top-rated universities, the most Olympic gold medalists.

But it also leads the world in putting people in prison. The United

States has not quite 5 percent of the world’s population but more than

20 percent of its prisoners. One in five of all people in prison in the

world are locked up in the United States.

One reason for this is the disastrous “war on drugs” that began in the

1970s. In 1980, the federal and state prison population was about

320,000. In 2015, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there

were 1,526,800 people in federal and state prisons (a decrease of 2

percent from 2014), plus more than 700,000 in local jails (up from

182,000 in 1980), hundreds of thousands of them locked up for nonviolent

drug offenses. Sentences for marijuana possession were often harsh and

remain so in states like South Dakota and Indiana. Now that scientists

are indicating that smoking pot is less dangerous than drinking alcohol

and states are legalizing pot possession, the United States is in the

absurd situation of having hundreds of thousands of people in jail for

doing something that is now perfectly legal in many states.

And prison policy is racist. African Americans are locked up at a rate

five times higher than that of whites. Sentences for crack cocaine, a

drug introduced into African American communities and heavily used in

inner-city neighborhoods, were much harsher than those for the powder

form, which was used more often by white people. The sentences were

sometimes a hundred times longer for what is the same drug.

How confused I was when I went to Rikers Island, the giant prison

complex in New York City, and found out that all the visitors were

people of color. “Why don’t you get put in prison in this country if

you’re white?” I wondered. Interesting.

There is a giant poster at the entrance to Rikers saying that you cannot

wear extra-large pants and hoodies. Why? Perhaps because prison

officials are ignorant enough to seed and spread the prejudice about

that connection between hip-hop culture and crime.

If you need to know something about inequality, ask Howard Zinn. “The

poorer you were the more likely you were to end up in jail. The rich did

not have to commit crimes to get what they wanted; the laws were on

their side. But when the rich did commit crimes, they often were not

prosecuted, and if they were they could get out on bail, hire clever

lawyers, get better treatment from judges. Somehow, the jails ended up

full of poor black people” (A People’s History of the United States). In

the words of Eugene V. Debs, “As a rule only the poor go to prison. The

rich control the courts and the poor populate the prisons.”

Politicians long outdid each other being “tough on crime.” Bill Clinton

interrupted his 1992 presidential campaign to sign a death warrant for a

mentally challenged man convicted of murder. The man, Ricky Ray Rector,

had shot himself in the head after committing murder, effectively

lobotomizing himself. He could barely function, yet he was executed.

Rector asked for the guard to save the dessert from his last meal so he

could eat it later.

Instead of realizing that the system wasn’t working, the authorities

just kept locking people up and found a mind-blowing solution for

managing the increase: privatize! Private correctional facilities were

started in the 1980s—locking people up to make a profit. By 2015, at the

peak, 18 percent of federal prisoners were held in private prisons. In

2016, Obama’s Justice Department announced it was phasing out private

prisons. Of course, Trump reversed that policy. In anticipation, the day

after the election, the stock price of the largest private prison

company, now called CoreCivic, went up 43 percent.

Like education and health care, if the main goal is to make a profit,

actually teaching people or healing people or rehabilitating people, in

the case of prisons, is secondary. No one gives a shit at all. Private

prisons exist to punish. Because they make money from people being

incarcerated, the corporations lobby for harsher sentences and support

politicians who are toughest on crime, as do the 400,000-plus prison

guards.

Prison shouldn’t be a profit center. The whole system costs $80 billion

a year. Wouldn’t most of that money be better spent on keeping people

out of prison, not in it? On education and retraining, job creation,

drug treatment, and so on?

We should support any efforts at reform. Even some Republicans, like

Rand Paul, support criminal justice reform. Some 450,000 people sit in

jail because they are denied or can’t make bail, even when it’s a few

hundred dollars, and lawmakers including Paul are trying to change that

in Congress.

The prison system does not help those who found themselves in trouble to

return to society. It labels you an outcast and prevents you from being

included. It’s been this way forever. “Year after year the gates of

prison hells return to the world an emaciated, deformed, will-less,

ship-wrecked crew of humanity ... their hopes crushed. With nothing but

hunger and inhumanity to greet them, these victims soon sink back into

crime as the only possibility of existence,” says Emma Goldman in the

essay “Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure” (1910).

As far as drugs are concerned, some places have come to their senses.

Cities like Seattle and Ithaca, New York, are looking at drugs as a

health care issue and not a criminal justice issue. Some even provide

heroin users with places to safely use as part of a comprehensive drug

policy. Opioid overdoses kill more than a hundred people a day—providing

treatment can help people come off drugs without going to jail or dying.

Switzerland went this route twenty years ago and has succeeded in

reducing drug-related crime, HIV infections, and overdoses.

But there is not much enlightened thinking. Lock up drug users and make

a buck if you can.

China is a good example of what can happen under a secretive government.

There is very little information about incarceration in China. No one

knows the real figure for executions—the low thousands probably. China’s

prisons are filling up with dissidents and democracy reformers opposed

to President Xi Jinping. China has its own war on drugs and executes

smugglers.

Chinese prisons are hellish. In pretrial detention centers, torture is

common. Cells are overcrowded, and there are often no beds. Prisoners

have to work long hours. In actual prison, inmates also work, but

conditions might be better than in detention.

What we know is that we don’t know what goes on in China. We know about

the United States, but prison reform is not a political priority. There

are more votes for being tough. In 2015, when President Obama visited a

federal prison, he was the first president ever to do so. He looked in a

nine-by-ten room that held three men and talked about overcrowding. He

sounded sympathetic. But eighteen months later, when Obama left office,

little had happened.

Under Obama, there was a movement against mandatory minimum sentences

and the beginning of a national debate on drug policy. Funding for the

“war on drugs” started to shift toward treatment, but under Trump, the

government threatens to double down on the failed policy. Trump’s

attorney general, Jeff Sessions, told federal prosecutors to seek the

harshest punishments allowed under the law, which would send prison

populations up again.

The appointment of General Mark Inch, who managed US detainees in Iraq

and Afghanistan, to run the Bureau of Prisons jibes well with the

general militarization of US police forces that has been going on for

decades. As we have seen in countless tragic police shootings, there is

no thought of deescalating a situation—go in hard, guns blazing, often

in massed SWAT teams.

The 2016 documentary Do Not Resist detailed the rise of militarized SWAT

responses by police forces. In the 1980s, there was an average of about

3,000 such deployments a year; now it’s anywhere from 50,000 to 80,000.

Since 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security has given police

departments more than $34 billion to buy toys like Mine-Resistant Ambush

Protected (MRAP) armored vehicles, Humvees, assault rifles, and so on.

(Google “MRAP” and tell me if you think it makes sense to have these

vehicles operating on US streets.) The Department of Defense has also

given away billions of dollars in similar freebies.

It appears that the authorities are waging war on underprivileged

sections of the US population with militarized policing and ultraharsh

sentencing and prison conditions.

Why don’t we discuss how to eliminate prison systems as we know them

today and their torture, terrible conditions, cruel punishments, and

murder? You’re sending rockets to the outer cosmos, making clones of

sheep, but you cannot reform a prison system? C’mon.

Eugene V. Debs knew how to do effective prison reform, and he wrote

about it at the beginning of the twentieth century. It’s known. It’s

doable. Here’s what he suggests (Walls and Bars, 1927):

• “First of all, it should be taken out of the hands of politicians and

placed under the supervision and direction of a board of the humanest of

men with vision and understanding. The board should have absolute

control, including the power of pardon, parole and commutation.”

• “Prison inmates should be paid for their labor at the prevailing rate

of wages.”

• “The prisoners themselves, at least 75 per cent of whom are

dependable, as every honest warden will admit, should be organized upon

the basis of self-government and have charge of the prison [and] ...

establish their own rules and regulate their own conduct under the

supervision of the prison board.”

• “Feed prisoners decently and wholesomely, not extravagantly, but in a

clean, plain and substantial manner to conserve their health instead of

undermining and destroying it.”

• “At least 75 per cent of the inmates of every prison are not criminals

but have simply been unfortunate, and every decent warden will admit

that they would at once retrieve themselves if given their liberty and a

fair chance to make good in the world.”

Bottom line: Prisons should not be connected with creating profit.

Prisons should not be run by army-like, secret organizations that can do

whatever they please. Prison officials should be accountable for what

they’re doing. Prisoners should play a major role in their own

management. There should be independent oversight boards to check how

everything is going in prison. People will be interested in serving on

such boards, because they understand that at some point, prisoners do go

free, and rehabilitation is in society’s best interests.

I was about six years old, walking with my father around Moscow. If a

cop walked toward us, we’d cross the road. I clearly remember the

poker-face trick my father taught me: if you walk near a cop, don’t ever

look at him, don’t look into his eyes, don’t draw his attention. I was

six years old, and I was happy that cops didn’t have anything on me.

What could we be scared of? Nothing. We didn’t rob banks or sell arms or

drugs. There was just an irrational fear that something might happen.

As I got older, I began learning to communicate with cops, always

bracing myself. But if I don’t make myself confront them, the desire to

cross the road, instilled in childhood, becomes so strong that it almost

gives me hives.

If we want people to stop being afraid of cops, we should equalize our

rights and give an average citizen the ability to jail the cop (for a

reason) the same as he has the ability to jail you. A cop should feel

the power of a common citizen above him. That’s how we’ll deal with that

fear.

• ** Deeds

Prison taught me a lot of lessons. One of them is about time, how time

works. How vital it is to look forward and imagine alternative futures.

I was living in barracks with a hundred other women. We had a shared

bedroom. Each bed had a sign with the inmate’s name, her photo, the

number of her criminal article, and the beginning and end of her term:

2005–2019; 2012–2014; 2007–2022; 2012–2025. It’s like a time machine

when you’re walking between those beds, being mesmerized by these years,

fates, faces, crimes. You cannot escape thinking about time. As a

prisoner you stay alive only by thinking about time. Imagining,

dreaming: How will I build my life when I get out of here? The future

has never seemed so full of and rich in wonderful possibilities as when

I was in a labor camp and had literally nothing but dreams. Not only

prison but also despair, grief, or on the contrary, inexplicable joy and

unconditional love—basically any transgressive situation—opens in you

this magic ability that is normally destroyed by adulthood: time when

you can dare to dream and imagine.

• *** prison riot

I was sent to a prison camp in Mordovia. Mordovia is a region of Russia

renowned for the most terrible prisons and the puffiest pancakes. The

mores in Mordovia are patriarchal and conservative. Women wear their

hair long, often with a braid slung over their shoulder. They measure

their life achievements in terms of the quality of their husbands and

the number of their children.

Mordovia is a land of swamps and prison camps. Here they breed cows and

prisoners. The cows give birth to calves and produce milk, while the

inmates sew uniforms. I encountered fourth- and fifth-generation guards.

From the time they are knee high, the locals believe that a person’s

only purpose in life is to suppress another person’s will.

The toughest discipline, the longest workdays, the most flagrant

injustice. When people are sent off to Mordovia it’s as if they’re being

sent off to be executed.

We worked sixteen to seventeen hours a day, from 7:30 a.m. to 12:30 a.m.

We slept four hours a day. We had a day off once every month and a half.

I was welcomed to my dorm unit by a convict finishing up a nine-year

sentence: “The pigs are scared to put the squeeze on you themselves.

They want to have the inmates do it.” Conditions at the prison are

organized in such a way that the inmates in charge of the work shifts

and dorm units are the ones tasked by the wardens with crushing the will

of inmates, terrorizing them, and turning them into speechless slaves.

“If you weren’t Tolokonnikova, you would have had the shit kicked out of

you a long time ago,” say fellow prisoners with close ties to the

wardens. It’s true: other prisoners are beaten up. For not being able to

keep up. They hit them in the kidneys, in the face. Convicts themselves

deliver these beatings, and not a single one happens without the

approval and knowledge of the wardens.

Perpetually sleep deprived and exhausted by the endless pursuit of

production quotas, the inmates are always on the verge of flying off the

handle, screaming their heads off, and fighting. A young woman was

struck in the head with scissors because she had delivered police

trousers to the wrong place. Another woman tried to stab herself in the

stomach with a hacksaw.

Thousands of HIV-positive women work with no rest, running down what is

left of their immune systems. Near the end they would be taken to the

camp hospital to die so their corpses would not spoil the penal colony’s

statistics. People were left behind bars alone with the understanding

that they were goners, that they were broken, crucified, and doomed.

A woman died in the sewing factory one night. Her body was removed from

the assembly line. The woman had been seriously ill. She should have

been working no more than eight hours a day. But the camp wardens need

thousands of suits. People fall asleep at their sewing machines. They

sew their fingers together. They die.

If a needle pierces your fingernail and slices through your finger, your

mind cannot process what is happening for the first five seconds. There

is no pain, nothing. You just do not comprehend why you cannot pull your

hand out of the sewing machine. After five seconds, a wave of pain

washes over you. Wow, look, your finger is stuck on the needle.

That is why you cannot pull your hand out. It’s simple. You can sit

alone nursing your finger for five minutes but not for longer. You have

to keep on sewing. You’re hardly the first person to sew through her

finger. What bandages are you talking about? You’re in prison.

The mechanics tell me they don’t have the spare parts to fix my sewing

machine and will not be able to procure them. “There are no parts! When

will they come in? How can you ask such questions and live in Russia?”

I mastered the mechanic’s profession involuntarily on my own. I would

attack my machine, screwdriver in hand, desperately hoping to fix it.

Your hands are scratched and pierced by needles, there is blood all over

the table, but you try to sew anyway, because you are part of an

assembly line and you must carry out your part of the job on a par with

the experienced seamstresses. But the damned machine keeps breaking

down.

Time and again, the needle in your sewing machine breaks, but there are

no spare needles. You have to sew, but there are no needles. So you find

old, blunt needles on the wooden floor and you sew. They do not punch

through the fabric, and the thread gets tangled and breaks off. But you

are sewing, and that’s the main thing.

At night you have a good dream that makes you wake up with a smile on

your face: you dream that you are presented with a set of needles. You

wake up, look around, and realize that no, it was only a dream, a

beautiful, rose-tinted dream. In reality, you will again sew the whole

day with the blunt needles you scare up in the manufacturing zone.

“My imprisonment, my women’s prison colony is lethargy, a dream,” I

wrote in a letter from the camp. “It is infinity, and it seems my whole

life has passed here. At the same time, it is one frozen moment, a

single day, which by the will of some evil genius must now last forever,

must be repeated again and again till death do us part. My imprisonment

is the reverse, material side of the Matrix, hundreds of bodies put into

operation, weak, pale, dumb bodies, hundreds of physical existences

enveloped in the slime of the eternal return, the slime of apathy and

stagnation.”

Forced prisoners’ labor has been used in Mordovia since the late 1920s.

The Mordovian camp complex was established during the “reforging of

socially dangerous elements,” as proclaimed by Stalin. Before Stalin,

political prisoners were able to hit the books, educate themselves, and

write. Everything changed abruptly during Stalin’s time. Forced labor

was declared the primary method of reeducation. The goals of the planned

Soviet economy were achieved at the cost of hundreds of thousands of

lives of the people sent to the camps.

Even after Stalin’s death in 1953, Mordovia remained a place where

political prisoners were sentenced to hard labor. From 1961 to 1972, the

Mordovian correctional labor camps were the only ones in the Soviet

Union where inmates convicted on political charges (say, for

distributing illegal literature) were sent.

My first impression of Mordovia came from the words uttered by my penal

colony’s deputy warden: “You should know that when it comes to politics,

I am a Stalinist.”

In Stalin’s time, if a prisoner failed or refused to go to work three

times, he was shot. In our time, he is just subjected to a good kicking

and locked in an ice-cold solitary confinement cell, where he is

supposed to freeze, get sick, and slowly die.

Sometimes you find a pig’s tail in your prison gruel. Or the canned fish

in the soup will be so rancid that you have diarrhea for three days.

Convicts are always given stale bread, generously watered-down milk,

exceptionally rancid millet, and rotten potatoes. In the summer, sacks

of slimy, black potatoes were brought to the prison in bulk. And they

were fed to us.

We sew on obsolete and worn-out machines. According to the Labor Code,

when equipment does not comply with current industry standards,

production quotas must be lowered vis-à-vis standard industry norms. But

the quotas only increase, abruptly and without warning. “If you let them

see you can deliver one hundred uniforms, they’ll raise the minimum to

one hundred and twenty!” say veteran machine operators. And you cannot

fail to deliver either, or else the whole unit will be punished, the

entire shift. Punished, for instance, by everyone being forced to stand

on the parade ground for hours. Without the right to go to the toilet.

Without the right to take a sip of water.

There is a widely implemented system of unofficial punishments for

maintaining discipline and obedience, such as forbidding prisoners from

entering their barracks in the autumn and winter (I knew a woman who

ended up so badly frostbitten after a day outside that her fingers and

one of her feet had to be amputated) or forbidding prisoners from

washing up or going to the toilet.

Dreaming only of sleep and a sip of tea, the exhausted, harassed, and

dirty convict becomes obedient putty in the hands of the wardens, who

see us solely as an unpaid workforce. In June 2013, my monthly wages

came to 50 cents.

Sanitary conditions at the prison are calculated to make the prisoner

feel like a disempowered, filthy animal. We get to do laundry once a

week. The laundry is a small room with three faucets from which a thin

trickle of cold water flows. We are allowed to wash our hair once a

week. However, even this bathing day gets canceled. A pump will break or

the plumbing will be stopped up. At times, my dorm unit has been unable

to bathe for two or three weeks.

When the pipes are clogged, urine gushes out of the toilets and clumps

of feces go flying. We’ve learned to unclog the pipes ourselves, but it

doesn’t last long: they soon get stopped up again. The prison does not

have a plumber’s snake for cleaning out the pipes.

The wardens force people to remain silent, stooping to the lowest and

cruelest methods to this end. Complaints simply do not leave the prison.

The only chance is to complain through a lawyer or relatives. The

administration, petty and vengeful, meanwhile uses all the means at its

disposal for pressuring the convict until she understands that her

complaints will not make anything better for anyone but will only make

things worse.

What happens to different things when they are placed in boiling water?

Soft things, like eggs, become hard. Hard things, like carrots, become

soft. Coffee dissolves and permeates everything. The point of the

parable is this: be like coffee. In prison, I am like that coffee.

There is little crying in here: everyone understands that it won’t

change anything. It’s more like a deep sorrow that is not expressed in

crying. Laughing isn’t tolerated much here. If someone does laugh, she

is approached and told, “What, you having fun?” Or, “What, you got

nothing better to do?” But I laugh anyway.

It’s possible to tolerate anything as long as it affects you alone. But

the method of collective correction at the prison is something else. It

means your unit, or even the entire prison, has to endure your

punishment along with you. The most vile thing is that this includes

people you’ve come to care about. One of my friends was reprimanded for

drinking tea with me and was denied parole, which she had been working

toward for seven years by diligently overfulfilling quotas in the

manufacturing zone.

Disciplinary reports were filed on everyone who talked to me. It hurt me

that people I cared about were forced to suffer. Laughing, Lieutenant

Colonel Kupriyanov said to me, “You probably don’t have any friends

left!”

I continued to dream about starting a prison labor movement.

I had a small circle of people I could trust in my camp, and we would

share plans of our upcoming labor war. When our endless conversations

looked suspicious to prison wardens, we would pretend that we were all

just flirting with each other, talking about flowers, and everything was

just fine.

Our intention was to force the prison administration to register a labor

union of inmates. I ordered law books for research. It was not easy to

get through the censors and convince the prison administration that it

was my basic right to study books on Russian law in prison. “Was I sent

here because I broke the law?” I asked the administrators.

“Correct,” they said.

“Do you want me to obey the law in the future?”

“Yes.”

“Sweet. Then I have to get my books to learn the law.” I got the books.

I studied the law that regulates a prisoner’s life. I learned labor law

too. I had to learn the basics by heart, because I was aware that my

books would be confiscated the moment I started an open war with the

administration about our labor conditions.

And conditions are truly horrible. If you think you live in a civilized

world and we don’t have slavery, you’re wrong. Here’s what life is like

for an inmate in a Russian prison:

• You have to work twice as long as allowed by the labor code (sixteen

hours).

• You work seven days a week with ancient, falling-apart, and thus

really dangerous equipment.

• Quotas are undoable and twice as high as regular workshops outside the

prison.

• You get paid a ridiculously small amount of money; my salary varied

from 50 cents to $10 ... a month.

• You go through severe psychological and physical pressure if you don’t

fulfill your quota.

Unsurprisingly, our plan of creating a legal prison labor union was

broken by the administration, which simply did not accept our papers.

That’s why we had to operate illegally.

We had a plan B. Plan B was me trying to talk nicely to the

administration. I visited the head of my prison camp multiple times.

Honestly I think he really enjoyed my attention, and he even asked

me—more than once—to write a book about how horrible he was (you get two

paragraphs, you’re welcome). He liked to talk with me about Putin and

democracy in Russia (his thought was that Russians love and accept only

authoritarian rule). I assume it all made him think he was an important

figure and not there just to steal money—like he was on an important

special service mission, to break the will of the enemy of the state and

make me obedient and therefore less annoying to the government. I have

to admit that this prick had a serious talent for breaking people’s

will. He was born for it. He was—openly and proudly—a sadist.

Anyway, I tried to talk nicely to this person. I told him, if we work

for eight hours a day instead of sixteen, I’ll chill out. It did work,

but it worked badly for me: I was severely punished, sent to dig

trenches around the prison church, saw wood, and pull up concrete slabs

all around the camp. My unit suffered too: the administration turned off

the hot water in our barrack, and worse than that, they forbade us from

washing ourselves with the cold water. Don’t even ask how we managed to

survive. It was ugly.

That’s how I learned that nice talks never work with those who have

power over you.

That’s how I learned that sometimes there is no other option than

showing your teeth and going on the warpath.

In September of 2013 I started the most dangerous hunger strike I’d ever

done. I handed a letter to the prison officials: “I will not remain

silent, watching in resignation as my fellow prisoners collapse under

slave-like conditions. I demand that human rights be observed at the

prison. I demand that the law be obeyed in this Mordovian camp. I

declare a hunger strike and refuse to be involved in the slave labor at

the prison until the administration complies with the law and treats

women convicts not like cattle banished from the legal realm for the

needs of the garment industry, but like human beings.”

THE DEMANDS I MADE DURING MY HUNGER STRIKE

• Reduce the workday to eight hours.

• Reduce the number of police uniforms we have to sew each day.

• Introduce two days off each week.

• Punish and dismiss the deputy warden, who threatened to kill me and

other inmates critical of conditions in the colony.

• Do not persecute or put pressure on inmates who file complaints

against the colony.

“So you are a revolutionary?” my prison boss asked me. “Maybe legends

will be spun about you, as they are now spun about revolutionaries, but

right now you are here. With us. And don’t you forget it. So keep your

views to yourself while you are here. For your own good, you had better

keep silent.”

Prison is an island of legalized totalitarianism. The objective is to

standardize the thoughts and actions of the people who end up on the

island. If you dare to rebel in a totalitarian state, be prepared to be

shot.

It was not an easy decision to rebel in a labor camp. But, you know, it

is not enough to sacrifice lambs, calves, doves. Sometimes you have to

sacrifice more.

“It was here, in Butyrka prison, that I gave some honest words to

myself, some kind of word, that I embraced something,” writes gulag

survivor Varlam Shalamov. “What were these words? The main thing was

matching word and deed. The capacity for self-sacrifice. The sacrifice

was life. How it would be taken. And how it would be used.”

Resistance gave me the strength to live. It gave me a feeling that life

behind bars is not a waste of time.

It was my third hunger strike. The first one lasted for nine days, the

second and third ones for five days. I finished my third hunger strike

after the prison warden came to my bed with his mobile phone and asked

me if I wanted to talk with the Presidential Council for Civil Society

and Human Rights in Russia. A really high person in their hierarchy.

Needless to say, prisoners are not supposed to use mobile phones, and

wardens are positively not supposed to provide mobile phones to

prisoners. But they decided to break all possible rules to deal with

this situation. It was all uncomfortable to them: my hunger strike and,

of course, massive support from the outside—activists, with my comrade

Peter Verzilov among them, were camping outside the prison, constantly

rallying, chanting, and setting off fireworks. They were filing endless

complaints and following the wardens everywhere, asking unpleasant

questions about what’s up with prison conditions and why on earth they

treat human beings as slaves.

The Presidential Council guaranteed me that there would be an

investigation of the human rights violations I’d mentioned in an open

letter I wrote describing the reasons for my hunger strike. He told me

that I’d even be invited to be on the public supervisory board when I

got out. You learn one thing in prison: all officials recklessly lie all

the time. You cannot trust anyone. But it still sounded like a good

point to start negotiations.

As a result of my hunger strike, a major review of my penal colony

happened. It was indeed initiated by that council. Most inmates were too

intimidated to talk with the supervisory commission about violations,

but the workday was reduced in my penitentiary to eight hours for some

time. Food was better. The head of the penal colony lost his job.

Quite soon I was transported from Mordovia, which is located in central

Russia, to Siberia. Feds in Moscow thought it would be easier to deal

with me if I was far away. They hoped that activists, lawyers, and media

wouldn’t follow me to Siberia. Spoiler: they were wrong. Peter the Great

Verzilov, a nightmare for prison officials, popped up in Siberia even

before I was transported there. He immediately organized a local

community of activists to help me, and when I finally—after one month in

prison trains and transit jails—found myself in Siberia, there was

already a camp outside my prison.

Hilarious situations arose after my hunger strike. I was still in

prison, but guards totally changed their attitude to me. They treated me

as an equal. I was shocked in the beginning, but then I just chilled and

began to enjoy it. Christmas had come in the middle of summer. Sometimes

it felt like officials were even slightly intimidated by my presence in

their facility. I turned effectively from a prisoner into a member of a

public supervisory commission in their eyes. I gained lots of symbolic

power and weight. They were well aware of the trouble that prison

wardens in my Mordovian camp had to face because of my open letter and

protest. They did not want to lose their jobs too.

For a month they just hid me from everybody and switched me from one

facility to another. My friends and relatives had no idea where I was or

whether I was dead or alive. But I was celebrating the changes. When you

jump in a van or a train for transporting prisoners, it’s a dark and

gloomy place, but it fills you with hope. Because you know it cannot get

any worse than it is right now. Therefore, it has to become better.

When I arrived at my next facility, I could see the highest prison

officials lining up, meeting me and checking how it’s going. All of a

sudden they started to care about following every single law.

I got back all the letters that censors in Mordovia had hidden from me

for a year. I felt like I had just won the biggest lottery that has ever

existed. Four giant, human-size sacks of letters in Russian, English,

Chinese, French, Spanish, and more. Packages and packages of postcards

that wonderful and truly alive people were sending from all over the

world. Little knitted balaclavas. Rainbow balaclavas. I cried over these

gifts and cards: for a year in Mordovia when I was having literally the

hardest time in my life, I had no idea how many passionate activists

were following our story and were dedicated enough to write an actual

note to a Russian prison camp located in the middle of nowhere.

I had established conversations in my mind with all those people, heard

their voices, imagined details of their lives. Here is a

sixteen-year-old girl from Arizona, and she’s a fan of Kathleen Hanna;

here is an old lady from Novosibirsk, and she likes classical music and

German linguistics; here is a twentysomething guy from Amsterdam, and

he’s fighting climate change. I cried not out of self-pity, or not just

because of that, but because I was speechless in the face of this

symphony of people’s efforts to break through barbed wire and prison

walls and encourage two Russian girls to keep fighting. I was crying

because I forgot that a prisoner may deserve love, and sympathy, and

respect. And all those voices, in different ways and timbres, were

strong enough to break through censorship, filling my cell with a

beautiful activist choir. I proudly brought packages of those cards from

one facility to another, though they were heavy. When guards searched me

and saw cards, they realized that I may be physically alone here in this

prison, but I was part of a powerful community of like-minded people.

And this is a very important thought for a prison guard. You should

plant this thought into your guard’s head. You’re not alone—you’re an

army.

I also got back all the books that had been stolen from me by Mordovian

officials. They stole them because who wants a prisoner to be inspired

to act? Definitely not prison guards.

These were memoirs of Soviet dissidents, Varlam Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn.

I read the notes of Dina Kaminskaya, a lawyer who courageously defended

a good half of the dissidents in the USSR and therefore ended up being

closely followed herself. I read about dissident and poet Yuri

Galanskov, who died in 1972 in a Mordovian prison hospital where a large

part of my struggle with prison administration took place. I read

Vladimir Bukovsky, who managed to keep his spirit while being force-fed

or made to undergo traumatic labor in camps. The memoirs of Natalya

Gorbanevskaya, who was one of the dissidents who showed up in Red Square

in 1968—right after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia—with a banner

reading “For our and your freedom” (participants in this action were

sent to labor camps for up to three years or forced to go through

treatment at psychiatric institutions). I was reading and wondering if

there were any limits to the power of the human spirit and will.

Reading, in the super strict prison of Omsk, the memoirs of Russian

revolutionary Vera Figner, I decided that she is my style icon forever,

with her rigor and dedicated look, her tightly buttoned shirts, her

unimaginable combo of being harsh, ascetic, mighty, and slightly

coquettish at the same time; she was initiating prison protests while

knowing that she was in jail for life. In my prison wagon—having not the

slightest idea where I was heading to—I read a history of the Soviet

dissident movement written by Lyudmila Alexeyeva, a veteran of the civil

rights movement in my country who’s still active nowadays in her

nineties. In my Siberian prison hospital I read Victor Hugo’s Les

Misérables and Ninety-Three with its passages praising the sublime

madness of the revolutionary spirit. And Osip Mandelstam’s essay on a

magnetic gangster, prisoner, blasphemer, and poet from the Middle Ages:

François Villon.

What I learned from my hunger strike is that to protest is better than

not to protest. Talking out loud about your values and goals is better

than not saying anything. Before I learned this lesson, I was trying to

be patient in Mordovia—for a year. I was telling myself that things

could not be changed, because everything is too rotten. I’m too weak to

change it, I thought. You can hardly find anything more typical than

this kind of thought. They make us give up in advance. Without even

trying. What we often don’t realize is that trying may not bring you

right away the bright future you’re seeking, but it’ll surely give you

power, and strength, and muscles. Being a prisoner, I became much more

powerful in my protest.

“We’re with you, girl!”

“You rule!”

“You bent cops, sister!”

“Respect.”

I’d hear this from old, weary prisoners covered with mind-blowing

tattoos when I met them in transit jails or prison wagons. I mean, what

can be better on earth than this kind of respect?

Because officials were slightly intimidated and confused by my presence

now, I ended up in a carnival of prison surrealism. Like, they didn’t

give me real shitty prison food but bought food especially for me.

That’s how I got lamb ribs with mashed potato in the prison of

Chelyabinsk. It happened only because I had mentioned Mordovian prison

food in my open letter and it became known internationally for its

misery.

In a prison of Abakan I was put in a cell with a young girl who was

celebrating her birthday. She was so shocked by the new food that

wardens started to give us after I was moved to her cell! It was real

meat, real vegetables. She was asking me about the difference between

the North and South Poles, about Stalin and Madonna, when guards showed

up in our cell, greeted my cellmate, and wished her a happy birthday.

She could not believe what had just happened. Before they had been rude

and the food was disgusting. Later I was invited to the prison boss’s

office, where he talked to me for four hours about his life story, about

his friends and enemies, about his fears and hopes for the prison, about

the prison economy and prison labor. The main idea was, we have a good

established enterprise here, please don’t interfere with your activism,

okay?

At the end of my one-month journey I was transported to Krasnoyarsk,

Siberia, and sent to the biggest and oldest Siberian prison. In fact I

was happy to be sent to Siberia, ’cause it’s my home. Siberians are

simply great. Another exciting thing is that I had wanted to wind up in

that prison since I was five. My grandmother’s apartment, where I spent

a lot of time in my childhood, is located right across the road. I

remember being five or six years old and walking alongside those giant

fences thinking, “How curious I am to take a look at what’s there! I

wonder if it’s possible to escape? Can I use a ladder and take a look?”

No doubt there is something witchy about me, because everything I

passionately want inevitably happens.

My final destination was a prison hospital. It’s probably one of the

most prosperous prison facilities in the whole of Russia. The prison

system didn’t want to hear my complaints anymore. They let me write,

read, and paint what I wanted. Instead of wearing the tight and

extremely uncomfortable prison uniform, we wore pajamas. And finally, I

got to participate in a prison rock band. It was called Free Breathe.

Our band was mixed—four men and two women, including me. Every evening

at 6:30, we were escorted to a prison theater, where our rehearsals took

place. All of that was inconceivable before my hunger strike. I tried a

couple of times to visit the prison theater in Mordovia, but I was only

punished.

A sweet boy from my band, a kid who used to live by stealing cars,

offered me a love letter exchange. It’s a super big thing in prison,

love letters. Often people wrote letters to people they had never seen

in person. I knew that I’d never be good at that highly sentimental

genre, and that’s what I told him, so we ended up writing political rap

texts to each other.

But the real fun started when we were touring with our band. We made a

couple of concerts in our own facility, and then we went on tour. It’s

like a normal tour, but you travel in a prison van. You put guitars,

pianos inside your cage and go. We came to a women’s penal colony, and I

was singing the songs of Zemfira, a Russian singer and songwriter, about

sexual love between women (a topic and practice that’s legally

prohibited in any Russian camp): “I was dreaming about people desiring

each other in a different way.” After the concert officials took me on a

private tour of their facility, showing me solitary confinement cells

and barracks. We were fed special food, lots of chocolate and candies.

This whole thing seemed awkward as hell to me.

In a couple of months I was released. I went back to Mordovia with food

and medicine for my fellows in prison, and during that visit I was

attacked twice by local thugs hired by the police. Prison officials did

not let me visit the facility, of course, but our lawyer reported that

since I was transported to Siberia, the workday had become sixteen hours

again.

Prison officials, at least those currently taking those positions in

Russia, can’t be trusted. They have to be watched 24/7. They have to be

held accountable. Most of them don’t have any good intentions, and if

they tell you they do, they’re lying.

It’s really sad, though, if you start to think that the whole Russian

political system is based on the same principle: there are certain

people who have to be treated in a special way, and then there are the

rest. We’ve visited a couple of male camps too, and we got that kind of

vibe everywhere. As an activist I love to feel empowered, but an

activist cannot be satisfied with personal privileges.

All this hypocrisy and showing off is not good. But this awkward

behavior of officials definitely shows you how much muscle you gain by

simply using your voice. My voice was amplified by the voices of all

those who supported Pussy Riot. And it became a polyphony, a polyphony

that made the whole Russian prison system feel weird. And when systems

of all sorts feel weird, we’re having fun, we’re taking our fucking joy

back.

May I finish with a short prison story?

Sometimes we don’t see radically politicized people, but open your

eyes—they’re all around you. Look at that policeman who just arrested

you. Look closely. Talk to him. What if he’s even more pissed off at

those who’re in power than you are?

One of my prison guards was talking to me, leaning against the bars

separating us.

“You know, civil war is not far off. Things are headed in that

direction. Putin is clinging to power. He won’t leave on his own. One

day, we’ll find ourselves on the same side.”

“I wonder how that will happen if you’re in uniform?”

“It’s simple. I didn’t swear an oath of allegiance to this government. I

don’t owe them a thing anymore. I’ll take off my uniform and go with

you.”

“When?”

“When the revolt begins.”

• ** Heroes

• *** michel foucault

Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks,

hospitals, which all resemble prisons?

MICHEL FOUCAULT, DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH

Foucault is a poet of a high suspicion.

If you want to learn the trick of using history for your critical

thinking, Michel Foucault is your man. He works with history like a

fighting dog, bites it hard and doesn’t let go easily. He spots a norm

and digs into the history of it. Sexuality, madness, prison,

surveillance, whatever. He’s a gracious killer of norms.

When I first discovered Foucault at seventeen, I might not have

understood everything he said, but what I got is that I don’t have to

take anything for granted. It was a relief, because the adult world

expected me to believe and accept rather than investigate, doubt, and

inquire, which was in my nature to do. Foucault elegantly reveals that

there is always a power struggle that leads to a certain idea we have at

our disposal, an idea that we’re tempted to consider an accepted axiom.

Pussy Riot’s basic, knee-jerk reaction in life is to refuse to obey any

authority—prison, university, or record label. Pussy Riot and Foucault

have the same demons to fight against—rigid and restrictive thinking,

normalization, classification, incarceration. When we hear something

about “a norm” (or “it’s normal, deal with it,” “that’s how it is,” “you

can’t change it, just accept it”), we try to find someone who’s a

beneficiary of ours buying into this norm.

His debut book, History of Madness, was published in 1961, a year when

the USSR sent the first human into space, East German authorities closed

the border between East and West Berlin and construction of the Berlin

Wall began, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated, and the CIA undertook an

unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Castro that history remembers as the

Bay of Pigs invasion. Foucault was thirty-five years old, and the book

was a critique of modern approaches to madness that he had seen when

working in a mental hospital in Paris and later in his own experience of

psychiatric treatment.

Foucault’s history of madness is a perfect example of someone gloriously

questioning a norm before accepting it. The whole idea of mental illness

is super new, claims Foucault, and it was created as an instrument of

control.

Discipline and Punish, Foucault’s book on prisons, normalization, and

mass surveillance, published in 1975, was written under the motto “to

punish less, perhaps; but certainly to punish better.” Foucault

describes how prison becomes the model for control of an entire society,

with factories, hospitals, and schools modeled on the modern prison.

Foucault names three primary techniques of control: hierarchical

observation, normalizing judgment, and examination. Control over people

can be achieved merely by observing them, he says (thirty-eight years

before Edward Snowden published his leaks about mass surveillance).

Think about how much disgusting stuff was—and is—legal. Slavery was

legal. Segregation was legal in the United States as recently as 1964.

It was not that long ago that the Civil Rights Act ended all state and

local laws allowing segregation. “Propaganda of homosexuality”—talking

about LGBTQ issues publicly—is still illegal in my country. On the other

hand, wars are legal, and making profits from killing people is legal

(General Electric, which makes your fridges and washing machines, and

Boeing, whose planes you’re flying in, are two of the biggest—and very

legal—arms manufacturers and profiteers from war). Outsourcing low-wage

labor, using cheap labor from non-Western countries to make our

computers and phones, making Asian children sew our pants is legal.

Destroying the planet via uncontrolled carbon dioxide emissions is

legal, and very well-respected men are doing it. On the contrary,

speaking truth to power, being a whistleblower can be illegal—in Russia,

in the United States, anywhere.

Prison is an ideal architectural model of modern disciplinary power.

There are surveillance cameras everywhere in prison, and inmates might

be being watched at any time and all the time. But they can’t be sure

exactly when. As Foucault notes, since inmates never know whether they

are being observed, they must act as if they are always objects of

observation.

Prisons mirror the society around them. Unless we change both, we will

all be trapped in a kind of prison.

• * liberation theology: a conversation with chris hedges

Chris Hedges was Middle East bureau chief of the New York Times for

seven years and has reported on wars in the Falklands, El Salvador and

Nicaragua, and Bosnia. He was part of a Times team that won a Pulitzer

Prize for reporting on terrorism in 2002. A prolific author, he has

taught at Columbia, New York University, the University of Toronto, and

Princeton—and increasingly in prisons. He was ordained as a minister in

2014.

NADYA: You work at Princeton, which is an Ivy League university. So

you’re teaching all those people who want to be 1 percent. Do you try to

influence them?

CHRIS: You can’t change their mind. Here, at places like Princeton,

they’re very hardworking. Many of them are very bright, but because

these institutions are so difficult to get into, they have been

conditioned to cater to authority. Large corporations like Goldman Sachs

send people to this campus to recruit. The students too often define

themselves by prestige, financial success, so they’re easily seduced by

Goldman Sachs. And that’s sad. It’s not that they’re not good people,

they are. And many of them have a conscience. I would just say they’re

weak ... in that sense.

NADYA: I was this nerd. The best student in high school. I got a

scholarship to Moscow State University (I didn’t bribe anybody) and then

I turned to politics. So it is possible. And how did it happen with you?

Because it looks like you are a nerd too.

CHRIS: Yeah, definitely a nerd.

At the age of ten I went to a very elite boarding school for the

uber-rich. And I was only one of sixteen kids on scholarship. My

mother’s family was working class, even lower-working class, in Maine.

I would look at the kids in the prep school, and many of them were very

mediocre on many levels, including intelligence. And I realized that

when you’re rich you get chance after chance after chance. If you’re

poor, you—at best—get one chance. You may not even get that. And that

kept me grounded.

So from a really young age I was always political. I was always fighting

the institution, and luckily, I was a very good student, I was also a

very good athlete, and I didn’t drink, and I didn’t take drugs so they

couldn’t get me. I started an underground newspaper in high school, and

the administration banned it.

NADYA: Of course.

CHRIS: It was a serious paper. I wrote stuff I cared about that would

normally never have been in a school paper. For instance, the people who

worked in the kitchen, who were poor people of color, lived above the

kitchen in terrible conditions. No students were allowed to go up there.

I went up there and took pictures, and waited until the commencement

issue so all the parents would be there and handed it out to embarrass

the school, and the trustees were there.

Over the summer, the school renovated the kitchen, and when I came back,

the kitchen staff had put up a little plaque in my honor.

NADYA: Wow.

CHRIS: Also my father was an activist; my father was a minister. He had

been a veteran of World War II but he came back from the war virtually a

pacifist. He was very involved in the antiwar movement in Vietnam, in

the civil rights movement. We lived in an all-white farm town, where

Martin Luther King was one of the most hated men in America.

He was very involved in the gay rights movement because his brother was

gay, for which the church finally got rid of him. That was also

important because I understood that you’re not going to be rewarded for

your activism. If you really, truly stand with the oppressed, you’re

going to be treated like the oppressed. And that was a lesson, because

of my dad, I learned really young, and that saved me because I wasn’t

naive. I didn’t think I was going to be exalted for doing the right

thing. I knew the cost.

There was no gay and lesbian organization at my college, Colgate

University. My father by then had a church in Syracuse, which was an

hour away, and he brought gay speakers to my campus, and my father said,

you have to go public, you have to come out. They were too frightened to

go out of the closet. So one day my father said to me: you’re going to

have to start the gay and lesbian organization, which I did. I’m not

gay, but I founded the gay and lesbian organization.

NADYA: Do you know if there are some priests who are still on the left

side, who can be connected with us? I ended up in prison because I came

to the church and I care about the church.

CHRIS: My favorite theologian is James Cone. The only theologian living

in America worth reading. He’s the father of black liberation theology.

Cone called out the white church. He condemned the white church as the

Antichrist. And he said, if you look at lynching, of black men and women

and children in the South ... what is that? It’s the crucifixion. And

the white church said nothing. As a matter of fact, the white church in

the South supported it. Even when the physical manifestation of the

crucifixion was in front of them, they were silent. And I asked him a

year or so ago, so do you still think the white church is the

Antichrist? And he said, well if you define the Antichrist as everything

that Jesus fought against, I would have to say yes.

After the third century, with the rise of Constantine and apologists for

power—Augustine, Aquinas, and others—they created a theology that I

think was not only contrary to the fundamental message of the gospel,

but was used to sanctify state power. And that’s how you got a thousand

years of church rule, with the inquisitions and the subjugation of the

poor. There’s a theologian named Paul Tillich who says every institution

including the church is inherently demonic. And that’s right.

And I was ordained, which you can watch online. James Cone preached the

sermon, and Cornel West spoke, we had a blues band, we invited all the

families of my students in prison to come in an inner-city church. When

I did this ordination I was asked, “Will you obey the rules of the

church?” And I said, “When the church is right.”

Pope John Paul II did tremendous damage to the church. Because he had

this phobia against communism. That gave the church a kind of right-wing

tilt, and the church in essence embraced neoliberalism. It forgot about

justice. It certainly forgot about the poor. And that’s why it’s largely

irrelevant, and I would say the last thing that made the church

irrelevant in the United States was the rise of the Christian Right.

They’re not Christians. They’re fascists.

Christian fascists are filling the ideological vacuum for Trump. Because

Trump doesn’t have an ideology other than his narcissism. And when you

fuse the iconography and language of a religion with the state, it’s

fascist, and that’s who they are.

NADYA: What do you think about identity politics? Do you think they may

have been co-opted by liberalism?

CHRIS: It swiftly became co-opted. For instance, feminism. If you go

back and read Andrea Dworkin and the real feminists, it is about

empowering oppressed women, but feminism now became about a woman CEO,

or in the case of Hillary Clinton, a woman president. Everything got

twisted. An African American president who runs the empire. So as Cornel

West says, Barack Obama is a black mascot for Wall Street. And the left

just got seduced by it. It was just political immaturity. It was a

willful severance with the poor because in marginal communities of poor

people of color—they were not only losing all their jobs, getting

evicted from their homes, being sent to the largest prison system in the

world ... but being shot, being gunned down right and left.

Their court trials are a joke. There’s no habeas corpus, there’s no due

process, 94 percent are forced to plead out to things they didn’t even

do.

NADYA: Because they’re scared.

CHRIS: The students I teach in the prisons with the longest sentences

are the ones that went to trial because they didn’t do it. And they have

to make an example of them because if everyone went to trial the system

would crash. They’ll stack you with twelve, fifteen charges, half of

which they know you didn’t do. And then they get to say: if you go to

trial, look at that poor guy who went to trial. I taught a guy once who

had life plus a hundred and fifty-four years, and he’s never committed a

violent crime. It’s insane.

NADYA: What did he do?

CHRIS: It was drugs and weapons possession. But he was never charged

with a violent crime. But see, this is the problem: because you

deindustrialize the society, you create redundant or surplus labor, who

are primarily black and brown, and you need a form of social control

because you turn them into human refuse. What are the forms of social

control? Mass incarceration and militarized police. If you go into

Newark, or Camden, or any of these poor areas in New Jersey, they’re

mini police states, where you have no rights, where SWAT teams come and

kick your door down in the middle of the night with long-barreled

weapons, terrorizing, sometimes shooting everyone in sight, for a

nonviolent drug warrant. It’s really hell. And that is about what’s

going to get extended throughout the whole country.

We’re seeing the ten thousand new police agents, the five thousand new

border patrol, the 10 percent increase to the military, which they

didn’t even ask for. A complete militarization of the society.

NADYA: They didn’t even ask for it! But yeah, take it.

CHRIS: And liberal elites are complicit because while this was happening

to poor people of color, they were worrying about making sure they had

their quota of LGBT people within their elite institutions.

Everybody talks about progress in gay rights—that’s not true. It’s

progress for the elites, but if you’re a gay man who only has a high

school education, and you’re pumping gas in rural Kansas, you’re worse

off. It’s more dangerous with the rise of the Christian Right. And those

gay elites in New York and San Francisco have turned their backs on the

poor.... And it’s not just the violence. It’s the fact that because of

the power of these Evangelical churches these poor kids believe they’re

impure, they’re diseased, and that’s why you have such a high rate of

suicide among these kids.

All the way around, it’s a class issue. And the neoliberal elites are

complicit with the rest of the country in turning their backs on the

poor, and especially poor people of color.

Richard Rorty said in Achieving Our Country, look, this is a dangerous

game. He wrote in 1998. If you have a bankrupt liberal establishment

that continues to speak in the language of liberal democracy but betrays

those values to your working class and your poor, then eventually, you

have not only a revolt against those elites, which is what we’ve seen

with Trump, but you have a revolt against those values. And that’s

what’s happened.

NADYA: How should we speak with them? Go deeper—analyze the economic

situation that brought this disaster which you see right now, and Trump

is just a symptom.

CHRIS: They don’t want to hear it because they—just like all people in

positions of privilege—don’t want to hear anything that challenges their

right to that privilege, so what’s the reaction to the election? Russia

did it! This is ridiculous. I’m no friend of Putin, but the idea that

Russia swung the election, it just doesn’t even make sense.

NADYA: I know that it is possible to change somebody’s mind because I

changed my own mind and I constantly change my mind every day.

CHRIS: I think that most people don’t get their mind changed. I think

that for me the most powerful way is to build relationships with the

oppressed. I was in El Salvador, I was in Gaza, I was in Yugoslavia, or

here I am in the prisons, or with the book I did, Days of Destruction,

Days of Revolt, it was two years we spent literally in the poorest

pockets of the United States.

NADYA: What do you answer to all those people who keep asking us, Okay

but what is the alternative? You want to destroy things? But what do you

want to put instead of that? And I’m telling them—look around, we have a

lot of bright people and anybody can be better than Putin ...

CHRIS: Putin wouldn’t have come down as hard on you as he did if he

wasn’t scared. Our job is to make them scared. Our job is to scare the

shit out of them. Because that’s the only way power reacts. Politics is

a game of fear. Appealing to its better nature is a waste of time, it

doesn’t happen. So who was America’s last liberal president? It was

Richard Nixon. Not because he had a soul or a heart or a conscience. But

because he was scared of movements. Mine Safety Act, Clean Water Act—all

of that came from Nixon.

There’s a scene in Kissinger’s memoirs where tens of thousands of people

have surrounded the White House in an antiwar demonstration and Nixon

has put empty city buses all around the White House as barricades, and

he looks out the window, and he goes, “Henry, they’re going to break

through the barricades and get us.” Well, that’s where people in power

have to be, all the time. I lived in France when Sarkozy was president.

Sarkozy pissed in his pants every time the students came into Paris or

the farmers brought their tractors into Paris.

NADYA: What should we ask for? What will be those words that can really

bring us together?

CHRIS: I’m a socialist. I believe that most of the people at Goldman

Sachs should go to prison, and Goldman Sachs should be shut down. Banks

should be nationalized. Utilities should be nationalized; the fossil

fuel industry should be nationalized. Yes, there are ways that you can

have corruption with that as you do in Russia, but right now we’re in a

situation where those industries and corporations run the country and

we’re not going to break their back unless we take away their toys and

their money.

I’m not telling you it’s going to happen. I’m just telling you that the

only hope we have is a revolution. A nonviolent revolution. Now, given

the situation as it is in the United States and the weakness of the left

and the lack of political consciousness, we’re probably far more likely

to have a protofascist right-wing backlash.

NADYA: Another question is, Can we develop a left version of

globalization? Neoliberal globalization does not serve the people, but

global mobility, on the other hand, is the thing that gave me everything

I have. Otherwise, I would be sitting in my Siberian hometown working at

the nickel factory.

CHRIS: Right. Well, there’s corporate globalization, which is dangerous

and evil. And then there’s the globalization between movements because

we’re all fighting neoliberalism. We’re all fighting corporate capital.

All revolutionary movements have fed off of each other throughout

history. They come in waves. So you have the American revolution, and

you have the French revolution, and then you have the Haitian

independence movement.

I think that’s right, that the only hope we have is by linking ourselves

globally and not retreating into nationalism, which they want us to do.

• * Rule № 9: CREATE ALTERNATIVES

In addition to resistance, create unorthodox, unconventional models,

mores, institutions. Revitalize your ability to dream, to envision and

create alternative futures. The inability to dream makes us

shortsighted. The most radical act of rebellion today is to relearn how

to dream and to fight for that dream.

You can listen to politicians, they’ll lead you astray

You’ve gotta see the light and you’ve gotta see the way

COCKNEY REJECTS, “OI! OI! OI!”

Those of us who are outside and free, we’re going to tell the truth.

We’re going to be honest. We’re going to have a certain kind of moral

and spiritual and intellectual integrity. And no matter how marginal

that makes us, we’re not in any way going to become well-adjusted to

this injustice out here.

DR. CORNEL WEST, IN AN INTERVIEW WITH DEMOCRACY NOW!, 2016

• ** Words

• *** stay weird

If Pussy Riot needed to define their job somehow, they’d say that their

job is being ridiculous. Being ridiculous is one of the best ways to

tell the truth. You don’t pretend that you know. You’re just asking,

you’re wondering and suggesting. You don’t force others to build a brave

new world.

People who behave weirdly might be called sick or disabled by some, but

they just might be seeing something that others don’t. Look at the Old

Testament prophets, for example, who behaved like total weirdos.

When you are ridiculous, when you tell the truth, they will say you are

insane.

Besides prisons, there are multiple other ways to turn you into an

obedient domesticated pet. One of them is control through the

medicalization of psychology, psychotherapy, and psychiatry.

Psychopharmaceuticals are overprescribed. The number of people with a

diagnosis is rising exponentially, the diagnoses themselves are

expanding. Anxiety, fear, and loneliness are plaguing us. Loneliness is

the disease of our century—that’s what I read when I was desperately

googling “WHAT TO DO ASAP DYING FROM LONELINESS.”

We don’t really inquire about the reasons for this plague, though. We’re

isolated with our problems, which we perceive as minor, personal

problems. Moreover, we start to feel guilty about our anxieties and

fears because they make us less productive, and we end up taking

performance-enhancing drugs. Why are so many people not feeling quite

well? And why is the goal of treatment to conform patients to the norm

rather than to deal with the systemic issues that make millions of

people feel miserable?

What if certain socioeconomic trends are leading to this explosion of

illnesses? When competition and gaining success by any means have become

our ideology, should we really be surprised by this overwhelming feeling

of hopeless isolation? Competitive solidarity does not exist;

competitive love does not exist either. Some things are just not

supposed to be competitive, things like access to solidarity, love,

health care, fresh air, and clean water. However, the most powerful

forces today—privatization and deregulation—are based on making

everything competitive. So, if so many people feel that they are fucked

and fooled, maybe they are fucked and fooled. It looks like a duck,

swims like a duck, and quacks.

The alleged scientific neutrality of modern medical treatments for

insanity are in fact covers for controlling challenges to conventional

bourgeois morality. That morality says that madness is mental illness,

and it’s presented as an objective, incontrovertible scientific

discovery. But it’s not neutral at all. Labeling those who think

differently as mentally ill, force-feeding them meds, and locking them

up in hospitals are part of a mighty instrument of control. As a matter

of fact, it’s the most dangerous form of control—one that appears to

come with the approval of science. Scientific authority is designed to

make you feel small and powerless. “Scientists know better”—that’s what

you’re prescribed to assume. But may I tell you something? The next time

you feel you can’t argue with science, think about eugenics—eugenicists

claimed their movement was a science while slaughtering millions of

innocent people in its name. That’s why I have problems with experts. I

don’t trust experts.

The antipsychiatry movement was big in the 1960s and ’70s. What’s the

central idea of the antipsychiatry movement? That psychiatric treatment

is often more damaging than helpful to patients. Classic examples:

electroconvulsive therapy, insulin shock therapy, and lobotomy. The

antipsychiatry movement has achieved a lot, methods have changed, but it

certainly doesn’t mean that civil society should just relax and stop

checking what’s going on in psychiatry. One of the most worrying things

today is the significant increase in prescribing psychiatric drugs for

children. Big pharma is a super powerful business, and we surely need to

pay attention to the many cases when drugs are prescribed just because

it’s profitable for the company and doctors. Actually, it’s really

confusing how few questions we ask about the origins of and reasons for

psychiatrists’ labeling (which we clearly should ask).

“A happiness unthinkable in the normal state and unimaginable for anyone

who hasn’t experienced it ... I am then in perfect harmony with myself

and the entire universe.” Dostoevsky thus described his epileptic

seizures to a friend. In The Idiot, his character Prince Myshkin

describes his epileptic episodes and the single second right before a

seizure. “What matters though it be only disease, an abnormal tension of

the brain, if when I recall and analyze the moment, it seems to have

been one of harmony and beauty in the highest degree—an instant of

deepest sensation, overflowing with unbounded joy and rapture, ecstatic

devotion, and completest life?” Myshkin felt more alive than at any

other moment: “I would give my whole life for this one instant,” he

said.

The goal of the power structures, though, is not to encourage

revelation, joy, and ecstatic devotion. The goal of power is to make

citizens measurable and governable. Michel Foucault reveals that it’s a

relatively new, nineteenth-century idea that those who behave strangely

are merely sick, that they’re invalids and have to be isolated from

society.

Paul Verhaeghe, the Belgian professor of clinical psychology and

psychoanalysis I referenced before, wrote a striking book on this

explosion of psychopathologies in modern Western societies, What About

Me? The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society (2012). He

writes about the psychiatric handbook, the Diagnostic and Statistical

Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and how every edition brings more and

more disorders: “180 in the second edition, 292 in the third, and 365 in

the fourth, while the latest, DSM-5, gives a diagnosis for many normal

human emotions and behaviours. Medically speaking, these labels have

little significance, with most of the diagnoses being made on the basis

of simple checklists. Official statistics show an exponential rise in

the use of pharmaceuticals, and the aim of psychotherapy is rapidly

shifting toward forcing patients to adapt to social norms—you might even

say, disciplining them.”

“Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn’t organized to serve

human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people

sick than it heals,” writes Ivan Illich, an Austrian-born Christian

anarchist. Illich wrote the iconic book Limits to Medicine: Medical

Nemesis; The Expropriation of Health (1976), and his main point is that

“the medical establishment has become a major threat to health.” He

explains, “This process, which I shall call the ‘medicalization of

life,’ deserves articulate political recognition.” Drugs often have

serious side effects that are worse than the original condition, but

because we get them from “professionals” who have (supposedly) access to

the ultimate truth about our health, we believe them unconditionally.

Which inevitably has consequences for us.

Thinking about economic inequality, it’s clear that it indeed brings us

lots of stress that doctors may describe as a diagnosis and make us take

antipsychotics. Working-poor and many middle-income families suffer from

constant financial stress, due to the increasing cost of homeownership

and renting, rising prices, and stagnating salaries. A situation of

chronic stress inevitably leads to a wide range of health-related

issues.

Trying to conclude everything that has been said and everything else

I’ve forgotten to say—it looks like we’re living in a paradoxical

situation:

• Permanent financial instability and impoverishment are literally

driving us nuts.

• We pay an expensive doctor, get our diagnosis (one of millions—there

is a diagnosis for everybody, for you too), and get a prescription.

• We buy costly prescription drugs, get dependent on them, become

junkies, and overpay pharmaceutical companies for legal drugs till the

end of our lives (or the end of our money).

I guess an exit from this vicious cycle should be found.

What if sometimes, in order not to feel insane, or lonely, or sad, or

fucked, you have no need to take a pill—you can find others who are

experiencing the same feelings, discuss your problems, organize, and

solve the problem?

You have no money to pay back student loans—you have a right to feel

sad, angry, fucked. You work all day long and have no money to pay your

rent—you have a right to feel insane. But don’t take a pill; it’ll help

you fall asleep but will not solve the issue.

Reach out to your people.

In May 2012, while we were sitting in a Moscow women’s jail under

investigation for our crime, psychiatry suddenly rose on the horizon. I

have to admit, I was scared to death and started to panic. As someone

who had spent her youth studying the antipsychiatry movement, I was well

aware of punitive psychiatry’s horrors. I think you’ve read One Flew

Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or seen the movie. So we underwent a forensic

psychiatric examination in the Kashchenko psychiatric hospital, a

facility that in the Soviet era was heavily involved in the political

abuses of psychiatry. I was trying to appear as normal as I could

possibly be. I found out that my doctor was honestly sympathetic to me

and to our cause. He smiled warmly when I answered a question about

priorities by naming freedom, sister/brotherhood, and equality.

However, all three of us were found to be suffering from a

“mixed-personality disorder.” What are the symptoms? “Proactive approach

to life,” “a drive for self-fulfillment,” “stubbornly defending their

opinion,” “inclination to oppositional behavior,” “propensity for

protest reactions.” All this was written in our psychiatric report. I

actually didn’t mind the description at all. They defined it as an

abnormal condition, but I think these are just characteristics of a

human being who is still alive.

The report used language very similar to the criteria used in the Soviet

era when diagnosing dissenters. Punitive psychiatry was widely used in

the USSR as an ideological weapon of control and repression. A Soviet

citizen had to be unquestioning and submissive. Those who said anything

against the oppression or showed any independence were regarded as

suspicious troublemakers, a threat to everyday life.

• *** all power to the imagination

Here is what I heard in one Russian classroom:

KIDS: We’re for justice.

PRINCIPAL: And what exactly is justice?

KIDS: It’s what we don’t have right now.

We have to learn how to be kids again, to use our imagination and start

to think of alternatives that we’re able to create with our own hands,

think of possible futures that we could establish by restructuring our

own lives, behavior, thinking, consumption of products, ideas, political

concepts, news, social networks.

Too often we don’t believe that another world is possible. This is what

may be called the “there is no alternative” (TINA) disease, and it’s a

pure crisis of the imagination. “There is no alternative” was Margaret

Thatcher’s favorite slogan. In her case, it mostly meant the economy.

Writing about Thatcher’s TINA in the Nation (April 12, 2013), Laura

Flanders said it meant that “globalized capitalism, so called

free-markets and free trade were the best ways to build wealth,

distribute services and grow a society’s economy. Deregulation’s good,

if not God.”

The TINA disease is global. As activists we’re so used to hearing this

standard response from our fellow Russians: yes, our government is

corrupt, courts exist only to protect the elites, the police do not work

and only take bribes, Putin is a thief, but there is no alternative.

Official statistics claim that the overwhelming majority of Russians (80

percent) support Putin. Nah, they don’t. A little investigation reveals

that there are many citizens who are perfectly aware of how corrupt and

greedy Putin is, how he’s stripping Russians of their money and rights

and monopolizing resources within the small group of his cronies. We’re

aware that we’re living in a plutocracy, an oligarchy—for sure not a

democracy. But here the TINA syndrome comes in. “But who will rule

Russia, if not Putin?” is what I hear. “You!” is what I say. I can

guarantee that you have more dignity, love of your country, and respect

for your fellow citizens than Putin has. That’s one hundred percent

true. We can run things differently. There are enough good-hearted and

smart people in our country to run our affairs better than Putin does.

The same is applicable to the United States. “The politics of

inevitability is a self-induced intellectual coma,” says Timothy Snyder,

author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. “So

long as there was a contest between communist and capitalist systems,

and so long as the memory of fascism and Nazism was alive, Americans had

to pay some attention to history and preserve the concepts that allowed

them to imagine alternative futures. Yet once we accepted the politics

of inevitability, we assumed that history was no longer relevant. If

everything in the past is governed by a known tendency, then there is no

need to learn the details.”

TINA helps elites, it does not help us. We choose to fight for our

dreams, we choose not to be powerless.

• ** Deeds

• *** alternative: another law enforcement system is possible

It’s a mistake to put political activists in prison. It only makes them

stronger and more convinced of their beliefs. If you consider becoming a

president or an MP, please remember this lesson and don’t try to silence

activists by putting them in jail. It’s simply not practical. They’ll

find a way to communicate from courtrooms and prison cells. They’ll find

a way to gain more power from their prison experience than they lose.

Putin and his team made a mistake when they locked us up. They had it

coming. Now it won’t be so easy for them to get us off their backs.

Authorities call Pussy Riot’s performances controversial and offensive.

All Pussy Riot’s videos are labeled “extremist,” and access to them has

been prohibited in Russia by a court decision, and I can see why: we put

their power in question.

But I believe it’s my basic human right to kick my government’s ass. And

I put my whole self into everything I do.

When the authorities are so pissed at you that they have to lock you up,

wear it as a badge of honor. Prison cannot make you weaker or break you

unless you allow it to happen. When they steal your freedom, the power

still resides in your decisions and your will. Nothing could be worse

for those who locked you up than when you stand up proudly for your

values even when you’re behind bars. It’s a cruel game: their goal is to

publicly annihilate your spirit, but you look for sneaky ways to grow

your courage and develop yourself instead of shrinking and dying (which

is what is expected in this situation).

My prison time gave me the unbelievably sweet and paradoxical feeling of

being a winner and a loser at the same time. We’re in prison, but thanks

to the court process we’re taking part in branding the government as a

mob of shortsighted, greedy, petty oligarchs and ex-KGB agents who are

afraid of three women in bright dresses and funny hats.

“Here, in prison, I have acquired something very important—a sense of

profound hatred for the modern state system and a class society,”

antifascist and anarchist Dmitry Buchenkov, a PhD in political science

and a boxing coach, writes in a letter as he sits in prison, where he

ended up because of an absurd politically motivated criminal case

stemming from the 2012 protests in Russia. “It’s very important for a

revolutionary. I had this sense before, but understood it logically. Now

it’s a deep emotional distress. I want to thank the investigation

committee and all case officers for my final emergence as a

revolutionary. I was lacking this small detail—the prison, where I had a

chance to meet absolutely different people who make up the Russian

society, from junkies to businessmen. Nobody can make so many

observations and political conclusions in such a brief period of time.”

Dmitry Buchenkov ended up in prison because he was accused of

participating in an illegal rally in Moscow on May 6, 2012. Dmitry was

not in Moscow on that day, so he couldn’t possibly have participated in

any rally. But cops don’t care—they seriously don’t like the guy and

want him locked up because he’s a smart and effective community

organizer.

On the first day after our release in December 2013, we decided to found

Zona Prava (Zone of Rights). A brilliant Russian lawyer, Pavel Chikov,

who defended us while we were in a camp, is the head of Zona Prava.

The mission of our prison reform initiative is to overhaul the current

law enforcement system, a vicious system that grinds people down and

spits out coffins, to offer an alternative to a broken system. The

acquittal rate in modern Russia is less than 1 percent. What does that

mean practically? It means that once you find yourself in a police

station, it’s almost impossible to get out of there. Even those who work

within the system are not happy about that. I know policemen for whom

dignity and self-respect are important. We have ex-interrogators and

ex-prosecutors working with us on protecting prisoners’ rights.

People die in police custody every day. There are thousands of deaths in

prison annually, half of them from tuberculosis, which given the current

state of medicine should be impossible to die from, and from HIV, which

is no longer necessarily a death sentence on the outside. We are

reeducating prison camp staff and police officers, using the carrot and

the stick to teach them to see detainees and convicts as human beings.

We help prisoners draft complaints, petitions, and lawsuits. We are

involved in proceedings against prison wardens in the Russian courts and

the European Court of Human Rights to help severely ill convicts obtain

parole. Our doctors visit penal colonies and carry out independent exams

of cancer patients and the HIV-infected.

In the year after Pussy Riot’s release, Zona Prava was working on a few

dozen cases across Russia, and more than ten are cases in the European

Court of Human Rights.

We have started work in prison camps, and we’re confident that if we can

help convicts find legal ways to protest their enslavement, we can do a

lot more for the many Russian citizens who want to express their

dissatisfaction with the Putinist political system. We have compiled a

book of complaints and suggestions, but so far citizens have no access

to this book.

Most prisoners are locked up because of the war on drugs. Even

possession of weed can lead to a prison sentence of up to eight years.

The next biggest group of prisoners after those sentenced for drugs

comprises the victims of domestic abuse, women who were beaten by their

husbands or other family members, sometimes for decades, and who

couldn’t take it anymore. What could they do? I have a lot of

acquaintances in that situation who would go to the police, and the

police would tell them, “Hey, you haven’t been killed yet! Come back

once you’re dead.” Seriously. This is typical. It’s almost like they get

special instructions on how to answer when someone comes in with

domestic abuse complaints.

We cannot change Russia’s law enforcement system in a moment without the

government’s support. And our government, of course, is doing everything

it can to prevent reform of prisons and law enforcement. What we can do

is to provide information, lawyers, and the safety margin afforded by

public monitoring. We can help people imagine a different way of doing

things, for the benefit of all.

• *** alternative: a different media is possible

At the end of 2013, Putin was deeply displeased with revolutionary

events in Ukraine. His logic was clear: if radical shifts can happen in

a country that is our closest neighbor, his power in Russia is not as

stable as he’d like it to be. It was a question of honor for Putin to

provoke chaos in Ukraine and make sure that nobody in Russia saw a

Ukrainian revolution as a positive example of changing elites through

the people’s power. Thus, Putin took three steps: (1) the annexation of

Crimea, (2) a secret war in East Ukraine, and (3) an open media war

against Ukraine and everybody in Russia who dared to say anything

critical of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Just when you think it

can’t get any worse, your president sends troops to a neighboring

country and—wow!—says that there are no troops, though we have

witnesses, we have photographic evidence. It’s gaslighting at the next

level.

Those who live in the United States had an unfortunate chance to feel

the impact of the Russian media wars in 2016, during the presidential

elections. But we Russians have lived with this reality for a while,

since the beginning of Putin’s first term as the president in 2000.

Any attempt to provide real information about what was going on in

Russia’s war with Ukraine in 2014 (not promoting a pro-Russian or

pro-Ukrainian position but just honest reporting) put the person who

made it available in jeopardy. Journalists and editors were fired and

threatened, and investors and advertising partners of media outlets who

dared to provide real news were intimidated and convinced to stop

working with traitors.

Troll factories had a lot of work too. There are giant government-paid

networks of people whose one role in life is to seed distorted

information on the internet. They’re paid to “dislike” any video on

YouTube that questions the power of Putin and his apparatus. Grown-up

people are getting Russian taxpayers’ money to “dislike,” say, Pussy

Riot’s music video. Are you serious?

DoS (denial-of-service) attacks on websites that post anything critical

of the government are another popular tool. DoS attacks bring down a

website for a period of time, which is extremely annoying when you’re a

media agency and your duty is to provide news to the people ASAP. And

here’s another tool: courts and the government can block sites they

don’t like for all Russian users.

The year after our release was a tough one for the media; pieces of it

were collapsing one after another under government pressure. In 2014,

the Russian government’s own media propaganda turned incredibly

reckless. It was fake news par excellence. We had a unique chance to see

how bad lies from the TV screens can be.

That’s why we created an independent media outlet in 2014. (As you’ve

probably noticed, we’re not looking for easy ways to live a life.) It’s

called MediaZona.

The key point is our media offers an alternative information source that

is completely free of censorship.

Citizens who are aware of what’s going on aren’t easily fooled. Our role

is to be a trustworthy news service. We don’t publish columns or op-eds

because we believe that our readers should come to their own

conclusions. We trust our audience. It’s up to them to decide what side

they’re on.

It’s rewarding to see how big media resources—controlled by the

Kremlin—refer to MediaZona’s articles in their materials. Even those who

are literally working for the Kremlin know that you can trust MediaZona.

We’re deadly serious about fact-checking. It’s difficult to gain the

trust of your audience, and you can ruin it with just one fake news

story.

When we started, we mostly covered law enforcement issues: politics in

Russia moved from Parliament to courtrooms and prisons, places where you

eventually end up if you’re politically engaged. We provide online

reports from the courts, and we expose the absurdity, brutality, and

injustice that dominate the modern Russian law enforcement system.

Sometimes it’s hysterically funny; sometimes it makes you cry. We

publish stories of prisoners and ex-prisoners, giving voice to those the

state prefers to stay silent.

MediaZona has existed for more than three years. We’ve been expanding,

and now we’re covering a broader spectrum of issues, making an

encyclopedia of Russian life. Our main question is, What does a life in

real Russia look like?

We’re not interested in an official propaganda TV picture of Putin

hugging kids or being sentimentally moved by bucolic church bells. We

collect information on protests held outside big cities that usually

remain unseen: strikes by miners or truck drivers, hunger strikes in

prisons, rallies organized by angry schoolteachers. We talk to

prosecutors, judges, policemen, prison wardens, those who work in the

system right now as well as former officials. They give us leaks on how

everything really works: the five steps of fabricating a criminal case,

how to torture a prisoner without leaving any evidence, the top ten ways

to take a bribe, etc.

“Well. Are you ready to burn some police cars?” That was the first thing

Sergey Smirnov said to me when we met for the first time at a gathering

of leftist activists in 2008. Now he’s an editor-in-chief of MediaZona.

I’ll let him tell you more about MediaZona:

For a few years, we watched what was happening, and after a while—from

my point of view—the most important events (for example, the case of

[Putin critic Alexei] Navalny) went to the courts. Politics, real

politics—it moved from the city squares to the courts. One case after

another. And a huge number of new restrictive legislative measures have

been introduced. It became obvious that court practices were the new

form of communication between those in power and those in the

opposition. And there was a moment when everyone knew exactly what was

happening. But when everyone knows what’s happening, one question

remains—what do you do next? One possible reaction is to do nothing.

We decided to cover it. We never had any illusions as to how interesting

any of this would be for people. We never thought everyone would

suddenly want to read about how policemen are killing people, or about

how another two dozen people have been put behind bars for many

years.... Of course, this isn’t the most popular kind of information,

but it’s important.

Maybe this is a strange idea, but our mission is constantly changing. We

have a lot of goals. One of them is to attract attention to court cases,

courts, and to problems in this system. We do online broadcasting from

courts, to show how the courts actually function.

I have another pretty strange idea about our mission, actually. I’ve

written a couple of articles about the nineteenth century, and here’s

what I think. If in ten, or fifteen, or twenty years, our website could

help a researcher understand this time period, we would be very happy.

They could read our live online broadcasting archives from courtrooms to

understand what really happened here, to get an idea of what kind of

epoch this was.

Of course, we can only offer a small part of the picture. But capturing

the current moment, what’s happening right now—that’s important. I’m

convinced we can’t even tell what is and what isn’t important right now,

and we don’t know what will be important ten to fifteen years from now

for someone studying Russia. In this context, I would like it if

researchers would study some parts of our coverage. It’s a strange

thought. It’s about understanding society.

I think one of the most serious problems is in the law and the system

that puts people in prison in the first place. Consider, for example,

Article Number 228 [of Russia’s Criminal Code] on narcotics. It’s a

classic law that is used only for (a) launching criminal cases, (b)

meeting quotas for the number of cases brought against suspects, and (c)

issuing a certain number of criminal sentences in a given time period.

No one actually thinks that the criminal code is there to punish crimes.

The narcotics law is an enormous issue in itself, since about 30 to 40

percent of the people who are locked up in prison are there for drugs.

Maybe in 50 percent of cases, people are put in prison because

investigators have to launch a case and bring it to court, so

[prosecutors] use stories about drugs for their own statistics and

quotas. It’s a big problem. And there’s no control over these agencies.

They can write basically anything they want in the case files.

This is the main problem: people don’t know how to work anymore. We can

see this in the general level of work done in the courts. Investigators

don’t really know how to investigate anymore. They aren’t taught, and

they don’t have any real opponents. It’s a completely failed system.

Even when young investigators come in, they see right away that, after

they open a case, it doesn’t matter at all what they write in the files.

I’ve seen so much nonsense in protocols over the past year. When it

comes down to it, when they actually have to search for someone in a

real criminal case, they don’t know how to do it. Because people have

gotten used to working in a system where everything is scripted.

I’ve also seen a lot of judges, and so many of them are just so

desperate. They know they can’t declare anyone innocent; they know they

can’t make their own calls when sentencing. I have a feeling that when

judges get any kind of freedom to make a decision, they get really happy

and brighten up. Seriously.

If we didn’t use our imagination, we would never have invented the

lightbulb.

So allow your imagination to create alternatives. Imagine police

officers as social workers rather than killers and armed robbers.

Imagine free health care. Imagine art being made for art’s sake, not

just to be successfully sold. Imagine that instead of making us

submissive, education encourages creativity and intuition.

• ** Heroes

• *** aleksandra kollontai

Aleksandra Kollontai was a feminist, activist, and Russia’s first woman

government minister and ambassador.

Kollontai was born in Saint Petersburg in 1872. Her mother had three

children from a first marriage before she obtained a divorce, which was

not easy, to marry the man who was to become Aleksandra’s father.

Aleksandra herself refused the arranged marriage that was set up for her

and instead married a distant cousin, an apparently unsuitable man who

was broke.

After the Russian Revolution, Kollontai wrote about gender relations and

equality for women in a communist society like the one she thought was

emerging. Women were not men’s property, she wrote in “Sexual Relations

and the Class Struggle” (1921). It should be easier for women to get

divorced. Marriage should be based on freedom, equality, and friendship.

Kollontai freaked out even her fellow Bolsheviks.

Kollontai’s focus was on equality. Her writing reads as if it were very

modern, not like something written a hundred years ago. In “Sexual

Relations,” she writes about social hypocrisy. If a man marries a lowly

cook, no one says anything, but if a woman doctor looks at a footman,

she is scorned (even if he’s good looking, she added).

Later, in the 1960s and ’70s, came Kollontai’s heirs, like the activist

and visionary Shulamith Firestone (1945–2012). Firestone’s ideas were a

radical cocktail of feminism and critiques of Marxism and

psychoanalysis. In The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist

Revolution (1970), a bestseller written when she was twenty-five,

Firestone advocated the complete elimination of gender as the only way

to achieve equality. She wrote that to eliminate “sexual classes,”

children would be born through “artificial reproduction” and they would

no longer be dependent on a single mother. “Genital differences between

human beings would no longer matter culturally,” she wrote, and labor

wouldn’t be divided by the sexes because labor itself would be

eliminated too (“through cybernetics”). A promoter of celibacy,

Firestone said that in an equal society, sex and reproduction would no

longer be important.

In a piece in the Atlantic published after Firestone’s death, Emily

Chertoff wrote that “Firestone wanted to eliminate the following things:

sex roles, procreative sex, gender, childhood, monogamy, mothering, the

family unit, capitalism, the government, and especially the

physiological phenomena of pregnancy and childbirth.”

Under capitalism, Kollontai wrote, the woman was forced to work and

bring up children, which was impossible. Women should be equal to men in

the workplace and be defined by that work and not the domestic bondage

they are forced to live under. In “Communism and the Family” (1920), she

wrote that equality in the workplace would leave women with no time for

cooking and cleaning and mending clothes, which were unproductive jobs

in the new society. In fact there was now no need for families at

all—workers would eat in communal kitchens, have their laundry done, and

the state would bring up the children. It was a fantastic utopian

glimpse of radical feminism written in the first quarter of the

twentieth century. She managed to be a second-wave feminist five dozen

years before the actual second wave, a kind of seeing that can only

occur in highly sensitive and intuitive thinkers and artists who feel

the air of an epoch before the epoch is born.

In The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Woman (published in

Russian in 1926), Kollontai wrote about her early disappointments in the

attitude of the Bolshevik Party regarding her efforts to win over women

workers. These battles started a long time before the revolution of

1917, dating back to 1906. Kollontai tried to set up a women’s bureau,

but her efforts were blocked. She wrote about that episode: “I realized

for the first time how little our party concerned itself with the fate

of women of the working class and how meager was its interest in women’s

liberation.... My party comrades accused me and those women comrades who

shared my views of being ‘feminists’ and of placing too much emphasis on

matters of concern to women only.”

Kollontai was stubborn about the feminist question, and she became

influential in founding an All-Russian Women’s Congress in December

1908. In the aftermath of that event she was forced to leave Russia for

Germany, where she joined the Social Democratic Party. She hung out with

leading European Social Democrats like Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht,

and Karl Kautsky. She roamed Europe for the cause, attending such events

as a housewives’ strike in Paris.

She knew Lenin and became a Bolshevik. She was made People’s Commissar

of Social Welfare in 1917, the first Russian woman to hold any

government position. But women’s rights were not as important to the

Leninists as they were to Kollontai. We should admire Kollontai for

pushing the Bolsheviks on women’s rights, because Lenin, Trotsky,

Stalin, and the others were men who didn’t like a lot of pushing. But

when conservative tendencies started to win in the party, Kollontai was

forced out of Russia again. She was made Soviet ambassador to Norway in

1923, and she was the first woman to have that type of job too. She

lived a long and eventful life and died in 1952.

“New concepts of the relationships between the sexes are already being

outlined,” she wrote one hundred years ago. “They will teach us to

achieve relationships based on the unfamiliar ideas of complete freedom,

equality and genuine friendship.”

An ability to think beyond the confines of your own era is the greatest

value of a creator.

• * Rule № 10: BE A (WO)MAN

Feminism is a liberating tool that can be used by male, female,

transgender, transsexual, queer, agender, anybody. Feminism allows me to

say: I behave how I like and how I feel, I deconstruct gender roles and

play with them, I mix them up voluntarily. Gender roles are my palette,

not my chains.

There is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

PAUL THE APOSTLE, GALATIANS 3:28

No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.

BETTY FRIEDAN, THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE

The oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves.

FRANTZ FANON

• ** Words

• *** proud witch and bitch

“Russian feminism, of course, is not natural to Russia and has no

basis,” says archpriest Dmitry Smirnov, a popular spokesman for the

Russian Orthodox Church, in one of his YouTube sermons. “Feminism aims

to destroy Christian principles. Feminism tries to put a woman on the

same level as man, depriving her of her advantages as a woman. Feminism

lays waste to the family. Distinct rights for men, women, and children

destroy the family. If we are baptized, we must regard feminism as a

poison that makes people unhappy when it penetrates the minds of society

and families.”

I’ve always enjoyed watching Archpriest Smirnov’s videos on YouTube. He

was one of the inspirations for Pussy Riot. We fell off our chairs when

we watched his sermons, and as we fell we came up with the idea of

starting a feminist punk band.

Archpriest Smirnov talks about women’s advantages that are being

destroyed by feminism. A well-known trick; the same old story. Sexists

are famous for claiming that they’re actually helping women by putting

them on a super special pedestal. But, of course, there on that

pedestal, you’ll not see any creative work or career or any

self-fulfillment. This pedestal is all about being a servant or a

beautiful thing among other things. And it’s easier to look up someone’s

skirt when they’re standing on a pedestal.

“School,” Smirnov said in a deep voice, “must be a crutch for the child

to prepare him for adult family life. Alas, twenty-five years ago, our

schools, under the influence of winds blowing from the West, rejected

education and limited themselves to pumping knowledge into children.

There is another problem: Ninety-nine point nine percent of our teachers

are women. In terms of their psychophysical capacities, they ...

Teachers should be men.”

“Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children,

practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians,” said Pat

Robertson—a conservative Christian, televangelist, and another media

mogul from the United States who apparently is out of his mind—in a

fund-raising letter quoted in the New York Times in 1992.

“Feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to

the mainstream,” wrote Rush Limbaugh in the Sacramento Union in 1988.

Limbaugh is known for popularizing the term “feminazi” and dismissing

consent in sexual relations.

Donald Trump has casually boasted of sexually assaulting young women. In

an interview in Esquire in May 1991, he dismissed getting bad press. “It

doesn’t really matter what they write as long as you’ve got a young and

beautiful piece of ass,” he said.

“A real man should always try, and a real woman should resist,” says

Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, as quoted by Komsomolskaya Pravda.

In Russia, women make up only 10 percent of the cabinet. We Russians

come out ahead of only the poorest African countries and the Arab world,

where there are legal and religious restrictions on the involvement of

women in politics and public life. And yet polls show that a quarter of

Russian citizens believe women have no place in politics or the number

of women in politics should be reduced. Instead of protecting women from

domestic violence, my government has recently passed a law that

legalizes domestic violence.

Sexists live among us, not just in parliaments and on TV. A statement

from the father of Kat, one of the incarcerated Pussy Riot activists,

was used in our trial: “He knows that Tolokonnikova drew his daughter

into the so-called feminist movement. In this connection, he has

repeatedly and strongly condemned the very idea of feminism in Russia,

because he believes the movement does not conform to Russian

civilization, which differs from western civilization.” This chthonic

statement was quoted in the verdict in the Pussy Riot trial, and it was

used by the court to prove that my “correction” was not possible without

isolating me from society.

“Feminism and feminists are cusswords, indecent words,” said the guard

at Christ the Savior Cathedral, one of the “injured parties” named

during the Pussy Riot trial. If that is how it is, swear as much as

possible. Cuss. Be indecent.

“Feminism has achieved everything already! What else do you need?” How

often do you hear this question? I feel like each day starts with it.

Having in mind everything that’s listed above, it does not look like

feminism can celebrate victory and peacefully retire.

Pussy Riot considers ourselves to be part of the third wave of feminism.

The third wave deconstructs the very concept of gender duality. If

gender is a spectrum, then discrimination on the basis of gender becomes

absurd. We reject the bipolar “man/woman” model itself. We think of

gender differently: there are innumerable genders that do not follow the

line between “male” and “female” poles.

I don’t have a stable sexual identity, I refer to myself as a queer

person. I see no reason to say “I’ll never ever do this or that” about

anything.

There is no use hoping that previous generations have settled everything

for you and gender roles have been obligingly spelled out for you. Don’t

think that your job is just being born with a certain kind of wee-wee,

and then supposedly everything is clear: the boys step to the right,

wearing army uniforms and brandishing pistols, while the girls step to

the left, wearing lace and brandishing eyebrow tweezers.

Gender roles are site, time, context specific. All that crazy talk about

historically neutral, eternal male and female roles will always remain

irresponsible baby talk. There are different notions of genders and

different sets of roles prescribed for those genders in every decade of

human history, in every social class, at every workplace, for every age

and race. You can talk about that feminine mystique crap as much as you

please, but I know for a fact that low-class women who were living under

slavery in nineteenth-century Russia were tough and strong as fuck, and

those ladies would beat any modern male New Yorker in arm wrestling.

There were and are “traditional” societies where it’s a norm to have,

say, three genders and four types of sexuality. Just two centuries ago

all European aristocratic cis men wore heavy makeup and wigs.

This whole thing about “a weak fragile woman” or “a weak sex” is merely

a fetish. This fetish had a certain place in our history, but there was

a specific time and culture in which it was born, and there is a time

when it dies. Disappears like a face drawn on the sand.

What is feminism about to me? Feminism is about getting rid of excessive

expectations that are projected on people according to a gender and

sexual role that they are expected to perform. Feminism is about

understanding the genealogy and history of every gender role that’s

prescribed for you. Feminism is about freedom of choice and having

informed options.

I don’t have enough time on Earth to play at being a weak sex. My life

is finite. I have a very limited amount of years indeed, and I want to

learn, try, achieve, change, feel, dare, lose, win a lot. I have no time

for old-school games. You know, some people are unwilling to live

straight from the shoulder. What if you’re living only once, for the

last time? I cannot simply assume that I have another thousand years

left.

I have been an activist and a feminist since I was seven or eight. The

first time I discovered what feminism was, I was eight years old. I

immediately decided that I was a feminist, because it just makes sense.

You go to school and you see that all the authors and all the scientists

you’re studying are men. So you’re asking yourself, “Why? What happened

in history?” And so I claimed I was a feminist, and one day my mate from

preschool came to me, and he was really sorry for me, he was really sad,

and he told me, “It’s okay, don’t worry, everybody at eight years old

can call themselves a feminist, but it’s okay, you’ll change your mind,

you’ll begin to love men. Maybe when you’re around fourteen.”

He spoke with me like I had some kind of disease, but he was trying to

encourage me and tell me that I would get over it.

I was a nerd from a very early age. Once my physics teacher was

embarrassing me in front of the whole class by saying that “Nadya is

such a good girl! She gets just the best marks all the time.” She

continued with the thought that I’d probably become a very successful

person in life and marry a president. I was ten years old, but I

remember I understood enough to be furious. I thought, Why can’t I be

president myself? Is it really the greatest achievement of a girl to

become somebody’s wife?

I became a feminist because Russian men refuse to give me a hand.

Russian men don’t shake hands with women. It bothered me. A guy from my

art collective liked to proclaim that women are not capable of making

art. “The only one who actually made real art was Leni Riefenstahl,” he

would add. That bothered me even more.

I came across Simone de Beauvoir when I was eighteen. “One is not born,

but, rather, becomes a woman,” she said. She actually gave me some hope.

I also was blessed to discover queer theory and gender as acting—with

Judith Butler’s help. At eighteen I realized what the main question of

my life was: How can we effectively redefine the norm? What makes you a

pirate, a nomad, or a rebel?

Misogyny stinks in big cities, but it starts to stink even more when you

find yourself in a small and nearly closed society like a village, a

tiny industrial town or prison. I learned that in prison you are obliged

to compete in beauty contests. If you don’t compete, you won’t be

paroled. Not competing in the “Miss Charming” contests means they will

write “does not have a proactive stance” in your personal dossier. I

boycotted the contest, so the prison decided I did not have a proactive

stance. Because I did not compete in the beauty contest, the court

refused to grant me parole.

The colony also decided that my friend who preferred to look androgynous

was not ready to be paroled because she kept performing at prison

concerts in low-heeled shoes. The way the colony saw it, performing

onstage in low-heeled shoes was too masculine. A woman should wear high

heels. My friend was granted parole only after she performed in high

heels and thus proved her loyalty to the feminine regimen.

“You could be stuck in prison for the next seven years,” my guards told

me. And they would taunt me. “You’re a beautiful young woman, but when

you get out you’ll be old, twenty-nine, nobody will want to fuck you.”

At its core, the word “bitch” is about power. It is said with awe, with

rage, and it is said about women who have looked at the world and

decided to get what they want. That is too often considered a bad thing.

Women are taught to put others first. So we are taking the word back.

I’m a proud whore and cunt. Throughout history, the women we labeled bad

were powerful, strong women. Look at witchcraft, look at witch hunting.

A bunch of people I’ve met, heterosexual men mostly, claim that they

don’t support feminism. But they barely ask themselves, “What is

feminism?” Their rejection is rooted in either fear or fantasy. Well,

let me give you another definition: “Feminism is a movement to end

sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.” I love this description

given by bell hooks.

Feminism is beneficial to men too. Feminism is beneficial to transgender

people. Feminism is beneficial.

Let me explain. If you’re a real man and you’re too tough to cry, to

grieve, or to love, you’re the one who loses. Feminism would help you

make peace with your feelings. It’s okay to feel. It’s called “life,” to

feel things.

Imagine: You’re a man, you live in Russia, and at eighteen, you have to

go into the army. They say that a real man has to shoot and fight. It’s

obligatory for men but not for women. When you were a kid, girls were

your equals on the playground. Institutions like the army deepen a

gender gap in your mind; the moment you come back after one year of

service, you’ve been successfully brainwashed and you don’t see women as

your comrades, mates, buddies, collaborators. As a real man you treat

women as another species, people who should be either (a) worshipped and

protected, or (b) oppressed and beaten. If you’re an eighteen-year-old

man who has to join the army, wouldn’t you rather join forces with women

and together demand that service be voluntary and you’re not a slave of

the state?

But it’s not just real men who need to be challenged. A lot of women

(mostly heterosexual) still believe that feminism is not needed. For

thousands of years our survival was based on our subordinated,

masochistic connection with a dominant culture, so it’s perfectly

understandable why it can be hard to break these bonds. Women feel

uneasy, and that’s why you have women who vote for misogynist douchebags

like Putin and Trump. That’s why you have women who are longing for a

strong hand. Sometimes it can be challenging to get rid of shackles, but

it’s worth it. It’s a good idea to bite the hand that feeds you. Once

you’re truly equal, you don’t need that hand anymore. No domination. You

eat together. You simply share food.

I know some women (mostly heterosexual) who still believe that our

primary task is to compete with each other over a partner. That we

should fight for a dick and not our rights. It’s so comforting for a

dominant culture! As long as we continue to think our survival depends

on men’s validation, it’s so easy to use us. It’s the old story: force a

group to lose their collective consciousness and sense of solidarity,

and then toy with them, use them, manipulate them. The belief that our

vital energy is based on men’s approval has its roots in history.

Indeed, there were times when women were totally dependent economically

on men. Those who were not were branded outcasts and witches, and had to

be burned. Time has changed a little bit.

The patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church wants to prohibit

abortions. Stalin banned abortions in 1936 to increase the birth rate, a

prohibition that remained until 1955. The USSR’s experience showed that

banning abortion increased not the birth rate but two other indicators:

the death rate of mothers from illegal abortions and the number of

infanticides.

Anna Kuznetsova, famous for supporting Putin and the telegony theory (a

belief that offspring can inherit characteristics from every sexual

partner a woman has had), was made Children’s Rights Commissioner in

2016. Children have so many feelings and emotions, and they are shy,

bashful, and unable to ask the right questions. They need a better

advocate than someone who believes vaginas have memories. Sexuality is a

powerful source of vigor and inspiration. Why suppress it, when you can

teach people to use it?

Female sexuality is about to be discovered and unchained. My case

studies have proved to me that there are a lot of men out there who

still have no clue what to do with a clitoris. If you want to fuck me

and don’t know the power of the clitoris, you suck. If I find out that

someone is too phallocentric in bed, I get up, put on my clothes, and

leave. Sometimes I recite a lecture on the false consciousness of

phallotheologocentrism while I’m puttin’ my clothes on.

Female individuals who explore their sexuality are stigmatized. Whore,

slut, hooker. You know what I’m talking about. I was convinced for a

long time that my ideas had priority and everything carnal was sinful. I

had to work hard to restore the connection between the body and the

consciousness. I keep on working. The quality of life improves

considerably after this connection is finally established.

A group of female rap artists in France recorded a song about licking

the clitoris. French YouTube banned the video. Male rappers from all

over the world ask us to suck their cocks, but this video contains

pornography? Why is the clitoris considered pornography and the penis is

not?

• *** the monster of obligatory perfection

When I was a teenager I realized the style of behavior I liked was far

from what passed for “feminine.” I tried to wear high heels. For six

months I tried, but like clockwork they wore down at a slant to the

middle, then fell off. I could not sit still and cultivate a smooth

bearing, as befits a young woman. I sang loudly in the hallways at

school and waddled like a goose.

I frankly couldn’t understand why I should emulate the behavior expected

of a young woman. I couldn’t understand what the benefits were. And if

there were no benefits, then why force myself? Because it was obvious

how dull it was to wiggle decorously along on high heels clutching a

handbag.

Every time I see a woman in high heels, I am filled with sympathy and

want to ask her whether she wants a piggyback ride. I admire men who

wear high heels, though. Despite the fact that tradition doesn’t oblige

them to do it, they still wear heels. They are my heroes. I like to

imagine they do it just to honor all the oppressed women in our history.

There is power in imperfection. Don’t try to be perfect all the

time—it’s actually boring.

This monster of obligatory perfection is a very real thing. It is not

just art that is overproduced; human beings are overproduced too.

Groomed. Tamed. If you want to know my feelings on that, overproduced

people don’t move me.

When we got out of prison, we understood quite fast that the power of

normalization is not a joke. The more active and vocal you become, the

greater this normalizing force gets. Don’t wear white tights under a

black skirt (or vice versa). Make your hair darker. You need to lose a

few pounds. Work on your voice, it’s too nasal. Don’t say “fuck” when

you’re onstage with Bill Clinton. Be more social. Why do you Russians

never smile? You can’t wear sneakers, wear heels. It scared the hell out

of me. I bought the lipstick, heels, hair straightener. But I still felt

that I wasn’t perfect enough. Honestly, I felt like shit. I tried not to

say “fuck” at Clinton’s event, but five minutes into my speech, I surely

did it.

But I wasn’t brought up in the woods to be scared by owls. The moment of

truth happened when they were applying the fifth layer of makeup on me

in the CNN studio. I thought that I don’t really need to look like a

corpse or a mannequin to talk about politics. I asked them to clean my

face.

I actually enjoy makeup. Sometimes. I would love to see more men wearing

it.

I don’t mind being called beautiful or even being beautiful. But I don’t

want to be too busy being beautiful. It’s not my thing.

I’m writing this book in English, and it’s humbling as hell. There are

times when I feel like a dog: I know something, but I can find no human

words to express it. It’s a failure, but a good one. I could have a

translator, or I could have a nice person to write this book instead of

me. Probably it would be a better book then. Sorry to say, but I stick

to the DIY principle. If I know that I can (theoretically) do something

by myself, I’ll do it. It makes my life path full of challenges, it’s

true. But that’s the way to not alienate your own life from yourself.

I find perfection in attempts, in moving forward, taking risks, and yep,

in failing. I would never have learned as much about my government, my

country, and the amazing people who’re living in it, and I would never

have the voice I have today, without the biggest apparent failure of my

life, my prison term.

When I was released from prison, I was confused.

I had to learn a lot of basic things again. How to cross the road. How

to use money. How to buy shampoo and not be distracted by the millions

of bottles on the shelves.

I met many people besides just new friends. I met those who offered me

$1,000 for an erotic photo shoot with Pussy Riot. The people trying to

hustle us assumed that a person who had just got out of prison must be

going through financial troubles. I was followed by political cops

fucking everywhere, my private phone conversations were leaked to

YouTube, and I was casually beaten by Cossacks and state vigilantes

every couple of weeks.

I also had to learn to maintain the clarity of thinking I had found in

prison.

I had discovered a previously unknown, strange and simple beauty in

living among outcasts and being an outcast myself. I had learned to see

clarity and honesty in being at the bottom of society but still having

the courage to smile. I realized that there is life in the darkest

circles of hell, circles that are normally and shamefully hidden from

the average citizen.

Nothing could be more breathtaking than seeing a gorgeous, blooming

creature growing proudly from rotten prison soil. It’s a pure

manifestation of the unstoppable life force. Women who refused to be

broken, women who chose joy, love, and laughter. I adored the grace with

which they undertook their everyday struggle with the misery, despair,

and death in a prison life.

The most precious thing you can have in prison is self-respect. That’s

pretty much everything you can allow yourself to own. You cannot own

clothes, food, or money. You cannot have knives, shields, or guns to

protect yourself. Your safety and happiness can be provided only by

self-respect. It’s dangerous to lose your self-respect, and if you lose

it once, you may never be able to pick it up off the floor. You have to

take care of your self-respect 24/7. Consistency in your beliefs,

behavior, and character is greatly appreciated. You cannot afford to

panic, to be indecisive. Your deeds should follow your words; otherwise

it’ll become known that you’re a cheap little liar, you’re weak and can

be easily attacked and hustled.

We had to go through normalization and sanitization when we came out. We

were expected to say one thing and not say another. Sometimes I would

feel like my newborn freedom was dissolving into the air.

In our everyday lives, we often expect that something from the outside

world, a magic pill or a new pair of shoes, can make us feel happier or

safer. Usually it’s an illusion. The key to happiness for me is the

dignity and self-respect I find in my work, whether I’m a prisoner

sewing my uniform quota or a free woman making art. It was hardly

possible to explain ideas about simplicity and clarity of life to most

of the people who surrounded us after our release.

If you’re honest with yourself, you don’t forsake the revelations that

you have found.

When Pussy Riot was speaking at Harvard, police arrested one man from

the audience for speaking his mind. His position was that Harvard should

not host public figures who openly supported Vladimir Putin, which

Harvard had done before.

We were supposed to go along with it. Instead, we canceled our upcoming

events, and rather than going to a fancy dinner, we went to the police

station and stayed there until the man was freed. The looks on their

faces! But how could they expect us to do anything different? The

dissonance seemed lost on them, their disappointment coupled with the

fact that they would never have cared about having dinner with us in the

first place if it were the fancy dinners we had chosen in the past.

• ** Deeds

• *** revolution is my girlfriend

Prison is sweet to me and no drudgery.

I don’t send letters to my husband on the outside.

He will never ever find out I love Maruska Belova.

DINA VIERNY, “LESBIAN WEDDING SONG”

To be fair, the time when you are in love in prison should not count as

part of your sentence, because prison stops being punishment. Everybody

knows this, so many prisoners look for someone to fall in love with.

Inspiration does not just happen, but you can pack your things in a

bundle and set out on your way in the hope of making discoveries, having

adventures, and finding treasures. If inspiration has come, give

yourself up to it. Live in such a way that your life could be a movie

plot.

Natasha is telling me excitedly about Nina, the number one dyke in our

camp. “So Nina comes up to me and she’s, like, ‘Wanna tumble?’”

I sit sewing opposite Natasha, who is talkative, svelte, and fast. She

is the quickest seamstress on the line. Everyone likes going with

Natasha to the baths, because she is thin but has large breasts, like in

a painting. Everyone stares in amazement.

“‘Tumble’?”

“Tumble, tumble. What, you don’t know what it means? She was inviting me

to the tool shack to have a fuck.”

“Ah, that Nina of yours is cool. But what, you turned her down?”

“I did.”

“What the fuck?” I said.

Nina takes two cigarettes from the pack, clamps both between her lips,

and lights them. She proffers one of the lighted cigarettes, keeping the

second for herself. She is wearing a gray down shawl. Because of her big

nose, she looks like a fledgling eagle when she wears it. The shawl is a

gift from one of the women in love with Nina.

Nina has been incarcerated for nine years. She was young when she was

sent down. In the camp, she became a boy. Talent, disposition, and an

education on the streets made her a tomboy, someone who climbs in and

out windows. She has black hair, a smoker’s husky voice, and long

eyelashes. She has legs, gracefulness, height, and a figure. And she

completely lacks feminine affectation. Instead, she has boyish,

aggressive desire and the ability to take what she wants.

Nina has a deliberately burly, wading gait, her head held high, her legs

spread wide as she walks. She wears her kerchief in the underworld

manner, tying the ends not in front, like little Alyonka on the famous

Russian chocolate bar wrapper, but in the back, like Jack Sparrow or

something.

Nina douses herself heavily with a simple men’s cologne. Perfume and

cologne are forbidden in prison because they contain alcohol, but you

can get hold of them for a large amount of money and by going through

trustworthy channels. It is harder than buying drugs on the outside.

It is nine in the evening. Night has fallen in the villages of Mordovia.

The cows have stopped mooing, and the horse-drawn carts loaded with

sauerkraut have stopped running.

Opposite us are the lit windows of the machine shop. Female prisoners

are sent there when they are severely lacking in physical intimacy.

“It’s time for you to go to the machine shop,” they say. Four dudes work

in the machine shop, all four of them alcoholics. For some women, a trip

to the machine shop has ended with their giving birth in the Mordovian

prison camp hospital in Barashevo.

It is deserted outside the sewing shops; there is not a soul in sight.

It is a time when you are not supposed to leave the shops. We have left.

We are strolling and smoking.

“Why do you open the door for me?” I dig into Nina when we exit the shop

into a wet March blizzard. “When did you first decide you would open the

door for women?”

“I don’t remember,” she shrugs.

The outcome of my discussions about gender with Nina are as paltry as if

you asked a man on the first date why the fuck he has brought you

flowers. He brought them just because. He could have not brought them.

Traditions are inexplicable.

Nina comes to life alongside me. Seducing women and falling in love with

them is the life she has found during her nine years in prison. And I am

thrilled and grateful to be learning her means of overcoming death and

boredom.

Beyond the colony’s flimsy, rotten wood fence are dark woods and swamp.

Nine years. Nine years behind a rotten fence.

But at that moment I am not bored behind this fence.

We are drinking instant coffee, the strongest instant coffee I have ever

drunk, coffee as potent as absinthe. I would later learn to drink such

coffee in the camp every morning. Nina treats me to chocolate bars,

while I pull a Snickers from my sock. I snuck it through the frisk at

the gate to the manufacturing zone.

“You learn quickly,” laughs Nina. She is bashful about her chipped teeth

and wants them replaced when she gets out. But I think the chipped teeth

contribute to her brassiness, and that is a good thing.

I speak very little: I am afraid of my own words. For conversing with

Nina, my words are excessively even and regular; they are educated

words. My language is like dead Latin compared with her temperamental

Italian. When she listens to me, Nina is ashamed of her own language,

which she imagines is simple and obscene. But I think there is much more

life in Nina’s language than in mine, more nuances and shades of

meaning. The decisive element is intonation. The same word spoken with a

different intonation can mean different things.

Vera, from the shop floor next door, comes to visit Nina. Vera is young

and feminine. She has thick, long brown hair, girlish manners, a slim

figure, and D-cup breasts. Vera sits down with a plastic cup of coffee

and gazes at Nina for hours. Vera will later tell me she has not

actually fallen in love with anyone during her six years in the colony,

but this is not true.

Nina doesn’t like dainty girls like Vera. She likes the kind of girls

you can get into trouble with. Nina sometimes has fast and furious sex

with Liza, a seasoned prisoner from another shop floor. Liza has curly

blond hair burned to red, a gruff voice, and one of the most brazen

gazes in the colony. When rumors of these encounters reach Nina’s steady

girlfriend, Katya, the head prisoner of my residential unit, there is an

explosion. Dishes, benches, and flowerpots go flying.

I have been summoned to the prison colony’s security department.

“You got magazines in the mail, but I am not handing them over.”

“Why not?”

“They promote homosexualism,” the female security officer snaps. She

scratches the word “faggots” on the rainbow-colored cover of my

magazine. “Tolokonnikova, are you aware that not only the theory but

also the practice of homosexualism has been banned in the colony?”

That’s how it all ended. For having a connection with me, Nina was

placed in a solitary confinement cell for two weeks. When she got out of

there, we did not speak anymore.

The dialectic of theory and practice.

• ** Heroes

• *** bell hooks

bell hooks is the godmother of postcolonial feminism. She started her

first book at nineteen when studying at Stanford on a scholarship from

her segregated Kentucky hometown. She has taught at the University of

California, Santa Cruz; Yale; Oberlin; and the City College of New York

and has written more than twenty books.

A pioneer of intersectional feminism, she started to use this term in

the 1980s, a long time before it became popular. In 1984, she dropped a

bomb, a book named feminist theory: from margin to center, in 1989

another: talking back: thinking feminist, thinking black. bell hooks is

one of the first to point out that the focus of feminism should not be

sex only, but rather the intersectionality of race, economics, and

gender.

In feminism is for everybody (2000) she writes, “Imagine living in a

world where we can all be who we are, a world of peace and possibility.

Feminist revolution alone will not create such a world; we need to end

racism, class elitism, imperialism.” In her 1985 feminist theory she

writes, “Most women active in feminist movement do not have radical

political perspectives and are unwilling to face these realities,

especially when they, as individuals, gain economic self-sufficiency

within the existing structure.”

I always thought that to be a decent artist you should master the fine

art of giving a name. Eloquent, precise, it should have the potential to

become commonplace without being commonplace. By giving names you learn

about economy of words.

hooks was born Gloria Watkins, and her pseudonym is a tribute to her

great-grandmother. She decided not to capitalize her name because she

wanted to focus on her work rather than her name, on her ideas rather

than her personality. hooks’s name is a perfect representation of her

writings: nonhierarchical, poetic, and explosive. Inclusiveness wins

over elitism; all letters are equal.

Look at the titles of hooks’s books. Aren’t they perfect poetry?

ain’t I a woman? black women and feminism (1981)

breaking bread: insurgent black intellectual life (1991, cowritten with

brother Cornel West)

feminism is for everybody: passionate politics (2000)

where we stand: class matters (2001)

we real cool: black men and masculinity (2004)

soul sister: women, friendship, and fulfillment (2007)

In 2000 hooks released all about love: new visions, and it’s fucking

striking. It somehow manages to combine class analysis, anthemic calls

for solidarity and compassion, psychotherapy, postcolonial feminism, the

high pleasure of serving others, and cries for sister- and brotherhood.

Praise of communal spirit goes hand in hand with longing for individual

freedoms.

Love is love without sexual interest. hooks uses psychiatrist M. Scott

Peck’s definition of love from his book The Road Less Traveled (1978).

Aware his definition might be inadequate, Peck says love is “the will to

extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s

spiritual growth.”

The personal is political, so hooks effortlessly jumps from questions of

sexual pleasure to analyzing the mechanism of radical political change.

Indeed, there are no successful mass people’s movements without sincere,

dangerous commitment to loving those around you and, thereby, a

readiness to sacrifice yourself for their sakes. Remember how Nina

Simone eulogized Martin Luther King Jr. in her song on his death? “King

of love is dead,” she says.

• * THE CLOSING STATEMENT: HOPE COMES FROM THE HOPELESS

At this stage of History, either one of two things is possible: either

the general population will take control of its own destiny and will

concern itself with community interests, guided by values of solidarity

and sympathy and concern for others; or, alternatively, there will be no

destiny for anyone to control.

NOAM CHOMSKY, MANUFACTURING CONSENT

<quote. You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution.

You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

URSULA K. LE GUIN, THE DISPOSSESSED

The stakes are as high as they could be. We may destroy ourselves and

destroy the planet. So we need thinking that goes beyond existing

boundaries. We need to question the status quo. We need political

imagination.

You can’t know the answer before you ask the question. And we should

make a collective effort to find the answer. As a matter of fact, nobody

can expect to have full knowledge about anything when you enter the

international waters of piracy. There can’t be unchangeable sets of

rules when you’re entering the unknown. What there should be is an

active and alive mind, a heart that’s in the right place, and good

intentions.

I made a vow to be open and understanding even to those who condemn me,

I promised myself to always give the benefit of the doubt before

judging. I don’t judge quickly because I know from experience what it

means to be a witch who has to be burned at the stake. I know how it

feels when you’re used as a scapegoat. It’s scary. There is no dialogue

when you’re an outcast. You’re dispossessed of your right to talk, to

think, to have joy or pain ... to live. You’re dehumanized, you’re

portrayed as an enemy, you’re an object among other objects.

I choose to be the Idiot, Dostoevsky’s character, who promised himself

that no matter what the circumstances he’d remain open, sympathetic,

kind to people around him. We’re all searching, always asking, and we

can never be perfect, we climb and we fall, we’re going through pain and

sometimes causing pain too. I may say, write, or do stupid things, not

knowing that it can hurt somebody. And I am sorry for that.

It’s okay with me if I sound childish. I prefer to try, to risk, and to

burn. I choose to live like a kid; kids are not afraid to admit that

they don’t know some things, and they have endless curiosity and

willingness to learn. When my daughter does something that hurts me, she

comes to me and says, “Give me a hug.”

Many of those who wanted to beat me or destroy me really just needed a

hug. I faced a mercenary who was hired by my government to physically

hurt me, and he did burn my eyes. I stood in front of him and kindly

asked, “Why did you choose to do that? It’s painful. It hurts. You hurt

my eyes. Why?” And then I saw a human behind his eyes, but he was

confused and did not have any coherent, human answer to the question.

All human beings want to believe they have dignity. If you answer

dehumanization with more dehumanization, it’ll be easy for your opponent

to ignore your words and feelings, stigmatize you, put you in prison,

take your life away.

It’s physically painful to see the hurricane of hatred, lies, and

hypocrisy that is politics right now. It’s normalized to deceive, to be

insincere and nontransparent. As long as you’re not caught, it’s fine.

And more often, they don’t care if they are caught.

I’m tired of doublethink. They’re petty liars, all those people who sit

in the White House and quote the Bible but never follow Christian

virtues of not judging, of simplicity and honesty.

We’re tired of lies. Truth really does have some kind of ontological,

existential superiority. That’s why so many people support Bernie

Sanders, who is making a moral political revolution by simply being a

politician who refused to sell his dignity, whose deeds follow his words

and who indeed serves the people, not corporations, friends, and his own

pocket. He does what a politician should do. Isn’t it pathological that

a politician who’s honestly and consistently doing his/her work is an

exception?

We need a miracle to get out of here. And miracles are real; they have

happened to me before. Unconditional love, for example, or solidarity,

or courageous collective action. Miracles always happen at the right

moment in the lives of those with a childlike faith in the triumph of

truth over falsehood, of those who believe in mutual aid and live in

keeping with the gift economy. You cannot buy the revolution, you can

only be the revolution.

Any corrupted power structure is built on lies. To quote Václav Havel,

“It works only as long as people are willing to live within the lie.”

It’s a choice that has to be made: do not live within the lie.

I’d like to leave you with some things that I may (or may not) have

learned from doing political artistic actions.

• I have learned: A combination of Zen, willpower, calmness, and

persistence.

Martial artists know everything about the power of this elixir. When

you’re fighting, you don’t want to be trapped by fear or rage, hiding

and escaping instead of calmly playing chess in the ring. You want to

win with your wits.

• I have learned: To feel good about others being mad at me.

You can hardly imagine how many people I irritate. Overall, it’s a good

sign for a (wo)man of political action when they call you a criminal or

an outcast.

It’s not just opponents who’ll be mad at you. When you knock on doors

and ask people to participate, some of them will tell you to go fuck

yourself. That’s fine. So go fuck yourself—it helps to relax and to get

your thoughts together and keep going.

• I have learned: To be grateful, to throw out those greedy expectations

about life and people around me.

Working with volunteers helps to develop an extremely useful attitude:

don’t expect that anybody has to do a favor for you or your cause. But

if they do, you’re genuinely happy. I’m amazed and thankful every single

time somebody decides to help with the cause I’m working on. It means

that they trust me and get inspiration from working with me. In itself,

it’s the biggest reward you can get. Sometimes you lose a battle, or an

action that you’ve been preparing for weeks is stopped, prevented by

police listening to your phones. Under those circumstances it’s hard not

to be angry or frustrated. But, hey, you met so many incredible generous

and loving humans while you were working on the action.

• I have learned: To give myself fully to the action I do.

Those who own the power and who use this power to screw us up are

watching us: they’re not going to give us even an inch if we don’t show

persistence.

• I have learned: I’m not ashamed of who I am.

If I seriously cared what everybody thinks about me, I would have

accomplished nothing. Today, you’ll be called a horny piece of

hysterical vagina. Tomorrow, they’ll devote to you a glossy ten-pound

magazine, where they say, “She dealt with body and sexuality issues.”

And then you will know that both things are equally dull.

I was told: don’t march in the rally under feminist banners—you’ll be

hated for that, because our country is not ready to understand feminism,

Russians think feminists are angry ladies who have not been fucked for

years and want to kill all men, blah, blah, blah. They said to Bernie

Sanders: don’t call yourself a socialist, rural America is allergic to

this word. But still, after generations of Cold War propaganda against

commies, Americans were about to vote for a socialist. You keep doing

what you do, and you let the world change its opinion of you.

If you are not proud of who you are, nobody will be.

• I have learned: I’m not trapped in thinking nobody cares about what I

do.

Get rid of the messiah complex. You cannot solve the world’s problems

alone. If you think so, you are Trump. Your activist effort is a unique

and important part of a global chain reaction and, ergo, it has to be

done. Or: think globally, act locally.

• I have learned: To reject political gaslighting.

Experts, economics magazines, think tanks, Ivy League colleges,

parliamentarians, Putin—they all politically gaslight us, try to

manipulate our thinking and persuade us we are wrong. They say that

everything is fine and we’re creating problems out of nothing. They want

you to feel that you’re not educated, you’re not aware enough to have an

opinion and act on it. Who knows the quality of people’s lives better

than the people themselves?

• I have learned: To be dumb.

Like Bernie Sanders says, if I were not dumb, I would have stopped my

political activity a long time ago. Because “there is no point, you will

never change it,” as they say. But I’m dumb, so I act.

All rules, including those on these pages, may be (and possibly should

be) thrown away. These rules should be treated as just another Pussy

Riot punk prayer, which I have performed to open myself up to a miracle,

a (failed) attempt at being a revolution. A rigid interpretation of any

rule or advice kills the spirit of freedom, and it’s the last thing that

should happen.

I believe we should follow what Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote at the end of

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:

6.54. My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone

who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he

has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak,

throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend

these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

Wittgenstein conceded that his own propositions are at some level

incorrect, but they could still be useful. I would endorse this idea

about any set of rules.

No matter how you perform your acts of civil disobedience—rallying,

occupying, painting, making music, or stealing and freeing animals from

the zoo—go do it, tear the fabric of submission to pieces.

And know this: if everyone who tweeted against Trump showed up on the

street and refused to leave until he left, Trump would be out of office

in a week. The powerless do have power.

AFTERWORD BY KIM GORDON

We are lucky to know you, Nadya. We should bond with you in order to

absorb through osmosis your experience living with a greedy,

power-hungry, authoritarian, narcissist type. Show us the lessons you

have learned growing up in your oppressive political climate so that we

may learn how to deal with ours, which every day becomes scarier and

more challenging in its potential. As you describe in the book, there is

a mirroring effect between our two nationalistic cultures. Trump wants

to be Putin. Putin wants to be more Putinesque. Your book is a

combination Girl Scout (this organization we have here in America to

breed nationalism and crafts, but also DIY) and how-to manual on

revolutionary actions. It is serious but has the playful feel of a

Mission: Impossible show, where the mission is heard on a tape recorder.

The voice says, “Should you choose to accept this mission ... This tape

will self-destruct in five seconds.” As you say at the end of the book,

essentially, don’t follow my rules—they are a way in or a way out. The

action is not an absolute; it is a beginning forward. And you quote

Wittgenstein:

6.54. My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone

who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he

has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak,

throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend

these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

Everyone is looking for the next cultural revolution. Hand in hand with

situationalism came punk, but one was born of hippie culture, the other

anti-hippie. People are always looking to music for this—music of the

’60s, punk, Nirvana (from the underbelly of indie)—but only if it is

taken up as a populist motion. Noise and experimental fringe music,

which are truly about freedom of expression, are not ever going to be

mainstream—or are they? It becomes a problem of art for art’s sake, or

is it an action against programmed songwriting? The point of your book

seems like, Stop waiting for something and make it happen. Stop

romanticizing about the past—it’s in the action, no matter how awkward

it is. Like sex, it sometimes feels awkward, but only if you think about

it that way.

AFTERWORD BY OLIVIA WILDE

When I was asked to play Julia in the stage adaptation of George

Orwell’s 1984, I struggled with how to flesh out a character who had

always seemed to me a frivolous floozy without any real commitment to

revolution. She wanted to fuck, drink coffee, and eat chocolate all the

time, which I naively misunderstood to mean she wasn’t as brave as

Orwell’s tragically self-sacrificial Winston. Of course, once I dived

deeper into the material and appreciated the depth of Julia’s rebellion,

I realized how wrong I was. I also realized who would be my main

inspiration for my performance: Nadya Tolokonnikova. Just like that,

Julia cracked open for me like an egg.

Nadya embodies the true rebel spirit with every fiber of her being.

Revolution is not an action. It’s a state of being. For 141 minutes a

night, eight times a week, I tapped into that way of existing. To know

that it was possible to live with such fierce independence is

exhilarating. It’s simply a choice. What would happen if we all chose

that path?

Pussy Riot, as a living, breathing piece of revolutionary art,

exemplifies a complete rejection of control. They have breathed life,

humor, color, and joy into the struggle for freedom. As Arundhati Roy

put it in War Talk, “Our strategy should be not only to confront empire,

but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock

it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy,

our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness—and our ability to tell our own

stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being

brainwashed to believe.” We forget our own ability to craft our reality.

Just as Orwell prophesized, by handing over control of our

consciousness, we have allowed ourselves to become our own oppressors.

Perhaps the most powerful thing we can do is to exist. To not let

ourselves be defeated, unpersoned, by surrendering to apathy or misery.

Of course Howard Zinn put it best when he wrote in “The Optimism of

Uncertainty,” “What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will

determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity

to do something.... The future is an infinite succession of presents,

and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all

that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.” Defiance as an

act of optimism. We must not give up on our own power to craft the

narrative, no matter what they do to us.

After six months of playing Julia on Broadway, I finally got to meet

Nadya when she came to see the show. That night, I felt her presence in

the audience, and it energized me to the point of tears. I felt my Julia

was suddenly not alone, particularly when I said the line, “I’m alive,

I’m real, I exist, right now. We defeat the Party with tiny, secret acts

of disobedience. Secret happiness.” I knew Nadya understood. I knew I

finally did too.

A PUSSY RIOT READING LIST

Alexander, Samuel, Ted Trainer, and Simon Ussher. The Simpler Way.

Simplicity Institute Report, 2012.

Alinsky, Saul. Reveille for Radicals. New York: Random House, 1969.

———. Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals. New

York: Random House, 1971.

Ball, Hugo. “Dada Manifesto.” July 14, 1916. Available at

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.

Barber, Stephen, ed. Pasolini: The Massacre Game: Terminal Film, Text,

Words, 1974–75. Sun Vision Press, 2013.

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 2012.

Berrigan, Daniel. The Nightmare of God: The Book of Revelation. Eugene,

OR: Wipf and Stock, 2009.

Black, Bob. The Abolition of Work and Other Essays. Port Townsend, WA:

Loompanics, 1986.

Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan Press, 1969.

Bujak, Zbigniew. Quoted in the introduction to “Václav Havel: The Power

of the Powerless,”

vaclavhavel.cz

.

Bukovsky, Vladimir. To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter. New York:

Viking, 1979.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.

New York: Routledge, 1990.

———. On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993.

———. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York:

Verso, 2004.

Chomsky, Noam. “Americanism.” Available at

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.

———. The Essential Chomsky. Edited by Anthony Arnove. New York: New

Press, 2008.

———. Language and Politics. New York: Black Rose Books, 1988.

Cone, James H. Black Theology and Black Power. New York: Harper & Row,

1969.

———. A Black Theology of Liberation. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott,

1970.

———. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011.

———. God of the Oppressed. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997.

Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press,

2003.

———. An Autobiography. New York: Random House, 1974.

———. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016.

———. Women, Race & Class. New York: Random House, 1981.

Debs, Eugene V. Labor and Freedom. St. Louis: Phil Wagner, 1916.

———. Walls and Bars. Chicago: Socialist Party of America, 1927.

De Kooning, Elaine. The Spirit of Abstract Expressionism: Selected

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Dickerman, Leah. Dada. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2005.

Diogenes Laërtius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers: Books 1–5. Loeb

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Harvard University Press, 1925.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Idiot. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa

Volokhonsky. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.

———. Letters and Reminiscences. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923.

———. Notes from a Dead House. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa

Volokhonsky. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.

Dworkin, Andrea. Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist

Militant. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

———. Intercourse. New York Basic Books, 2002.

———. Life and Death. New York: Free Press, 1997.

Einstein, Albert. Ideas and Opinions. New York: Crown, 1954.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Rev. ed. New York: Grove Press,

2008.

———. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963.

Figner, Vera. Memoires of a Revolutionist. DeKalb: Northern Illinois

University Press, 1991.

Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist

Revolution. New York: William Morrow, 1970.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New

York: Pantheon Books, 1978.

———. History of Madness. Edited by Jean Khalfa. New York: Routledge,

2006.

———. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of

Reason. New York: Random House, 1965.

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W. W. Norton, 1963.

———. The Second Stage. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981.

Fromm, Erich. The Art of Being. New York: Continuum, 1993.

———. The Art of Loving. New York: Continuum, 2000.

———. The Sane Society. New York: Holt, Reinhart & Winston, 1955.

Gorbanevskaya, Natalya. Red Square at Noon. New York: Holt, Reinhart &

Winston, 1971.

Goldman, Emma. Anarchism and Other Essays. New York: Mother Earth, 1910.

———. Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure. Alexandria: Library of

Alexandria, 2009. Kindle.

Goodman, Amy, and Denis Moynihan. “How the Media Iced Out Bernie Sanders

& Helped Donald Trump Win.” Democracy Now, December 1, 2016, available

at

www.democracynow.org

.

Havel, Václav. Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965–1990. New York:

Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.

———. The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Eastern

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Hedges, Chris. American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on

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———. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of

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———. Wages of Rebellion. New York: Nation Books, 2015.

———. War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. New York: PublicAffairs,

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Hedges, Chris, and Joe Sacco. Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt. New

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hooks, bell. ain’t i a woman: black women and feminism. Boston: South

End Press, 1981.

———. all about love: new visions. New York: William Morrow, 2000.

———. feminism is for everybody. Boston: South End Press, 2000.

———. feminist theory: from margin to center. Boston: South End Press,

1984.

———. soul sister: women, friendship, and fulfillment. Boston: South End

Press, 2006.

———. talking back: thinking feminist, thinking black. Boston: South End

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———. we real cool: black men and masculinity. New York: Routledge, 2004.

———. where we stand: class matters. New York: Routledge, 2000.

hooks, bell, and Cornel West. Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black

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Hugo, Victor. Les Misérables. Translated by Julie Rose. New York: Modern

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———. Ninety-Three. New Jersey: Paper Tiger, 2002.

Illich, Ivan. Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis, The Expropriation of

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Kaminskaya, Dina. Final Judgement: My Life as a Soviet Defense Attorney.

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Kesey, Ken: One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. New York: Viking, 1962.

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Kollontai, Aleksandra. The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated

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———. Selected Writings. New York: Norton, 1980.

Kropotkin, Peter. Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets. New York:

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Laing, R. D. The Divided Self. New York: Pantheon Books, 1962.

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———. The Politics of Experience. New York: Pantheon Books, 1968.

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———. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University

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———. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

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———. Our Revolution. New York: Thomas Dunne, 2016.

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———. Race Matters. Boston: Beacon, 1993.

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[[#calibre_link-75][About the Author

NADYA TOLOKONNIKOVA is an artist, political activist, and founding

member of Pussy Riot, the punk-rock art collective that garnered

international headlines, and support, after several members were sent to

jail following a performance in the Moscow Cathedral of Christ the

Savior. Tolokonnikova is the recipient of the LennonOno Grant for Peace

and is a corecipient of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought.

Following her release in 2013, she founded Zona Prava, a prisoners’

rights nongovernmental organization. Later, she started MediaZona, an

independent news service now partnered with The Guardian.