Russia, Pussy Riot and the Church

 It is clear that Russia is becoming more oppressive, undemocratic, corrupt and unwilling to allow open debate. It is driven by powerful elites which have Putin at their centre. The arrest and gaoling of Pussy Riot is just the latest example of a ruling elite that will suffer no alternative voices.

Of course it’s easy for us in the West to get into Russian bashing. Memories of the cold war, and simplistic readings of the Russian opposition to American interference in Syria make it easy to make Russia the bad guys yet again. It’s not like Russia is the only country where elites rule for their own benefit, and democracy is a well-orchestrated game.

What fascinates me about the Pussy Riot case is less the big picture of political oppression than the meaning that the members of the band gave to their actions. Five members of the band staged an action on the altar of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. For less than a minute, the women danced, singing “Our Lady, Chase Putin Out!” and crossing themselves. They were removed and arrested 10 days later and charged with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.”

What is clear from their statements in court is that these people were not attacking religion as such, nor trying to stir up religious hatred. They used this action to confront the way in which the Russian Orthodox Church had allowed itself to be part of the political strategy of Vladimir Putin and his re-election as President. They used punk rock, and a performance in an most unexpected space to challenge the way that space had been co-opted by Empire.

The head of the Russian Orthodox Church is Kirill Gundyayev, a former KGB colleague of Putin’s. The band members claim that Putin has used the Church, and this Cathedral to support his power. He has offered to return to the church some of the spiritual values and power it lost in Soviet times, to help it reclaim its history. During the Soviet era the Church was an oppositional culture, but under the new head of the Church now confronts the evils of contemporary culture and its desire for diversity and tolerance.

At least that is what band member Yekaterina Samutsevich claimed, and in terms of the point I want to make, that is what is important. To quote Ms Samutsevich, “In our performance we dared, without the Patriarch’s blessing, to unite the visual imagery of Orthodox culture with that of protest culture, thus suggesting that Orthodox culture belongs not only to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Patriarch, and Putin, but that it could also ally itself with civic religion and the spirit of protest in Russia” (speech to the Court at her trial).

I think what they did was a wonderful use of theatre to challenge the way the church allows itself to be co-opted by empire; to take the church’s own symbols and turn them back upon us for the sake of the world. And it did this in ways that speeches and reams of writing never could.

Anti-whaling protests and street theatre

A lot of years ago I read an interesting article that compared the life and work of Martin Luther King, jnr and Father Daniel Berrigan. King, of course, was famous for his fight against racism and his use of non-violent action, and his willingness to go to gaol in an attempt to change the system. Dan Berrigan was an active opponent of the American involvement in Vietnam and of the use of nuclear weapons. He, too, spent a lot of time in gaol as a result of his actions.

The article – which I can no longer put my fingers on – makes the point that King believed that the American system was basically OK, but that there were parts of it that needed change and individuals who needed to change. Essentially he saw sin as structural and personal, and took actions which he believed would change those parts and people that needed changing.

Berrigan, on the other hand, thought that the sin around war and nuclear weapons was not simply structural or individual, but went deep into the culture of the country. Changing a law or a part of the system or a few people was not going to change this culture. So he and his friends engaged in street theatre, in attempts to highlight the sheer craziness of things. They poured napalm – which was being dropped on Vietnam – on draft cards in an effort to show the absurdity of being charged for destroying cards when people where being burned in this way. They broke into nuclear defence facilities and painted peace slogans on bombs.

I was reminded of King and Berrigan this week when the three men in Western Australia boarded a Japanese whaling vessel. The moral outrage has been extraordinary, and the government has responded by (i) defending its failure to insist that international law is followed in regard to whaling with the usual excuse about how complex this issue is and how much needs to be done behind closed doors, (ii) working very quickly to get the men released so the issue moved from the front page of the papers, and (iii) speaking about the amount tax payers will need to pay for their return to Australia in order to get tax payer sympathy on the Government’s side.

I think we have a major clash of approaches. The government insists that, yes there are a few minor issues with whaling but if we play the game right changes can occur. I think that the three men confront us with Berrigan’s issue: is the failure to act a deeply cultural one about a game that stinks, and the only way to force change is a form of street theatre that shows the absurdity of what is going on.