Act & Punishment: The Pussy Riot Trials

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Act & Punishment: The Pussy Riot Trials

Postby admin » Tue Aug 07, 2018 2:17 am

Act & Punishment: The Pussy Riot Trials -– Illustrated Screenplay
produced, written and directed by Evgeny Mitta
© 2018 MVD Visual
Cleopatra Entertainment in Association with 2Plan2 and Paperworks Present "Act & Punishment" Mariya Alyokhina, Alexander Cheparukhin, Ekaterina Dyogot, Boris Groys
Music & Sound Design by Demian Kurcheko, Edited by Igor Malakhov, Cinematographer Vladimir Kanareykin, Alexander Kuznetsov, Igor Malakhov

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.




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[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] You know the situation well. You know there’s no one behind you. Not Berezovsky, nor Guelman, nor the U.S. State Department. That your action wasn’t ordered by anyone, that you act of your own accord, by intuition, that you write songs and texts with your own brain, no one does it for you. Whenever we wrote something longer than two paragraphs, people said it couldn’t be the girls, because they’re stupid, someone must be controlling them.

-- Act & Punishment: The Pussy Riot Trials, produced, written and directed by Evgeny Mitta


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After a decade of President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian rule in which civil society seemed to be comatose, a new protest movement is growing in Russia. Infuriated by electoral fraud and galloping corruption, the so-called “creative class” is fighting back by means of music, poetry, multi-media, and daring art performances. In this presentation, Artem Troitsky gave a firsthand account of the situation.

Artem Troitsky is the first, and best known, Russian rock journalist, author of Back in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia and Tusovka: Whatever Happened to the Soviet Underground Culture. He currently teaches in the Journalism Department of Moscow State University, hosts TV and radio shows (including on Ekho Moskvy), writes for Novaya gazeta, is a member of the board of Greenpeace Russia, and is a well-known blogger and opposition activist.

-- Enemies of the State: Pussy Riot and the New Russian Protest Rock, by National Endowment for Democracy, Part of IERES’ Behind the Headlines Series, Co-sponsored with the National Endowment for Democracy’s International Forum for Democratic Studies with Artem Troitsky, Moscow State University


She has been involved in environmental activism with Greenpeace Russia, opposing development projects in the Khimki Forest, and was a volunteer at the Children's Psychiatric Hospital in Moscow.

-- Maria Alyokhina, by Wikipedia


In December 2016, Maria Alyokhina and music producer Alexander Cheparukhin started a new project – Pussy Riot Theatre with Riot Days - a play based on Alyokhina's book Riot Days (published in UK in Summer 2017). There are 4 people on stage: 2 women and 2 men. Maria Alyokhina herself, Kyril Masheka - her main stage partner plus Nastya and Max of the music duo AWOTT (Asian Women On The Telephone). The project is produced by Alexander Cheparukhin and directed by Yury Muravitsky - one of the leading Russian theatre directors.

-- Pussy Riot Theatre, by Kulturfabrik


Alexander Cheparukhin, a music promoter and the founder of Greenwave Music (which has organized performances in Russia by Michael Nyman, Kraftwerk, Kronos Quartet, and others), recently shared a previously unreleased video interview from June 1990 with Boris Yeltsin in honor of what would have been the late president’s 87th birthday. An environmental activist at the time, Cheparukhin spoke to Yeltsin aboard a train car headed from Moscow to Riga. Austrian journalist Werner Kreutler was along for the ride. Just days earlier, Yeltsin had been elected to serve as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Meduza summarizes this new footage of Boris Yeltsin.

On Facebook, Alexander Cheparukhin described the interview in detail, writing about his ecological projects from the Perestroika period, which allowed him to start traveling abroad. During that time, he was also involved with a group that assisted sick children, and part of his work included bringing children with leukemia from Minsk to Europe for treatment. This is how he met the Austrian journalist Werner Kreutler. They began reporting on politics together and both became Boris Yeltsin “fanatics.”


-- ‘In the Politburo, they were ready to betray, besmirch, and defile’ Now you can watch a previously never-before-seen interview with Boris Yeltsin from June 1990, by Medusa Project


To live in harmony with Nature and with each other has always been, and remains, the eternal aspiration of Mankind. Today this aspiration is clouded by the threat of nuclear war and global ecological catastrophe, while the destruction of Nature and of cultural values is evoking ever-greater protest. Now the time has come for concrete, constructive action.

We, representatives of the Association of Soviet Esperanto-speakers, of the Union of Soviet Societies of Friendship and Cultural Ties with Foreign Countries, of the Association "Ecology & Peace,", of the Soviet Peace Committee, of the Soviet YCL, of the Geographical and Philosophical Societies of the USSR, of the All-Russian Society for Protecting Nature, of the Youth Environmental Council of Moscow State University, and of the Moscow Society of Explorers of Nature, propose to hold annually henceforth an International Green Wave of Voluntary Ecological Action -- beginning in April in honour of the first flight of Man into Space when, through the eyes of Yuri Gagarin, people saw for the first time our Planet as their common and only home, and ending on World Environment Day (5 June).

-- Appeal of the Initiators of "The Green Wave" of Voluntary Ecological Action, by Alexander Cheparukhin, Chairman


The largest environmental NGOs survived the 1990s, in many cases by relying on funding from foreign governments and foundations to continue their work; small grass-roots groups also persisted, working on local issues...

Within the broader environmental movement, environmental organizations tend to fall into three broad categories (Henry 2010). First, there are a limited number of “professional” environmental organizations, such as WWF and Greenpeace, which are based in Moscow or regional capitals. In the second category are grassroots environmental organizations... Finally, in the third category are a number of government-sponsored environmental NGOS that receive funding from state programs and that work closely with state agencies to help them achieve their goals....

Many environmental NGOs in Russia were able to operate in the post-Soviet period due to foreign funding for their work from governmental donors such as USAID, the UK’s DIFD, and private foundations. Larin and his co-authors describe environmentalists’ struggle to continue their work in the 1990s as state funding for nature protection declined and few domestic alternatives emerged (Larin et al. 2003). Foreign support influenced the development of the environmental movement. To survive, NGO representatives proposed projects on issues that interested foreign funders and environmentalists who had facility in foreign languages were more likely to successfully obtain grants. Contact with foreign partners offered the opportunity to exchange ideas as well as develop organizational capacity and new kinds of expertise. Globalization, Russia’s integration into global consumer society, and the country’s emerging role as a natural resource provider also changed the “master frames” of environmentalists (Yanitsky 2010, 191–194). This international orientation also may have increased the distance between environmentalists and average Russians, however....

The Putin administration offers rhetorical concessions to some environmental campaigns but largely resists environmentalists’ demands, in part by portraying activists as anti-Russian and by insinuating that environmental groups receiving funds from abroad do not work in Russia’s national interest. In recent years, the government has attempted to more directly regulate NGOs. Among environmental NGOs, groups such as EWNC, Baikal Wave, and Greenpeace, as well as a number of regional groups have had their offices inspected and their documents and computers confiscated. Criticism of NGOs receiving funding from abroad led to the 2012 Law on Foreign Agents, which requires that public organizations receiving foreign funding and engaging in “political activity” register as “foreign agents,” pay significant fines, or cease operating. In May 2015, the Ministry of Justice listed 127 NGOs on its foreign agent register, including at least 20 organizations with an explicitly environmental purpose (Ministry of Justice, Russian Federation n.d.). Technically, “the protection of flora and fauna” is excluded from the definition of political activity, but representatives of environmental groups have been cited for activities such as attending public meeting and making written appeals to the authorities. Given that the term “foreign agent” has the negative connotation of traitor or spy, most organizations have vowed that they would fight the designation in court. In July 2014, Moscow-based anti-nuclear organization Eco-Defense, which receives funding from the EU and several German foundations, was declared a foreign agent. Vladimir Slivyak, the leader of Eco-Defense, initiated a court case to have the decision overturned.

-- The state of environmental protection in the Russian Federation: a review of the post-Soviet era, by Joshua P. Newell & Laura A. Henry


As Olga Tsepilova left a political opposition rally in St. Petersburg, Russia, last April, a member of the special forces police squad descended upon her. With a full overhead swing, he cracked Tsepilova in the face with his nightstick, fracturing her nose and cheekbone, sending her to the hospital for a month.

Tsepilova, 49, a sociologist and senior research fellow at the Russian Academy of Sciences, has run afoul of state authority before. In 2004, she hoped to study the social consequences of pollution in Russia by focusing on two closed nuclear zones. One of them, the town of Ozyorsk in the southern Urals, is the site of the infamous Mayak nuclear facility. Now a nuclear-fuel reprocessing plant, Mayak suffered the Soviet Union's largest pre-Chernobyl nuclear accident, an explosion in 1957 that spread radiation over an area of 14,300 sq. mi. (23,000 sq km). Scientists say the area has never been adequately decontaminated....

The Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, noting that the U.S.'s National Endowment for Democracy provided some of Tsepilova's funding, labeled her research project a "spying scandal."....


Far from improving the situation at Mayak and other troubled sites, the Federal Atomic Energy Agency has been importing waste from foreign countries, turning nuclear sites in the Urals and elsewhere into what Greenpeace says are some of the world's largest nuclear dumps. To help lift the veil of nuclear secrecy that has persisted since the Soviet Union's disintegration, Tsepilova has joined the liberal opposition Yabloko party as head of its green wing, and is running in December's election for the Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament.

-- Olga Tsepilova, by Brett Forrest


We were accused of not having scored any victories in our campaign against the law-breaking pig producers. I had to explain that we have won victories, albeit small ones, and that in conditions of total corruption it would be pointless to expect quick and easy victories in the fight against dirty businessmen. That it would be much easier for me if in the district as a whole and in every village and farm we had active assistance. It is one thing when two or three witnesses come to a court hearing and testify that it stinks where they live, and quite another if hundreds of people would gather in the square outside the court and demand that Kievo-Zhuraki Agribusiness JSC stop poisoning people’s lives. Perhaps the judge, even if he or she had been “inspired” by their superiors, would find it much more difficult morally to hand down an unjust ruling.

And I also said that Kievo-Zhuraki Agribusiness JSC had stocked up on all sorts of certificates and evaluations approving their operations, and that was all the officials who inspected them needed to see. In reality, nobody had really inspected the pig producers and punished them....The regime despises the people, and the people despise this regime. They despise it and fear it. It is a vicious circle. To paraphrase the famous saying, every people deserves the regime it tolerates....

Why is Kievo-Zhuraki Agribusiness JSC planning to raise cows outside of Maykop while it breeds pigs in the Teuchezhsky District?... Because in practical terms, excuse my use of jargon, the Muslim population has been “punked,” meaning it has been humiliated to the point where people have lost their self-esteem. Humiliated people are easier to manage: you can wrap them round your little finger....The Holy Quran forbids the faithful from eating pork, except in cases when they are forced to eat it. But who or what has forced the Adyghe to breathe manure-polluted air and swim in ponds poisoned by sewage? Nothing but cowardice and a lack of self-esteem. How does living in filth differ from the consumption of pork? For, according to the Quran, the pig is considered a dirty animal, because it lives in filth. But the residents of the Teuchezhsky District also, as a matter of fact, live in filth. It turns out that the stench from Kievo-Zhuraki Agribusiness JSC’s pig farm poisons not only people’s bodies but also their souls.

People used to sing,

“No one will grant us deliverance,
No god, no tsar, no hero.
We will win our liberation,
With our very own hands.”


Now they sing completely different songs, songs tolerant of the powers that be and the shit they generously reward people for their obedience. And they themselves place their hope in God, fear the tsar, and hope a hero will save them. No hero will save you, my dear fellow countrymen, until you cease being afraid of tsars. And God will not help you until you roll up your sleeves. The Russians have a saying: “God helps those who help themselves.” And the great French thinker Voltaire argued that God helps those battalions that shoot best. So when are we going to start shooting better, villagers?

-- Silence of the Lambs, by Valery Brinich


Yesipyonok is convinced there are no statements in the article “The Silence of the Lambs” that could be construed as extremist or offensive.

“Rather than supporting Valery Brinikh in his fight to preserve a clean environment, the law enforcement authorities of the Republic of Adygea have organized his criminal prosecution by arbitrarily interpreting the laws, committing numerous procedural violations, and engaging in flagrant psychological pressure,” he wrote in a letter to the editors of Open Russia....

The Presidential Human Rights Council has announced it will be monitoring the Brinikh case. Council chair Mikhail Fedotov and Greenpeace Russia’s executive director Sergei Tsyplenkov studied the situation when they visited Adygea during a field meeting of the council in Krasnodar Territory from December 15 to 17.

-- “The silence of the lambs”: why the smell of manure must be endured, by Elena Borovskaya


German doctors say there is a "high plausibility" that a member of the Russian protest group Pussy Riot, who was taken ill in Russia last week, was poisoned.

Speaking at a press conference Tuesday, Dr. Kai-Uwe Eckardt of the Berlin Charite Hospital said that an external substance appears to have affected Pyotr Verzilov's nervous system.

Doctors have been unable to determine the nature of the substance or the source, he said, adding that while the activist remains in intensive care, his life is no longer in danger.

"The information we currently have... shows a high plausibility that poisoning has taken place here," Eckardt said. "To turn it around, so far we have no indication that there might be another explanation for his state."

The announcement adds weight to claims made by other Pussy Riot members on Thursday that Verzilov was poisoned in Russia. The Russian punk band -- known for obscuring their identities with colorful balaclava-style masks -- is an outspoken critic of the Putin government.

Speaking at a press conference Tuesday, Pussy Riot founding member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova said that Verzilov was probably the victim of an "assassination attempt," alleging that multiple law enforcement agencies in Russia have been "trying to find a way to get to Pyotr."...

Following treatment in Moscow, Verzilov flew into Berlin on Saturday, according to Germany's Cinema for Peace Foundation, a non-profit humanitarian group that has previously advocated for Pussy Riot and which organized the flight....

"The attack (last week) is regarded as revenge for appearing in the World Cup final to support human rights in Russia," said the Cinema for Peace Foundation in a statement Sunday.


-- Pussy Riot member Pyotr Verzilov was probably poisoned, German medics say, by Atika Shubert, Stephanie Halasz and Judith Vonberg


With his Berlin-based production company Star Entertainment Jaka Bizilj is the founder and since 2002 the largest financial sponsor of the global Cinema for Peace initiative, which has been reaching billions of people via media coverage and could collect more than 10 million USD for charity, confirmed by external audit. Since its inception in 2008 Jaka Bizilj also volunteers as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Cinema for Peace Foundation....

Jaka Bizilj is a member of the Clinton Global Initiative
and collaborates with and supports, among others, UNICEF, Unifem, Amnesty International, ONE, amfAR, Richard Gere's work for Tibet and the International Campaign for Tibet....

On the occasion of the 12 IAAF World Championships in Athletics in Berlin 2009 he launched together with Gerhard Janetzky the initiative "Sports for Peace". This was preceded in 2008 by a unilateral appeal in the International Herald Tribune on the occasion of the Olympic Games, signed by more than 100 world champions, Olympic champions and world record holders in order to remind China to live up to the Olympic ideals and universal human rights. The first “Sports for Peace” Awards were presented at the “Sports for Peace” inauguration 2009 to IOC Vice President Sergey Bubka, Laureus ambassador Dr. Edwin Moses and those players of the Iranian national football team, who wore green wristbands during their match against South Korea, thus expressing their solidarity with the freedom and democracy movement in Iran.

-- Jaka Bizilj, by Wikipedia


Clinton saw Yeltsin as a significant figure in Russian history, and he tried to convey that at various points. At a meeting in May 1998, Clinton said, “You know, Boris, we really are working with the stuff of history here. I’m convinced that 20 years from now, when the Russian economy is booming, people will look back and say we were right; we did the right things. I just hope you get all the credit you deserve while you’re still around, because you’ve done a terrific job of leading your country during one of the two or three most important moments in Russian history.”

-- Bill and Boris: A Window Into a Most Important Post-Cold War Relationship
by James Goldgeier: Memorandum of Conversation, “President Boris Yeltsin of Russia,” Birmingham, England, May 17, 1998


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[Elena Volkova, Cultural Critic] It is essential to remember that Pussy Riot continue traditions of the Occupy strategy, “Occupy Wall Street,” strategy of occupation of power-related spaces that should belong to the people. This space is charged with confrontation of people and power, and the blood that’s been shed for ages.

-- Act & Punishment: The Pussy Riot Trials, produced, written and directed by Evgeny Mitta


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"Pussy Riot" is a cover for "Riot."

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START THE PUSSY RIOT

Epistle I.

AWAKE! my C …. have all things beside,
To low ambition, and to Scottish pride:
Let us (since life can little more supply,
Than, just to fight a duel … and to die)
Expatiate, freely, upon Woman-kind;
And trace, the mighty errors of her mind;
Mark where her thousand weeds, promiscuous, shoot;
And, fearless, cultivate forbidden fruit:
Together, let us trace this ample field;
Try, what the open, what the covert yield;
The artful tricks, and pretty flights explore,
Of ev’ry coy, and every willing whore:

Eye, all her walks; shoot folly, as it flies;
Notice her actions, as to fight they rise:
Blame, where we must; but laugh, where e’er we can;
And shew, that Woman is the Foe of Man.
Of God above, or Woman here low,
What can we reason, but from what we know?
Of her, what see we but her station here,
From which to reason, or to which refer?
Through worlds unnumber’d though the God be known,
Woman’s acknowled’d only in our own.
Woman, presumptuous! would the reason find;
Why she is form’d so little, and so blind?
But let her first the harder reason guess,
Why she is form’d no blinder, and no less?

Ask of her mother, Earth, why oaks are made
Taller, or stronger, than the weeds they shade?
Woman respecting, what most wrong we call.
May, must be right, as relative to all.
That woman’s helpless, say not … heaven in fault;
Say rather … she’s as perfect as she aught:
Her knowledge, measured to her state and place,
Her time, a moment; and a point, her space.
Heav’n from us all conceals the book of fate,
Or who would wed the woman he must hate?
The girl thy passion dooms a lawful prey,
Had she thy reason, would she sing, and play?
Pleas’d to the last, she yields her virgin charms,
And hugs her dear destroyer in her arms.
Oh! blindness to the future, not to see
Her two worst enemies are, love and thee;
From whom to endless ruin she is sent,
Her fatal passion is her punishment,
Hope springs eternal in the female breast,
Women ne’er are, but always to be blest:
The girls uneasy and confin’d, will run
From dear mamma to us, to be undone.

Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutor’d mind,
With European taste all unrefin’d.
Who never saw or masquerade or play,
Nor shone at court on George’s natal day;
Yet simple nature to her hope has given,
In her dear tawny Lord, an humbler heav’n:
To be, contents her natural desire,
She asks no angel’s wing, no seraph’s fire;
But thinks, she has all blessings in her eye,
Her dusky lover in her company.
Go! wiser thou, and in thy nervous lines,
Where all the strength of composition shines,
Call imperfections to the face of day,
And d…. the needy players who work for pay:
Say, here they rant, and there too much they whine,
Heed not their fears, thy business is … to dine.

Ask, for what end the sparkling brilliants shine?
The woman … ever modest … cries, for mine;
For me the artist tries his utmost power,
And forms, from gems, the artificial flower;
Annual, for me, returning winter comes;
For me prepares ridottos, masks, and drums;
For me, joy gushes from a thousand springs;
And forty-shilling actors soar to Kings;

Chairmen to waft me, boys to light me rise,
And all the pit is wounded by my eyes.
But errs not nature from her kind intent,
When female minds, on mischief ever bent,
Delight to torture where they ought to please.
And yield their own to blast another’s ease?

“No, (tis reply’d) the females have no flaws.
“And too woman, act by gen’ral laws;
“Without exception do what ills they can;
“Their only aim to hurt, to injure mann.”
If the great end be human happiness,
And woman deviates … shall man to less?
As much that end a constant course requires,
Of showers and sunshine, as of their desires;
As much eternal springs and cloudless skies,
As woman, ever temperate, calm, and wise.
If plagues and earthquakes heav’ns design fulfill,
Why should not man o’er woman have his will?

Better for us, perhaps, it might appear,
Were you a mitre’d priest, and I a peer;
But trust me, C …, those, who better know,
Have long determin’d it shall not be so.
Thus all subsists by politics and strife,
And passions are the elements of life.
The gen’ral order, since the whole began,
Is not in woman, but is kept in man.

What would these girls? now upwards will they soar,
And little less than angels, would be more;
Now look around, and just as griev’d appear,
They are not mothers in their fifteenth year:
Made for their use, all creatures will they call;
Say, what their use, had they the powers of all?
Kind to the sex, in rich profusion kind,
Shape, beauty, wit, dame Nature as assign’d;
Shall she then only, whom a wit we call,
Be pleas’d with nothing, if not bless’d with all?
A woman’s bliss, could pride that blessing find,
Is, not to think or act beyond her kind.
No powers of body or of soul to share,
But what her nature and her state can bear,
Why have no women microscopic eyes?
For this plain reason … women are not flies.
Say, what their use, were finer optics giv’n,
To inspect a mite, not comprehend a heav’n?
Cease then, nor rudely let us seem to blame;
Our proper bliss is centred in the dame:
Let us submit, in this our humble sphere,
Content to be as blest as we can bear:
Safe in the hands of one all-charming wife,
Calm let us tread the rugged path of life;
And, spite of truth, in fair conviction’s spite,
Still let us say, and swear, that WOMAN’S RIGHT.


-- An Essay on Woman, in Three Epistles, by John Wilkes [Member of The Hellfire Club]


-- A Decade of Change: Profiles of USAID Assistance to Europe and Eurasia, by USAID
-- Russian Environmentalists Brand U.S. Green Party Putin "Accomplices", by Damien Sharkov
-- A U.S. Backed Military Junta in Egypt Was Always the Plan, by Patrick Henningsen
-- Anonymous Targets Iran, by Curt Hopkins
-- The Challenge Ahead in Eastern Ukraine, by Askold Krushelnycky
-- The Third Russian Revolution, by Harlan Ullman
-- Boris Berezovsky (businessman), by Wikipedia
-- Alexander Goldfarb (biologist), by Wikipedia
-- Boris Berezovsky finances revolutions and plots to overthrow Putin - but it's his newspaper antics that are really entertaining, by The Guardian
-- Boris Yeltsin presidential campaign, 1996, by Wikipedia
-- Godfather of the Kremlin? The Decline of Russia in the Age of Gangster Capitalism and Boris Berezovsky and the looting of Russia, by Paul Klebnikov
-- Marat Guelman, by Wikipedia
-- Russians Expose U.S.-U.K. Terror Role After School Massacre, Excerpt from 9/11 Synthetic Terror Made in USA, by Webster Griffin Tarpley [Chechens]
-- Semibankirschina [The Seven Bankers], by Wikipedia
-- Spinning Boris, by Wikipedia
-- Why Russia produces (and quashes) so much radical art, by Marat Guelman
-- Yanks to the Rescue: The Secret Story of How American Advisers Helped Yeltsin Winby Michael Kramer
-- Central and East European Law Initiative (CEELI): Country Strategies for the Rule of Law Program for Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia, Submitted to The U.S. Agency for International Development, by American Bar Association
-- Color Revolutions 101: The Making Of A Controlled Revolution, by Brandon Turbeville
-- The History And Science Of Color Revolutions, by Brandon Turbeville
-- How the National Endowment for Democracy Manufactures Regime Change Around the World, by Derek Royden
-- Is The Balkans the New Latin America? Bulgarian Paper Says "CIA Is Tutoring Serbian Group, OTPOR, OTPOR!", by Jared Israel
-- Libyan Scenario For Syria: Towards A US-NATO “Humanitarian Intervention” directed against Syria?, by Rick Rozoff
-- “Manufacturing Dissent”: The Anti-globalization Movement is Funded by the Corporate Elites. The People's Movement has been Hijacked, by Prof Michel Chossudovsky
-- Ten Years Ago: "Manufacturing Dissent" in Seattle, by Michel Chossudovsky
-- Michel Chossudovsky on the OWS Movement & The Libyan War, by Potent News
-- National Endowment for Democracy of US, by B. Raman
-- Occupy Wall Street and "The American Autumn": Is It a "Colored Revolution"?, by Michel Chossudovsky
-- Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention, and Hegemony , by William I. Robinson
-- Resolution on the Misuse of U.S. Government "Democracy Promotion" Initiatives: Undermining Progressive Governments and Movements in the Americas, by National Lawyers Guild International Committee
-- Revolution U, by Tina Rosenberg
-- Semper Fi: Occupy Marines Bringing Reinforcements to Occupy the Nation, by Stephen D. Foster, Jr.
-- Systemic Propaganda and the Branding of Nations in Central and Eastern Europe*, by Gerald Sussman
-- The Albert Einstein Institution: non-violence according to the CIA, by Thierry Meyssan
-- The Color Revolution Virus and Authoritarian Antidotes: Political Protest and Regime Counterattacks in Post-Communist Spaces, by Abel Polese and Donnacha O Beachain
-- The East Turned Upside Down: Carnival and Conspiracy in Ukraine, by Jesse Walker
-- The new Gladio in action? "Swarming Adolescents" and "Rebellious Hysteria," by Jonathan Mowat
-- The Protest Movement in Egypt: "Dictators" Do Not Dictate, They Obey Orders, by Michel Chossudovsky
-- The Revolution Business, Report by Patrick A. Hafner and Alexander Steinbach
-- The Tulip Revolution takes root, by Pepe Escobar
-- "To Be Partly Controlled by the CIA? That Doesn't Bother Me Much": Interview with Two Activists of the OTPOR Student Movement, by Gerard Mugemangango & Michel Collon
-- US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev, by Ian Traynor
-- U.S. Cash Is Lifeblood Of Dozens of NGOs, by Nabi Abdullaev
-- US military trained Georgian commandos, by Charles Clover and Demetri Sevastopulo
-- Washington Tries to Break BRICS – Rape of Brazil Begins, by F. William Engdahl
-- Washington’s New Imperial Strategy In Venezuela, by Chris Carlson
-- The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, directed by Sophie Fiennes -- Screenplay
-- The Unbearable Lightness of Slavoj Zizek's Communism: The Year of Dreaming Dangerously - Review, by Benjamin Kunkel
-- After Zizek's Talk of Communist Catastrophe: An Alternative Script, by Radical Eyes
-- Slavoj Zizek: Interview, by Sean O'Hagan
-- The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic, by Slavoj Zizek and John Milbank -- Nina Power Tires of Slavoj Zizek and His Monstrous Essays, by Nina Power
-- Beethoven and the Illuminati: How the Secret Order Influenced the Great Composer, by Jan Swafford
-- Right-Wing Sock Puppets Pretending to Be Liberals Assault Progressive Websites, by R.S. Janes
-- Gnosis in Cyberspace? Body, Mind and Progress in Posthumanism, by Oliver Krueger
-- Is Slavoj Zizek a Left-Fascist, by Alan Johnson
-- Akashic Records: The Book of Life, adapted from Edgard Cayce on the Akashic Records by Kevin J. Todeschi
-- Christian Mystery and Responsibility: Gnosticism in Derrida's The Gift of Death, by Peter Goldman
-- Noam Chomsky discusses Post-Modern "Theory" and "Philosophy" on LBBS, Z-Magazine's BB, 11/13/95
-- Slavoj Zizek on Occupy Wall Street
-- Occupy First; Demands Come Later; by Slavoj Zizek
-- Occupy Wall Street: What is To Be Done Next?, by Slavoj Zizek
-- The Dangerous Dreams of Slavoj Zizek, by Jerome Roos
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Re: Act & Punishment: The Pussy Riot Trials

Postby admin » Tue Aug 07, 2018 2:36 am

Part 1 of 6

Act & Punishment: The Pussy Riot Trials
copyright 2018 MVD Visual
Produced, written and directed by Evgeny Mitta

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[Newly Married Woman] That’s it. Let’s go indoors.

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Let’s go.

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[Female Judge Syrova] Tolokonnikova, please rise.
Identify yourself. Name, first name, patronymic.

[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna

[Female Judge Syrova] Date of birth

[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] 7/11/89

[Female Judge Syrova] Place of birth

[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] Norilsk

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[Female Judge Syrova] Citizenship

[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] Russia

[Female Judge Syrova] Alyokhina, please rise. Identify yourself.
Name, first name, patronymic.

[Alyokhina Maria Vladimorivna] Alyokhina Maria Vladimirovna.

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[Female Judge Syrova] Date of birth

[Alyokhina Maria Vladimorivna] 06/06/1988

[Female Judge Syrova] Place of birth

[Alyokhina Maria Vladimorivna] Moscow

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[Female Judge Syrova] Samutsevich, please rise. Identify yourself.
Please tell us your name, first name and patronymic

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[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna

[Female Judge Syrova] Date of birth

[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] 9th of August 1982

[Female Judge Syrova] Place of birth

[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] Moscow

[Female Judge Syrova] Citizenship

[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna]Russia Federation

Act & Punishment

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[Elena Volkova, Cultural Critic] Feodosia Prokopievna was born to a rich boyar family
that belonged to the small coterie close to the tsar.

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She was married off to a rather old man
Gleb Ivanovich Morozov when she was 17
and she was …
one of the most influential women

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at the court of Alexei Mikhailovich.

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[Ekaterina Degot, Art Curator] Often contemporary art is looked for not where it it’s at.

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Between museums and exhibitions there’s a whole field
with philosophers, theoreticians,
the same curators doing different projects
in other spaces,
urban performance artists.

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[Crowd] Putin is a thief!
Putin is a thief!

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Keep the line!

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[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] I met Nadya and Petya [Petr Pyotr Verzilov]

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at an exhibition of the Rodchenko school.
We had our end-of-semester exhibition
while they were looking for new activists.

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So they decided to drop by the Rodchenko school.

[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] Katya was at the commencement of the Rodchenko school.

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She dropped her past life altogether,
with a regular job, routine,
Friday and Saturday night clubbing.
She xed it all to go into art.
She spent her last cash to buy a photo camera
and shot several series.
She brought her works to the school and passed the test.

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[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] Of course we’d heard about them.
All students of the Rodchenko school

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would discuss their “Feast” action
in the subway dedicated to Prigov.

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[Petr Verzilov [Petr Pyotr Verzilov], artist, “Voyna” group] Prigov was one of the most significant figures
for the “Voina,” for all of us.

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He had this idea of doing something together
with the early “Voina,”
but a very tragic thing happened –

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he died several days after that.

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German doctors say there is a "high plausibility" that a member of the Russian protest group Pussy Riot, who was taken ill in Russia last week, was poisoned.

Speaking at a press conference Tuesday, Dr. Kai-Uwe Eckardt of the Berlin Charite Hospital said that an external substance appears to have affected Pyotr Verzilov's nervous system.

Doctors have been unable to determine the nature of the substance or the source, he said, adding that while the activist remains in intensive care, his life is no longer in danger.

"The information we currently have... shows a high plausibility that poisoning has taken place here," Eckardt said. "To turn it around, so far we have no indication that there might be another explanation for his state."

The announcement adds weight to claims made by other Pussy Riot members on Thursday that Verzilov was poisoned in Russia. The Russian punk band -- known for obscuring their identities with colorful balaclava-style masks -- is an outspoken critic of the Putin government.

Speaking at a press conference Tuesday, Pussy Riot founding member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova said that Verzilov was probably the victim of an "assassination attempt," alleging that multiple law enforcement agencies in Russia have been "trying to find a way to get to Pyotr."...

Following treatment in Moscow, Verzilov flew into Berlin on Saturday, according to Germany's Cinema for Peace Foundation, a non-profit humanitarian group that has previously advocated for Pussy Riot and which organized the flight....

"The attack (last week) is regarded as revenge for appearing in the World Cup final to support human rights in Russia," said the Cinema for Peace Foundation in a statement Sunday.


-- Pussy Riot member Pyotr Verzilov was probably poisoned, German medics say, by Atika Shubert, Stephanie Halasz and Judith Vonberg


With his Berlin-based production company Star Entertainment Jaka Bizilj is the founder and since 2002 the largest financial sponsor of the global Cinema for Peace initiative, which has been reaching billions of people via media coverage and could collect more than 10 million USD for charity, confirmed by external audit. Since its inception in 2008 Jaka Bizilj also volunteers as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Cinema for Peace Foundation....

Jaka Bizilj is a member of the Clinton Global Initiative
and collaborates with and supports, among others, UNICEF, Unifem, Amnesty International, ONE, amfAR, Richard Gere's work for Tibet and the International Campaign for Tibet....

On the occasion of the 12 IAAF World Championships in Athletics in Berlin 2009 he launched together with Gerhard Janetzky the initiative "Sports for Peace". This was preceded in 2008 by a unilateral appeal in the International Herald Tribune on the occasion of the Olympic Games, signed by more than 100 world champions, Olympic champions and world record holders in order to remind China to live up to the Olympic ideals and universal human rights. The first “Sports for Peace” Awards were presented at the “Sports for Peace” inauguration 2009 to IOC Vice President Sergey Bubka, Laureus ambassador Dr. Edwin Moses and those players of the Iranian national football team, who wore green wristbands during their match against South Korea, thus expressing their solidarity with the freedom and democracy movement in Iran.

-- Jaka Bizilj, by Wikipedia


[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] It was great that these people took the usual space
where people ride every day as a restaurant where you can
linger over drinks and food to commemorate
someone who’s just died.

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I liked their style,
it was obvious that they came very prepared,
they’d looked for those tables, they’d taken the measurements,

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They knew when it was best to enter,
what to do
if people wouldn’t do it …
I liked this thing about them. There was a lot of effort in it.

Hellfire Clubs in contemporary life: Phoenix Society

In 1781, Dashwood's nephew Joseph Alderson (an undergraduate at Brasenose College, Oxford) founded the Phoenix Society (later known as the Phoenix Common Room), but it was only in 1786 that the small gathering of friends asserted themselves as a recognised institution.[43] The Phoenix was established in honour of Sir Francis, who died in 1781, as a symbolic rising from the ashes of Dashwood's earlier institution. To this day, the dining society abides by many of its predecessor's tenets. Its motto uno avulso non deficit alter (when one is torn away another succeeds) is from the sixth book of Virgil's Aeneid and refers to the practice of establishing the continuity of the society through a process of constant renewal of its graduate and undergraduate members. The Phoenix Common Room's continuous history was reported in 1954 as a matter of note to the college.[44]

-- Hellfire Club, Wikipedia


The Liberalia (17 March) is the festival of Liber Pater and his consort Libera.[1] The Romans celebrated Liberalia with sacrifices, processions, ribald and gauche songs, and masks which were hung on trees.

This feast celebrates the maturation of young boys to manhood. Roman boys, usually at age 15 or 16, would remove the bulla praetexta, a hollow charm of gold or leather, which parents placed about the necks of children to ward off evil spirits.... The young men discarded the toga praetexta, which was probably derived from Etruscan dress and was decorated with a broad purple border and worn with the bulla, by boys and girls. The boys donned the clothing of adulthood, the pure white toga virilis, or "man's gown". The garment identified him as a citizen of Rome, making him an eligible voter.

The celebration on March 17 was meant to honor Liber Pater, an ancient god of fertility and wine (like Bacchus, the Roman version of the Greek god Dionysus). Liber Pater is also a vegetation god, responsible for protecting seed. Liber, again like Dionysus, had female priests although Liber's priests were older women. Wearing wreaths of ivy, the priestesses made special cakes, or libia, of oil and honey which passing devotees would have them sacrifice on their behalf. Over time this feast evolved and included the goddess Libera, Liber Pater's consort, and the feast divided so that Liber governed the male seed and Libera the female. Ovid in his almanac entry for the festival identifies Libera as the celestial manifestation of Ariadne.[2]

This ancient Italian ceremony was a "country" or rustic ceremony. The processional featured a large phallus which the devotees carried throughout the countryside to bring the blessing of fertility to the land and the people. The procession and the phallus were meant also to protect the crops from evil. At the end of the procession, a virtuous and respected matron placed a wreath upon the phallus.

-- Liberalia, by Wikipedia


In another recent stunt, the group hung a drawing of a huge phallus on a St. Petersburg drawbridge, the agency reports in the same article.

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-- Western media concealing facts about female rock band’s desecration of Russian cathedral, by Matthew Hoffman


The peasants set off
In a file, down the road,
Count the poles until thirty
And enter the forest,
And, silently counting
Each footstep, they measure
A verst as directed.
They find the smooth lawn
With the pine-trees upon it,
They dig all together
And soon reach the casket;
They open it—there lies
The magic white napkin!
They cry in a chorus,
"O napkin enchanted,
Give food to the peasants!"
Look, look! It's unfolding!
Two hands have come floating
From no one sees where;
Place a bucket of vodka,
A large pile of bread
On the magic white napkin,
And dwindle away.
"The cucumbers, tea,
And sour qwass—where are they then?"
At once they appear!
The peasants unloosen
Their waistbelts, and gather
Around the white napkin
To hold a great banquet.
In joy, they embrace
One another, and promise
That never again
Will they beat one another
Without sound reflection,
But settle their quarrels
In reason and honour
As God has commanded;
That nought shall persuade them
To turn their steps homewards
To kiss wives and children,
To see the old people,
Until they have settled
For once and forever
The subject of discord:
Until they've discovered
The man who, in Russia,
Is happy and free.

-- Who Can Be Happy and Free in Russia?, by Nicholas Nekrasov


Nekrassov is dead. But all over Russia young and old repeat and love his poetry, so full of tenderness and grief and pity for the Russian people and their endless woe. Quotations from the works of Nekrassov are as abundant and widely known in Russia as those from Shakespeare in England, and no work of his is so familiar and so widely quoted as the national epic, now presented to the English public, Who can be Happy in Russia?

-- Who Can Be Happy and Free in Russia?, by Nicholas Nekrasov


[Petr Verzilov [Petr Pyotr Verzilov], artist, “Voyna” group] We’ve always felt that actionism is an implementation

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of some conceptual and artistic energy
to some specific street space.

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[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] When I heard a performance of Prigov’s
“My uncle – high ideas inspire him …”
and when I saw his performance “My dear pussycat, say Russia,”
I realized this is where I should dig.

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[Dmitri Prigov] [To a cat] Let’s do it together: “Ru-ssia-a.”
Go on, say it: “Russia.”
Don’t be afraid, say Russia.
Say Russia.
It’s okay. Let’s say it together.

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Good.

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[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] I came to Moscow not only to make it
into the Philosophy department
but to become an apprentice of Prigov’s.

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[Petr Verzilov[Petr Pyotr Verzilov] , artist, “Voyna” group] My meeting Nadya was about art,

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as art was one of the triggers of our acquaintance.
I was amazed that a first-year co-ed from Norilsk

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knew Prigov, Rubinstein and others
totally unknown at the department of Philosophy
including the faculty.

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[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] First of all I’m a nerd,
I finished school with a golden medal

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and had I not been expelled from the Philosophy department
I would have finished with honours.
Philosophy is a permanent quest,
criticism including self-criticism.
Permanent adjustment of your own position and experimenting.

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The flash and circle is a political symbol used by several organisations. It was first used by the British Union of Fascists (BUF), and was adopted in 1935….Oswald Mosley's post-war group the Union Movement and his National Party of Europe initiative continued to use the flash….The American National Renaissance Party adopted the lightning bolt within a circle as their symbol, which superseded Madole's use of the swastika. It decorated their rostrum and was worn on their armbands….The insignia of Singapore's People's Action Party (PAP) is composed of a red flash struck through a smaller blue circle on a white background. The PAP insignia is claimed to represent "action within social/racial unity" with the white background representing purity in thought and deed. A similar logo was adopted by Blocco Studentesco, the youth wing of Italy's CasaPound movement in 2006. The group has been accused of fascist propaganda.

-- Flash and circle, by Wikipedia


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Relationship with the Suffragettes

In a January 2010 BBC documentary, Mother Was A Blackshirt, James Maw reported that in 1914 Norah Elam was placed in a Holloway Prison cell with Emmeline Pankhurst for her involvement with the Suffragette movement, and, in 1940, was returned to the same prison with Diana Mosley, this time for her involvement with the fascist movement. Another leading suffragette, Mary Richardson, became head of the women's section of the BUF.

Mary Sophia Allen OBE was a former branch leader of the West of England Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). At the outbreak of the First World War, she joined the Women Police Volunteers, becoming the WPV Commandant in 1920. She met Mosley at the January Club in April 1932, going on to speak at the club following her visit to Germany, "to learn the truth about of the position of German womanhood".

The BBC report described how Elam's fascist philosophy grew from her suffragette experiences, how the British fascist movement became largely driven by women, how they targeted young women from an early age, how the first British fascist movement was founded by a woman, and how the leading lights of the Suffragettes had, with Oswald Mosley, founded the BUF.

Mosley's electoral strategy had been to prepare for the election after 1935, and in 1936 he announced a list of BUF candidates for that election, with Elam nominated to stand for Northampton. Mosley accompanied Elam to Northampton to introduce her to her electorate at a meeting in the Town Hall. At that meeting Mosley announced that "he was glad indeed to have the opportunity of introducing the first candidate, and ... [thereby] killed for all time the suggestion that National Socialism proposed putting British women back into the home; this is simply not true. Mrs Elam [he went on] had fought in the past for women's suffrage ... and was a great example of the emancipation of women in Britain."

-- British Union of Fascists, by Wikipedia


[Petr Verzilov[Petr Pyotr Verzilov] , artist, “Voyna” group] Infatuation begins when you keep socializing with someone
and realize that feelings that come out of this socializing

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can't be compared with anything in this world.

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When you’re in love

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you feel that this is impossible with anyone else,

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whence grows and develops this feeling.

[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] Everything was decided once and for all when I saw his library.
And a map of Africa on the wall.
And when he said that he’d give me this library and he did …

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everything was cool.
For me, participation in the action in the Biological museum
was similar to those radical, hysterical, carnal practices.

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The Bacchanalia were Roman festivals of Bacchus, the Greco-Roman god of wine, freedom, intoxication and ecstasy. They were based on the Greek Dionysia and the Dionysian mysteries.

-- Bacchanalia, by Wikipedia


For me it’s something different.

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For me it was self-detraction of sorts,
humiliation, like crucifying myself.
Of course I didn’t want to do it at all.
It’s in my nature
to always feel guilty before culture, before people.
People are screwed. Putin had chosen his heir –
Dmitry Anatolievich Teddy Bear and no one could dispute that.
What we tried to do was explaining,
artistically, with hyperboles,

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what was being done to people when Teddy Bear ran for office.
In this rather shocking manner we drove it home



“sorry guys, you’re being fucked.”

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[Saumtsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] Nadya breaks the stereotype of a passive wife,
at times she’s more active than Petya.
It was very clear at some points especially when she spoke
at a meeting and people started poking fun at Petya.

[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] I was introduced as a wife,

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but I represent here both the feminist movement and LGBT
and I’m not happy being introduced as a wife …

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[Saumtsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] Can a family survive without home?

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It turns out that yes, it can.

[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] Gera is growing a very happy child.

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She’s very smart,

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she plays tennis, she dances,
she speaks English,
she plays piano,
and I think she’s happier than me.
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Re: Act & Punishment: The Pussy Riot Trials

Postby admin » Tue Aug 07, 2018 2:36 am

Part 2 of 6

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[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] I met Masha in 2008

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When “Voina” was at its height, what with the famous actions.

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We wanted to stage an action for Yerofeyev,
dedicated to the trial of the “Forbidden art,”
we lacked documenters and she agreed to do the job.
She somehow managed to break through to the first row

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and filmed from behind.

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[Alyokhina Maria Vladimorivna] Preparation for this action and everything they did,
the stuff I filmed,
interested me more than the people who were doing it
and only after a while

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I met them and found out we had a lot in common.

[Petr Verzilov, artist, “Voyna” group] She worked in different volunteer organizations,

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she worked with child patients,

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she’d go to orphanages, hospitals. [Red Cross?]

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She tried a lot of interesting practices with her son Phillip.

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Masha is a real big-time humanitarian.

]She has been involved in environmental activism with Greenpeace Russia, opposing development projects in the Khimki Forest, and was a volunteer at the Children's Psychiatric Hospital in Moscow.

-- Maria Alyokhina, by Wikipedia


In December 2016, Maria Alyokhina and music producer Alexander Cheparukhin started a new project – Pussy Riot Theatre with Riot Days - a play based on Alyokhina's book Riot Days (published in UK in Summer 2017).... The project is produced by Alexander Cheparukhin and directed by Yury Muravitsky - one of the leading Russian theatre directors.

-- Pussy Riot Theatre, by Kulturfabrik


Alexander Cheparukhin, a music promoter and the founder of Greenwave Music (which has organized performances in Russia by Michael Nyman, Kraftwerk, Kronos Quartet, and others), recently shared a previously unreleased video interview from June 1990 with Boris Yeltsin in honor of what would have been the late president’s 87th birthday. An environmental activist at the time, Cheparukhin spoke to Yeltsin aboard a train car headed from Moscow to Riga. Austrian journalist Werner Kreutler was along for the ride. Just days earlier, Yeltsin had been elected to serve as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Meduza summarizes this new footage of Boris Yeltsin.

On Facebook, Alexander Cheparukhin described the interview in detail, writing about his ecological projects from the Perestroika period, which allowed him to start traveling abroad. During that time, he was also involved with a group that assisted sick children, and part of his work included bringing children with leukemia from Minsk to Europe for treatment. This is how he met the Austrian journalist Werner Kreutler. They began reporting on politics together and both became Boris Yeltsin “fanatics.”


-- ‘In the Politburo, they were ready to betray, besmirch, and defile’ Now you can watch a previously never-before-seen interview with Boris Yeltsin from June 1990, by Medusa Project


To live in harmony with Nature and with each other has always been, and remains, the eternal aspiration of Mankind. Today this aspiration is clouded by the threat of nuclear war and global ecological catastrophe, while the destruction of Nature and of cultural values is evoking ever-greater protest. Now the time has come for concrete, constructive action.

We, representatives of the Association of Soviet Esperanto-speakers, of the Union of Soviet Societies of Friendship and Cultural Ties with Foreign Countries, of the Association "Ecology & Peace," of the Soviet Peace Committee, of the Soviet YCL, of the Geographical and Philosophical Societies of the USSR, of the All-Russian Society for Protecting Nature, of the Youth Environmental Council of Moscow State University, and of the Moscow Society of Explorers of Nature, propose to hold annually henceforth an International Green Wave of Voluntary Ecological Action -- beginning in April in honour of the first flight of Man into Space when, through the eyes of Yuri Gagarin, people saw for the first time our Planet as their common and only home, and ending on World Environment Day (5 June).

-- Appeal of the Initiators of "The Green Wave" of Voluntary Ecological Action, by Alexander Cheparukhin, Chairman


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[Alyokhina Maria Vladimorivna] I need life and I need direct action.
And when I realized that direct action
can be chosen as the main form,

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I made this choice.

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[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] I’d started socializing with Nadya
but it was hard as we only discussed actions.

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[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] I think it took me a year to discovery Katya.

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[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] Somehow we suddenly noticed each other. Don’t know why,
probably because the atmosphere in “Voina” was rather tense,
it must have been useful for our actions
but the atmosphere was saturated with machismo,

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while we two suffered most from it.

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“Ya too big for your boots, you’re just a pretty girl.”

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She was belittled only because

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she looked like a stereotypical advertising.

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There is a feminist point here.

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She became bothered by that, ‘cause you would never expect
such things especially on the territory of art.
This was the ground where we became friends

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and maybe it was there that a desire
to do something on our own

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began taking shape. Something altogether different.

[Alyokhina Maria Vladimorivna] Katya is a real feminist,

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this is the stuff she’s made of.
Sometimes it manifests itself very acutely.

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[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] You are given a role –

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politically, sexually, gender-wise,

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and if you act passively and do nothing about it,

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you’ll be just a doll playing the role.

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We didn’t have a clear-cut concept, nor a name,
then in 2011 it became more or less clear
that it would be an all-girl band with a feminist,
of course it would be an art and actionist group.

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[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] First we planned to kiss away policemen

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but all our men proved cowards

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and didn’t want to kiss policemen,

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so we started recruiting female activists

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that were ready to kiss policewomen.

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Preparation for the action took three months,

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it was then that we developed our concept of feminist action,

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by the end of 2011 we founded Pussy Riot.

Domestic violence can be described as the power misused by one adult in a relationship to control another. It is the establishment of control and fear in a relationship through violence and other forms of abuse. This violence can take the form of physical assault, psychological abuse, social abuse, financial abuse, or sexual assault. The frequency of the violence can be on and off, occasional or chronic.

“Domestic violence is not simply an argument. It is a pattern of coercive control that one person exercises over another. Abusers use physical and sexual violence, threats, emotional insults and economic deprivation as a way to dominate their victims and get their way”. (Susan Scheter, Visionary leader in the movement to end family violence)(3)

The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 says that any act, conduct, omission or commission that harms or injures or has the potential to harm or injure will be considered domestic violence by the law. Even a single act of omission or commission may constitute domestic violence - in other words, women do not have to suffer a prolonged period of abuse before taking recourse to law. The law covers children also.(4) Domestic violence is perpetrated by, and on, both men and women. However, most commonly, the victims are women, especially in our country….

Domestic violence against women is an age old phenomenon. Women were always considered weak, vulnerable and in a position to be exploited. Violence has long been accepted as something that happens to women. Cultural mores, religious practices, economic and political conditions may set the precedence for initiating and perpetuating domestic violence, but ultimately committing an act of violence is a choice that the individual makes out of a range of options. Although one cannot underestimate the importance of macro system-level forces (such as cultural and social norms) in the etiology of gender-based violence within any country, including India, individual-level variables (such as observing violence between one's parents while growing up, absent or rejecting father, delinquent peer associations) also play important roles in the development of such violence. The gender imbalance in domestic violence is partly related to differences in physical strength and size. Moreover, women are socialized into their gender roles in different societies throughout the world. In societies with a patriarchal power structure and with rigid gender roles, women are often poorly equipped to protect themselves if their partners become violent.

-- Addressing Domestic Violence Against Women: An Unfinished Agenda, by Ravneet Kaur and Suneela Garg


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[Alyokhina Maria Vladimorivna] I think, every woman who had a child in the Russian Federation
can come to feminism.
For this you don’t have
to learn the history of the feminist movement,
nor translate Judith Butler into Russian,
it only takes the first-hand experience
of the social policies of the Russian Federation.

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[Dusty Pink Masked Pussy Riot participant] We met at a New Year’s party,
both Nadya and Petya Verzilov.
I saw people who led a life totally different from mine,
with a different rhythm, goals
and understanding how one should live.

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[Green Masked Pussy Riot participant] They said, come take part in discussing an action,
so I came, I listened and I took part.

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[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] In 2007-2008, I was a photo documenter
of elections at the polls.

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Then we encountered fake polling stations,
one of them on the grounds of a psychiatric clinic.
Of course, it influence me a lot,
because I saw it all with my own eyes.
After that I chose the political art
that deals with these problems.

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Actionism uses real public spaces as a site,

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it’s like a canvas in the classical art,

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only the instrument is different.

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Real events, real life, become the instrument.

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[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] Actions are more democratic
as they can be perceived by a wider audience.

Some analysts believe a new form of fascism has formed that has disguised itself as democracy with relentless propaganda and continuous war. It is our responsibility to expose the lies of warmongers, to re-awaken popular movements, and to demand change.

-- The Rise of a "Democratic" Fascism, by John Pilger


Even in an epoch full of big lies like the late 20th century, it is ironic that the financiers of the Trilateral Commission should have chosen the name "Project Democracy" to denote their organized efforts to install a fascist, totalitarian regime in the United States and a fascist New Order around the world. It is ironic that so many of the operatives engaged, in the name of "democracy" in this insidious, creeping coup d'état against the United States Constitution should be first- and second-generation followers of the Soviet Russian universal fascist, Nikolai Bukharin. It is ironic that Israel, the country in the modern world singled out more than any other by Project Democracy as a model of the triumph of democratic values, should turn out to be a corporate state with marked similarities to Mussolini's Italy.

Though ironic, all these propositions are indeed true. Project Democracy is fascist, designed to culminate in the imposition of fascist institutions on the United States, institutions that combine the distilled essence of the Nazi Behemoth and the Bolshevik Leviathan. Project Democracy is high treason, a conspiracy for the overthrow of the Constitution. An organization whose stock in trade is the destabilization and the putsch in so many countries around the world can hardly be expected to halt its operations as it returns to the U.S. border. For Project Democracy, it can happen here, it will happen here.

The greatest obstacle to understanding the monstrous purpose that lurks behind Project Democracy's bland and edifying label is the continued ignorance on the part of the American public of the real nature of 20th-century totalitarian regimes. Despite the fact that Stalin deliberately helped bring Hitler and the Nazis to power, despite the Nazi-Communist alliance of 1939-41 under the Hitler-Stalin Pact, despite Mussolini's close ties to Moscow, despite the deep affinity between Nazi-fascists and communists demonstrated repeatedly in many countries by mass exchanges of membership between political organizations of the two persuasions, the average American still sees communism and Nazism-fascism as polar opposites. The expression "fascist" exists only as a strongly derogatory but very vague epithet, empty of any precise political content.

In reality, Bolshevism and fascism, Bukharin and D'Annunzio, are products of the Capri School, Siamese twins conceived in the Isle of Capri's Grotto of Matromania by Venetian and Benedictine cultural-political gamemasters. This can be shown by briefly examining Nazi-communist ideology and economics. But in addition to ideology and economics, there exist specifically Nazi-communist, totalitarian institutional forms which can be objectively identified. A review of the institutions of the corporate state as exemplified by D'Annunzio, Mussolini, and Bukharin is an excellent preparation for recognizing the corporate state in present-day Israel, and for discerning the outlines of the ongoing Trilateral-Project Democracy fascist transformation of the United States.

Nazi-communism is 20th-century totalitarianism. Although some writers attempt to trace the origins of totalitarianism to models of the Protestant Reformation or the French Jacobins, the search for the roots of totalitarian regimes takes us totally outside of the confines of Western, Augustinian civilization, outside of the world of Latin Christendom. The model from which Western totalitarianism derives is to be found in the separate, Byzantine-Orthodox civilization of Eastern Europe. Byzantine-Orthodox civilization has been not just autocratic and militaristic, but specifically totalitarian also, since no later than the reign of the Emperor Diocletian in the second century A.D. Although Hannah Arendt and her school never recognized it, Soviet communism is only the form of totalitarian rule associated with the Bolshevik dynasties of the Russian Empire.

"Totalitarianism" is much more than just a dictatorship or authoritarian state. The totalitarian state seeks to dictate the behavior of its inmates down to the most minute detail, and creates for this purpose institutions that will allow that total surveillance and total control. In Byzantine-Orthodox civilization and in the Western totalitarianism copied from it, all departments of human endeavor, including economics, religion, sports, marriage, and even thinking are conceived of as departments of the state. Appropriate institutions are required to mediate totalitarian control in each of these areas….

As will be shown later, the National Endowment for Democracy is not only corporatist, but its board of directors is intended to function as a kind of informal Grand Council of Fascism in the totalitarian one-party state that Project Democracy seeks to create in the United States.

-- Project Democracy's Program: The Fascist Corporate State, by Webster Griffin Tarpley


When I was in prison I realized that to a large extent
this philosophy of action is clearer to people
than some treatises that people are just afraid of.
They see there “too many letters,”
they lack the time for that,
while I’m no snob
like they have to get it and they’re stupid if they don’t,
they are just busy doing something else.
This was a call for immediacy,
to critically comprehend our present life,
to put questions, to think over what’s on the agenda today.
So naturally we came to political criticism.

[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] I remember how Nadya and I wanted to do something,
give something a thought and we had nowhere to do it

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so we went to my place.

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Like I’m eating my soup and a cockroach on the ceiling

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has my bowl in his sight.
Nadya said, “it’s cool,

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I’ve never been in a place like this.”

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Of course it was a punk joke.
Punk contains a pure, sincere protest.

Nothing so true as Pope, long since, let fall,
“Most Women have no characters at all”;
How many pictures of one nymph we view!
All bow unlike each other … all bow true!
See Sin in state majestically drunk;
Proud as a Peeress, prouder as a punk;
Chaste to her husband, frank to all beside,
A teeming mistress, but a barren bride;
In whose mad brain the mix’d ideas roll,
Of Tallboy’s breeches, and of Caesar’s soul.
Who, spite of delicacy, stoops at once,
And makes her hearty meal upon a dunce.
In Men we various ruling passions find,
In Women … two alone divide the mind;
Those only fixed, they, first or last, obey,
The love of pleasure, and the love of sway.

-- An Essay on Woman, In Three Epistles, by John Wilkes


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[Taisiya Krugovikh, artist] The group was announced
in the “Late Autumn” forum where Katya and Nadya

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gave lectures on feminism.

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[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] [5 bored males in attendance; no women] Art feminism has been a most outstanding art trend
and helped gender equality a lot in all Western countries.

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In the 1970s and 1980s Europe and the U.S.
saw a number of new punk rock bands performing rousing

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and occasionally aggressive songs about women’s revolution,
feminists pogroms and oppression of sexists.

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[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] The idea of anonymity is very attractive of course,
we had it in our minds,

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those black balaclavas seemed too scary,

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people would think it’s some special task force.

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We needed something more colourful,

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more cheerful and positive.

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[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] I don’t really go into art thinking. I care about politics.
For me, art is just a method.

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[Taisiya Krugovikh, artist] Then they put some terrible music on
and said it was a Russian punk group
of the feminist kind “Pussy Riot.”

[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] We are really respectful of feminism

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but naturally we’d take piss out of it too.
Irony is a cool thing that helps you grow.

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[Dusty Pink Masked Pussy Riot participant 1] The first song Nadya put on was called “Rotten Socks.”

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[Music] You’re sick of clingy socks …

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[Man] Moscow without faggots!

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[Music & Fake Conflict with protester and cops] That rotten grub in dirty dishes,

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over-roasted chicken and cleaning the floors –
your mother lives in prison.
You’re never free.

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Life in hell, male dominance –
go out in the streets and liberate women.

[Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev] I think it the congress should support the candidacy

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of the chairman of the party, Vladimir Putin
for the office of the president of the country.

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[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] In October we saw Medvedev’s statement
that soon we’d have a new president.
His name being Vladimir Putin.
We were all scandalized,
I remember the uproar in the society,
in the opposition circles, and we realized that we must act.

[Yellow [Pretending to be pregnant], Green & Hot Pink Masked Pussy Riot participants ] [Singing] Voters are stuffed in school classes,
in sultry rooms booths rot,
it ranks of sweat and control,
floors are swept, stability is at hand,
set block-stone pavement free.

[Dusty Pink Masked Pussy Riot participant 1] We had a pre-recorded scratch track
and we rehearsed some actions to it second by second,
everyone had her dance routine.

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Some other tricks, too – confetti,
pillows with feathers flying out of them, fire extinguishers …
People are striving to make out the lyrics, some are smiling,

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while some are standing still and calm, as if waiting,
naturally these were secret police officers.

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The federal government has significantly expanded undercover operations in recent years, with officers from at least 40 agencies posing as business people, welfare recipients, political protesters and even doctors or ministers to ferret out wrongdoing, records and interviews show.

At the Supreme Court, small teams of undercover officers dress as students at large demonstrations outside the courthouse and join the protests to look for suspicious activity, according to officials familiar with the practice.

At the Internal Revenue Service, dozens of undercover agents chase suspected tax evaders worldwide, by posing as tax preparers, accountants drug dealers or yacht buyers and more, court records show.

At the Agriculture Department, more than 100 undercover agents pose as food stamp recipients at thousands of neighborhood stores to spot suspicious vendors and fraud, officials said.

Undercover work, inherently invasive and sometimes dangerous, was once largely the domain of the F.B.I. and a few other law enforcement agencies at the federal level. But outside public view, changes in policies and tactics over the last decade have resulted in undercover teams run by agencies in virtually every corner of the federal government, according to officials, former agents and documents

-- More Federal Agencies Are Using Undercover Operations, by Eric Lichtblau and William M. Arkin


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[Singing] A feminist whip is good for Russia

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[Dusty Pink Masked Pussy Riot participant 1] There was a lot of police,
at my first performance I had a bunch of candies,
so I poured them on the police,

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I was quick to come down in my mask, my sarafan
and my coloured stockings. The locoman stopped the train,
I hid behind one old lady.
She turned around
and started screaming, “Here she is! Catch her!”
A cop burst in,
with him was a man all dressed in black.
He was clearly into martial arts – there was nothing I could do.

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I did spit though in the face of the old lady who shopped me.

According to Yorktown police, the mother was driving with her newborn infant in the car around 2:30 p.m. Wednesday when she noticed a car tailgating her near Nebo Road and Kilgore Avenue.

While they were stopped at the intersection, a passenger got out of the vehicle and spit in the mother’s face. That woman [was] identified as 26-year-old Kinsey Robinson….

Robinson was arrested Friday on preliminary charges of battery by bodily waste

-- Social media tips lead to arrest of woman accused of spitting on mother during Yorktown road rage incident, by Fox 59


[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] Interestingly the first remarks and comments

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were like, “Oh, you silly girls.”

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[Ekaterina Degot, Art Curator] The fact that they sang on the top of a trolley bus
is a very important symbol, too.
Like they are a part of the masses.

[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] You asked somebody
for an amplifier, somebody else – for a guitar.

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A dress, a hat.
As a rule, such things are performed on no budget.

[Alyokhina Maria Vladimorivna] We bought some semi-broken wires at a flea market.
Some mics, some combos from God knows where,

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and suddenly they start producing sound.
I was always impressed how Katya worked at these rehearsals.
Magically, all this equipment started to function,
all thanks to her.

[Green Masked Pussy Riot participant 2] Nadya and Katya wanted songs
to be as close as possible to punk clichés.

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Fast, loud and howling.

[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] Our next job was “Kropotkin vodka.”
We decided to tackle a more complicated topic,

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Putin’s glamour,
a new phenomenon of the Noughties,
elite consumption closely linked to the power elite.

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[Singing] Occupy the city with a frying pan,

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go out with a Hoover, reach an orgasm,
seduce battalions of police girls …

[Green Masked Pussy Riot participant 2] It all looked very interesting in the documentation,

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like it was some fire-show, like a Rammstein gig.
Finally we got caught, but kind of forgiven.

The German hard rock band Rammstein are often accused of flirting, playing with the Nazi militaristic iconography. But if one observes closely their show, one can see very nicely what they are doing, exemplarily in one of their best known songs “Reise, Reise.”

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The minimal elements of the Nazi ideology enacted by Rammstein are something like pure elements of libidinal investment. Enjoyment has to be, as it were, condensed in some minimal tics, gestures, which do not have any precise ideological meaning. What Rammstein does is it liberates these elements from their Nazi articulations. It allows us to enjoy them in their pre-ideological state. The way to fight Nazism is to enjoy these elements, ridiculous as they may appear, by suspending the Nazi horizon of meaning. This way you undermine Nazism from within.

So how does nonetheless ideology do this? How does it articulate pre-ideological elements? These elements can also be seen as a kind of a bribe. The way ideology pays us to seduce us into its edifice. These bribes can be purely libidinal bribes, all those tics which are condensed enjoyment. Or they can be explicit discursive elements, like notions of solidarity, uh, of collective discipline, struggle for one’s destiny and so on and so on. All these in itself are free-floating elements which open themselves to different ideological fields.

-- The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, directed by Sophie Fiennes


[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] When we performed in the subway,

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after every show we’d spend from two to ten hours in a precinct.
We had a high personnel turnover.
People would come to us attracted to the ideas,
they wanted to try it for real,
but after some time in a precinct
they’d leave us forever.
Every time we told we were poor actors
who tried to take to the stage
in Kirill Serebrennikov’s theatre
but failed, he didn’t accept us, he said we were too shy.
Nobody would give us a job, we needed some practice
so we thought we’d try it out in public places.
So we’d overcome our stage fright
and join Serebrennikov’s company in the next season.

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[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] After one meeting, people flocked
to the centre towards Red Square.
The administration panicked,

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now there was a lot of special police forces in the city.
We saw people being detained,
a lot ended up in detention rooms
and we decided to take part in it,
hence the idea of performing before the inmates.

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[Singing] The gay science of occupying squares,
the will to power without those fucking leaders,
direct action is the future of humankind …

[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] We decided to perform on the roof
in front of the cells, so the inmates could see us.

[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] We thought we’d be caught, but strangely, nothing happened.
We still don’t know why.

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Plain-clothes officers filmed us and drove away.

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[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] The Kremlin is the official symbol of power.
For all. But I’m not emotional about it.
In Russia, there was this tradition of holy fools
who broke the rules, and behaved odd.

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[Elena Volkova, Cultural Critic] A holy fool has a goal and a mission.

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Like that of the biblical prophets
it’s to expose and warn.
A holy fool exposes human vices, primarily of the clergy.
It’s a sacred sacrilege, a sacred challenge
to highlight some important issues
in the spiritual life of the church.
A holy fool is a hero, the voice of people, voice of God.
So Russian holy fools would often expose the tsar.
When Ivan the Terrible made for Pskov
he was met by a holy fool Nicholas Salos
holding a piece of raw meat.
Instead of bread and salt.
When Ivan the Terrible saw raw meat he was indignant.
I don’t eat meat for the Lent.

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Nicholas Salos replied: “You eat the flesh of your people.”
There was a lot of outrage

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when Ter-Oganyan broke ikons in the Manege.
But it replicated the action of Basil Fool for Christ
who broke an ikon with a stone.
Why did he do that?

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Because behind the image of the Virgin he saw Satan.
What did he imply?

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That behind the façade of hypocrisy, decorum and beauty
hid worshipping of the demonic,

that the church and the laymen thought they prayed to God
but were actually leading a life that could only worship Satan.

Legends of Black Masses and Satan or demon worship have subsequently become attached to the club, beginning in the late Nineteenth Century. Rumours saw female "guests" (a euphemism for prostitutes) referred to as "Nuns". Dashwood's Club meetings often included mock rituals, items of a pornographic nature, much drinking, wenching and banqueting.

-- Hellfire Club, Wikipedia


[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] In this respect this territory is rich with symbols,

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this place had more than once been used by artists
for their statements.
As it was done by Moscow actionism.

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[Banner reads: AGAINST EVERYONE]

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[Anatoly Osmolovsky, Artist] 1991, April 18th,
We lay out a universally known swear word on Red Square.

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It was a spontaneous outrage
of what was going on in the country.

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[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] Red Square is one of the most guarded sites in our country.
It was a strange view: people walking with guitars
and travel backpacks.
Going there and definitely not to drop a coin.
Then they came closer.
One federal security officer even got inside the circle.
But he was just standing there, nothing he could do,
we’d already climbed up there
and they were scared of messing with us.
We only thought that since it looked
like an occupation of Red Square,

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we should come up with a symbol to substitute the power.
Naturally, there’s a lack of feminism.
This is what Putin hates most.
He’s one of the main sexist machos in Europe.

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Naturally, the name of the song is, “Putin got scared.”

[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] [Singing] A rebellious column moves toward the Kremlin,
windows explode in FSB offices.

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Bitches piss behind the red walls,

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Riot declares system’s abortion.

18 U.S. Code § 2102

(a) As used in this chapter, the term “riot” means a public disturbance involving (1) an act or acts of violence by one or more persons part of an assemblage of three or more persons, which act or acts shall constitute a clear and present danger of, or shall result in, damage or injury to the property of any other person or to the person of any other individual or (2) a threat or threats of the commission of an act or acts of violence by one or more persons part of an assemblage of three or more persons having, individually or collectively, the ability of immediate execution of such threat or threats, where the performance of the threatened act or acts of violence would constitute a clear and present danger of, or would result in, damage or injury to the property of any other person or to the person of any other individual.

(b) As used in this chapter, the term “to incite a riot”, or “to organize, promote, encourage, participate in, or carry on a riot”, includes, but is not limited to, urging or instigating other persons to riot, but shall not be deemed to mean the mere oral or written (1) advocacy of ideas or (2) expression of belief, not involving advocacy of any act or acts of violence or assertion of the rightness of, or the right to commit, any such act or acts.

(Added Pub. L. 90–284, title I, § 104(a), Apr. 11, 1968, 82 Stat. 76.)


[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] We had a breakthrough,
this Red Square performance where there were eight of us,
it had a new

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mass character, before there’d always been three of us.
We started to get it going, at last we met some musicians
that made right music for us, as we are no musicians.

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[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] We were in a precinct
and the FSO officers didn’t know what to make of us,
they kept discussing it,
and one of them asked, “What is it they did? Is it extremism?”

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[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] [Singing] Revolt in Russia – we exist!
Revolt in Russia – riot, riot!
Take to the streets!
Live on the Red!
Set free the rage of civil anger!

[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] They made a lot of phone calls, they photographed us,
which was fun.
We saw the prints, saw what it looked like,
it looked great, we were happy.
Euphoric, the action was a success.
Accept conformity!

[Elena Volkova, Cultural Critic] “The morning of the Streltsy execution.”
On the Calvary assembled people who would watch,
there are no authorities on the Calvary.
It is essential to remember that Pussy Riot continue traditions
of the Occupy strategy, “Occupy Wall Street,”
strategy of occupation of power-related spaces
that should belong to the people.
This space is charged
with confrontation of people and power
and the blood that’s been shed for ages.

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It is crucial that the frozen Peter the Great

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with his famous goggle eyes stands for bewildered power.
It’s both his hatred towards the rebels and incomprehension,
“How the hell is it possible? How can it be?”
The power was dumbfounded –
it couldn’t believe that was possible.

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[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] It went viral. People liked it.
Then for a fortnight we gave interviews every day:
The Guardian, BBC, those news giants took interest in us.

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[Dusty Pink Masked Pussy Riot participant 1] Hello
I’m Balaclava.

[Green Masked Pussy Riot participant] I’m Cold Soup.

[Yellow Masked Pussy Riot participant] I’m Garaja.

[Red Masked Pussy Riot participant] We are Pussy Riot group.

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For this holiday we are preparing …

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[Magazine Cover: CAN PUSSY RIOT TAKE DOWN PUTIN?, by Carole Cadwalladr

[Beige Masked Pussy Riot participant] a performance in Red Square.

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[Facebook post] Re: Russia Pussy Riot: “Sick stupid chicks.”

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“I hate them.”

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“Way to go.”

[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Livejournal –

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all very important domains
where people are prepared to watch your work,
a distance between the work of art
and the audience is getting shorter.

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[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] In actionism, no one can help you but you yourself.
If I don’t write something and place it on that very day,
it will not be interesting for news agencies
and the news will be lost.
You’re tired, you hadn’t slept for three days
before the action, but you must write a text
and upload photos, choose the right ones,
find the right structure for your post, contact journalists,
make a mail-out, and your text must be presentable,
you don’t have an institution
that will help you write the text.
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Re: Act & Punishment: The Pussy Riot Trials

Postby admin » Tue Aug 07, 2018 5:52 am

Part 3 of 6

[Orange Masked Pussy Riot participant] Some videos were on TV rotation,
voices there were quite discernible.

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My parents were watching and I thought, “Well, this is it.”
My parents are very strict and conservative,
my dad is one of those [who says], “Let’s burn ‘em!”
They didn’t recognize my voice.

[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] When you’re happy

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with the result, you don’t feel like turning back.
At every stage, I understood that it was a point of no return.

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[Newswoman] Vladimir Putin stands the highest chance
of becoming the president.
Said the patriarch of Moscow and all Russia, Kirill.
Today the PM had a meeting in the Svyato-Danilov monastery
with representatives of all religious confessions of Russia.

[Patriarch Kirill of Moscow] I must speak very openly as the Patriarch,
whose vocation is to tell the truth,

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heedless to the political situation
and propaganda accents,
that a great role in rectifying the crookedness of our history

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was played by you personally, Vladimir Vladimirovich.
It was right what you said about the need to strengthen ties
between the church and the state,
but it will be but a drop in the sea.

[Elena Volkova, Cultural Critic] This ikon speaks about
Ivan the Terrible being in lieu of God.

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It is obvious that today Russia is stuck in conflicts,
beliefs and values of the XVI century.
There’s a cult, in my opinion, a rather pagan cult of force,
cult of power.
This tradition is covered with the religious authority.
Since the olden days. This is what they call, “Caesaropapism,”
when the authorities weigh upon the religious one.
This is a special Caesar’s religion,
religion of power that’s taken shape in Russia.

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[Green Masked Pussy Riot participant] This action in the temple at first seemed …
Well, Femen did something similar.
It’s shallow and not very interesting.

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[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] Of course we argued a lot.
Whether a different place should be used.
Some people refused and advised us against doing it.
Like people will stop liking us.
We wanted to show that we are independent.
We don’t serve the opposition, we don’t serve Navalny,
if you think it’s hot and useful, you keep walking forward.
It is yet another sign that you’re on the right track.

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[Alyokhina Maria Vladimorivna] The Punk prayer as it is now is much more PC,
both lyrics-wise and action-wise.

Western media accounts typically quote only one phrase from the song sung by the trio, “St. Mary, virgin, drive away Putin,” giving the impression that the song was nothing more than an outcry against the Russian leader. However, an English translation of the full lyrics obtained by LifeSiteNews.com indicate that the girls had more than just electoral politics in mind.

In addition to their mockery of Orthodox worship, the girls derided the “Black robe, golden epaulettes,” of Orthodox clergy, and mocked the “crawling and bowing” of the parishioners. They then added a barb against the Orthodox Church’s defense of public morality, stating, “The ghost of freedom is in heaven, Gay pride sent to Siberia in chains.”

“The head of the KGB is their chief saint,” continue the girls, in reference to Putin’s former position under the Soviet regime.

They then sing a stanza associating the sacred with feces, followed by another stanza objecting to perceived support of the Putin administration by leaders of Orthodoxy, then another stating “Patriarch Gundyaev believes in Putin,” adding “B**ch, you better believe in God.”

-- Western media concealing facts about female rock band’s desecration of Russian cathedral, by Matthew Hoffman


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[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] We decided that on February 21st,

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we’d go to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.
This is Putin’s territory. It’s his symbol.
Religion has been captured by Putin.
From that very ground
the Patriarch Kirill exhorted his parish to vote for Putin.

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[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] People go to them to cleanse their souls,
to talk about something intimate and personal,
while they offer them some political agenda.
They impose it, which is not decent towards the Christians.


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[George Gorton] [Jogging up and down hallway]

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[Dick Dresner] Do you believe in God?

[George Gorton] It depends. Why?

[Dick Dresner] You better start. Church is testing super high. Higher than showbiz or intelligentsia.

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[George Gorton] Let’s recommend the endorsement from "Him" to "Them."

***

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[Aleksy [Alexy] II, patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, and Boris Yeltsin]

-- Spinning Boris, directed by Roger Spottiswoode


We chose a day when there were few people.
Of course, we’d gone there in advance,
we checked the itinerary.

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A common man had brought in the guitar.

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[Woman] What kind of provocation is that? Leave immediately!

[Pussy Rioters riot in Cathedral]

[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] It was our lamest work.
As regards the real action and not the video.
We didn’t want to upload it, didn’t want to talk about it.
We told of it by chance, since a chance witness

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uploaded his photos on the Net and the word came about
that Pussy Riot had performed
in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour,

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while we had almost thrown into the garbage all our records.
We were apprehended very quickly.

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Most likely our plans had been known to the E centre.
Several people,
including members of ultra patriotic organizations
like the “People’s convocation,” were recruited.
It was curtailed, and we were thrown out. You can see it.
It’s a 30-40 second video of our incomprehensible jerkings.
Of course, nothing was performed there of what was supposed to.

[Elena Volkova, Cultural Critic] Feodosia Prokopievna allowed herself some hypocrisy.
She did attend Niconian services.

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She became harsher and more consistent
in affirming her position
after she was secretly admitted to the veil
under the name of Theodora,
it was then that she began to be in denial, a passive resistance.
It wasn’t only herself that she put in the line of fire.
It was her son who died,
she was probably right in her suspicions
that he was killed by her opponents.
As well as her brothers
who were exiled and many servants of hers,
fourteen of them were burnt alive in a log-house.
By the way, there’s another interesting parallel,
at the time the burning stake would be in Bolotnaya square.

[Female Judge Syrova] When were you detained on this case?

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[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] March 3rd.

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[Female Judge Syrova] Any previous convictions?

[Alyokhina Maria Vladimorivna] No.

[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] When I was told, “You’re under arrest,”

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I realized that could be for quite a while,
and that I was going to see Nadya and Masha.

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[Magazine article: PUSSY RIOT: A PUNK PRAYER FOR FREEDOM. LETTERS FROM PRISON, SONGS, POEMS, AND COURTROOM STATEMENTS PLUS TRIBUTES TO THE PUNK AND THAT SHOOK THE WORLD]

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[Russian Dolls: FREE PUSSY RIOT]

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[Newswoman] Activists of the feminist group staged a five-minute show …

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[Alyokhina Maria Vladimorivna] We became hostages of this mythology.
Nobody cared that somebody did something.
It was all about making a myth, painting a picture.
Like it’s usually the case. Okay, a girl group.
Three persons.
Like “Viagra,” or some other band,
they usually consist of three people.

[Man] [Pushes down masked Pussy Rioter] Hey, hush, cool it!

[Man] [To Male Defender] Hey, let’s take a walk!

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Come on! You’re brave?

[Man] [Takes mask off Pussy Rioter]

[Male Defender] You’re hurting a girl.

[Unmasked Pussy Rioter] [Attacks man]

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[Man] [To Unmasked Pussy Rioter] Put the mask back on.

[Man on megaphone] Let off the woman!

[Unmasked Pussy Rioter] [Attacks another man.]

[Man] [Hits her back]

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[Newsman] The recent protest wave
brought about the question of the ethical boundaries.

[Priest] Everyone today discusses the destiny
of members of the Pussy Riot
who had staged a real orgy
in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.
The pictures of young, masked women by the altar went viral.
I think that no believer
should say that it is none of his business.

[Standing in prayer “in defence of faith desecrated sanctuary, the Church and the good reputation,” 4/26/12.]

Every believer cannot but be hurt.

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So I exhort you all
to exalt your prayers about our country and our people,
for we have no future
if we start to scorn at the sacred things
and if this scorn is to someone’s liking as a virtue,
a correct expression of political protest,
an acceptable action, or a harmless joke.

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[Newspaper: SOVEREIGN RUSSIA]

[Man] It’s beautiful.

[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] If such massive
collective prayers are assembled in our honour,

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though indirectly, against our punk prayer,
if there are huge rallies against us,
it’s done definitely not to let us go.

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[Petr Verzilov, Artist, “Voyna” group] A very funny and bizarre thing happened
when in the eyes of the media and millions of people
the two sides became equal.

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[Man] [With Sign: I AM AN ORTHODOX, BUT AGAINST PUSSY RIOT PROSECUTION]

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[Man] I have this rare opportunity of speaking as a musical critic.
I want to say that I like the song
“Mother of God, Chase Putin Away.”
I’ll even say
that in the whole not so huge repertoire of the band
this song to my taste is the best.

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I can also say that in how they treated the situation
both the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian state
didn’t get closer but rather distances themselves from …

[Man] [yelling] Nadya, chin up!

[Chanting] Freedom! Freedom!

[Petr Verzilov, Artist, “Voyna” group] On April 12th there were several hundreds.

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Initially, they put effort into media coverage of the situation,
attention was focused on the first trial –

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there was a court festival of sorts.

[Shouting] Freedom!

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[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] You know the situation well. You know there’s no one behind you.
Not Berezovsky, nor Guelman, nor the U.S. State Department.


From his new home in the UK, Stanley House, where he and associates including Akhmed Zakayev, Alexander Litvinenko and Alex Goldfarb became known as "the London Circle" of Russian exiles, Berezovsky publicly stated that he was on a mission to bring down Putin "by force" or by bloodless revolution. He established the International Foundation for Civil Liberties, to "support the abused and the vulnerable in society – prisoners, national minorities and business people" in Russia and criticized Putin's record in the West.

Berezovsky launched a concerted campaign to expose alleged misdeeds of Vladimir Putin, from suppressing freedom of speech to committing war crimes in Chechnya. He also accused Russia's FSB security service of staging the Moscow apartment bombings of 1999 in order to help Putin win the presidency. Many of these activities were funded through the New York-based International Foundation for Civil Liberties directed by Berezovsky's friend Alex Goldfarb….

When Berezovsky told Reuters in early February 2006 that he was working on plans to overthrow Russian President Vladimir Putin, British Foreign Minister Jack Straw warned the London-based Russian tycoon not to plot against the Russian President while living in Britain. His refugee status could be reviewed if he continued to make such remarks….

Appeals for regime change

In September 2005, Berezovsky said in an interview with the BBC: "I'm sure that Putin doesn't have the chance to survive, even to the next election in 2008. I am doing everything in my power to limit his time frame, and I am really thinking of returning to Russia after Putin collapses, which he will." In January 2006, Berezovsky stated in an interview to a Moscow-based radio station that he was working on overthrowing the administration of Vladimir Putin by force. Berezovsky also publicly accused Putin of being "a gangster" and the "terrorist number one".

On 13 April 2007, in an interview with The Guardian, Berezovsky declared that he was plotting the violent overthrow of President Putin by financing and encouraging coup plotters in Moscow: "We need to use force to change this regime. It isn't possible to change this regime through democratic means. There can be no change without force, pressure." He also admitted that during the last six years he had struggled hard to "destroy the positive image of Putin" and said that "Putin has created an authoritarian regime against the Russian constitution. ... I don't know how it will happen, but authoritarian regimes only collapse by force." Berezovsky said he had dedicated much of the last six years to "trying to destroy the positive image of Putin" held by many in the West by portraying him whenever possible as a dangerously anti-democratic figure.…

The Russian Prosecutor General's Office had launched a criminal investigation against Berezovsky to determine whether his comments could be considered a "seizure of power by force", as outlined in the Russian Criminal Code. If convicted, an offender faces up to twenty years imprisonment, however Berezovsky is now deceased. The British Foreign Office denounced Berezovsky's statements, warning him that his status of a political refugee might be reconsidered, should he continue to make similar remarks. Furthermore, Scotland Yard had announced that it would investigate whether Berezovsky's statements violated the law. However, in the following July, the Crown Prosecution Service announced that Berezovsky would not face charges in the UK for his comments. Kremlin officials called it a "disturbing moment" in Anglo-Russian relations….

In September 2005, the former president of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, accused Berezovsky of having financed Viktor Yushchenko's 2004 Ukrainian presidential election campaign, and provided copies of documents showing money transfers from companies he claimed were controlled by Berezovsky to companies controlled by Yuschenko's official backers. Berezovsky confirmed that he met Yushchenko's representatives in London before the election, and that the money was transferred from his companies, but he refused to confirm or deny that the companies that received the money were used in Yushchenko's campaign. Financing of election campaigns by foreign citizens is illegal in Ukraine. In November 2005, Berezovsky also claimed he had heavily financed Ukraine's Orange Revolution (that had followed the presidential election). In September 2007, Berezovsky launched lawsuits against two Ukrainian politicians, Oleksandr Tretyakov, a former presidential aid, and David Zhvaniya, a former emergencies minister. Berezovsky was suing the men for nearly US$23 million, accusing them of misusing the money he had allocated in 2004 to fund the Orange Revolution.

-- Boris Berezovsky (businessman), by Wikipedia


Goldfarb studied biochemistry at Moscow State University and graduated in 1969. After graduation, he worked at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in Moscow. He emigrated from the USSR in 1975. He received a Ph.D. in 1980 from the Weizmann Institute, one of the only non-governmental producers of polonium, in Israel….

Back in the west, he continued his research with a post-doctoral program at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany. From 1982 to 1991 he was an assistant professor at Columbia University in New York. From 1992 to 2006 he was a faculty member at the Public Health Research Institute in New York where he led a U.S. government-funded study "Structure and Function of RNA Polymerase in E. coli" with a total budget of $7 million. He also directed the project "Treating Multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis in Siberian Prisons" funded by a $13 million grant from philanthropist George Soros….

Goldfarb was among the first political emigres to return to the USSR after Gorbachev launched his reforms. Impressions of his first visit in October 1987 were published as a cover story in The New York Times magazine under the title "Testing Glasnost. An Exile Visits his Homeland".

The story caught the attention of US philanthropist George Soros, leading to a decade-long association between the two men. According to Soros' biographer Robert Slater, Goldfarb was among the first group of Russian exiles in New York whom Soros invited to brainstorm his potential Foundation in Russia. In 1991 Goldfarb persuaded Soros to donate $100 million to help former Soviet scientists survive the hardships of the economic shock therapy adopted by the Yeltsin government.

From 1992 to 1995, Goldfarb was Director of Operations at Soros' International Science Foundation, which helped sustain tens of thousands of scientists and scholars in the former Soviet Union during the harshest three years of economic reform. In 1994 Goldfarb managed Soros' Russian Internet Project, which built infrastructure and provided free Internet access for university campuses across Russia. That project created a controversy because of a conflict with emerging Russian commercial interests in the ISP field. In 1995, during the first months of the First Chechen War, Goldfarb oversaw a Soros-funded relief operation, which ended disastrously with the disappearance of the American relief worker Fred Cuny. From 1998 to 2000 Goldfarb directed the $15 million Soros tuberculosis project in Russia. He worked with Dr. Paul Farmer to battle TB in Russian prisons, an endeavor described by the Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Kidder in his book Mountains Beyond Mountains.

Since 2001 Goldfarb has been Executive Director of the New York-based International Foundation for Civil Liberties, founded and financed by the exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky.

Goldfarb first met Alexander Litvinenko during his tuberculosis project in Russian prisons. In October 2000, at the request of Boris Berezovsky, Goldfarb went to Turkey where he met Litvinenko and his family, who had just fled from Russia. Goldfarb arranged their entry to the United Kingdom, an offense under British law, for which he was banned from visiting Britain for a year. His involvement would also "...cost him his job with George Soros."

When Litvinenko was poisoned [with polonium] in London in 2006, Goldfarb was his unofficial spokesman during the two last weeks of his life [26] On the day of Litvinenko's death, Goldfarb read out his deathbed statement accusing Vladimir Putin of ordering the poisoning.

Goldfarb later explained in interviews that he had drafted the statement at Litvinenko's request and that Litvinenko had signed it in the presence of a lawyer. With Berezovsky, Litvinenko's widow Marina, and the human rights lawyer Louise Christian, Goldfarb founded the Litvinenko Justice Foundation to campaign for the truth about his murder, and for the perpetrators to be brought to justice. He later testified in a libel suit, in which Berezovsky successfully contested the claim by Russian state television station RTR (now Russia 1) that he had murdered Litvinenko [with polonium].

-- Alexander Goldfarb (biologist), by Wikipedia


My father, the playwright Alexander Guelman, was well known in the 1970s and was once lauded by Mikhail Gorbachev as the father of perestroika, the movement for reform within the Communist Party. At that time, theater was changing the perceptions of an entire generation….

The return of the great writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn from exile in 1994 became symbolic of a new era. But by this time, rock music had taken over the roles previously held by theater and literature. The creativity of acts like Mashina Vremeni, Boris Grebenshikov and DDT led the charge for a new, open world. The whole country knew the lyrics by Kino's lead singer Viktor Tsoi: "Our hearts demand change."

Now, social debate in Russia has been catalyzed by contemporary art, and provocative performances have proven the most effective medium for influencing public opinion….

Until 2012, many of us assumed that, after communism, Russia would develop as a democracy. The authorities paid lip service to European values, but after Putin's reelection in 2012, Russia's work-in-progress democracy transformed into a stereotypical autocracy.

The Russian government dropped any pretense of appearing Western; officials stopped trying to hide the wealth they had accumulated through corruption; and the media was increasingly regarded as a tool of state propaganda. Courts became punitive rather than judicial bodies, with political disagreements treated as criminal conduct.

In these circumstances, even the most politically engaged segment of Russian society became despondent and apathetic….

Just two weeks before Putin's reelection, Pussy Riot emerged with their raucous prayer "Mother of God, Drive Putin Away!" After the song was performed in Moscow's largest cathedral, the Orthodox Cathedral of Christ the Savior, news of this extraordinary protest spread, and the video was watched by millions online. When the band was subsequently arrested on hooliganism charges, an epic saga with almost daily episodes began: Pussy versus Putin.

Pussy Riot became the anti-Putin on every level. He is a man, they are women; he is old, they are young; he is gray, they are brightly colored; he is rich, they have nothing; he is in the Kremlin, they were in prison.

Pussy Riot's trial, and the imprisonment of two members, drew global attention to Russia's seemingly biased judiciary, and their treatment highlighted the fate that befalls many political prisoners: Amnesty International called the court's decision "a bitter blow to freedom in Russia."…

In 2013, when I was director of the Perm Museum of Contemporary Art, we hosted Siberian artist Vasily Slonov's "Welcome! Sochi 2014," an exhibition that mocked the 2014 Winter Olympics. The exhibition was shut down the authorities, and I was dismissed from the museum. Two years later, I was evicted from my Moscow gallery space after hosting a fundraising exhibition for political prisoners who had protested Putin's 2012 reelection….

Just as the Bolsheviks did 100 years ago, following the October Revolution, today's Russian government is trying to make art serve the state and further the government's ideology. However, only the most incompetent artists willingly serve this cause.

The artistic community at large rarely sees eye to eye with the state. This conflict may not always boil over, but it exists because of a fundamental truth: Artists will always seek to be open to the world, looking to the future and seeing their place in it. By contrast, Putin's rule is characterized by the rhetoric of isolation and Russian nationalism, looking to the past for traces of former glory….

In the artistic community, more clearly than anywhere else, one can see the green shoots of a new Russia rising.

Marat Guelman is a Russian art curator living in Montenegro. His most recent exhibition, "Art Riot: Post-Soviet Actionism," opened at London's Saatchi Gallery on Nov. 16, 2017.

-- Why Russia produces (and quashes) so much radical art, by Marat Guelman


Semibankirschina(семибанкирщина), or seven bankers, was a group of seven Russian business oligarchs who played an important role in the political and economical life of Russia between 1996 and 2000. In spite of internal conflicts, the group worked together in order to re-elect President Boris Yeltsin in 1996, and thereafter to successfully manipulate him and his political environment from behind the scenes…..

Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, in a 29 October 1996 interview in the Financial Times, named seven Russian bankers and businessmen that he claimed controlled most of the economy and media in Russia and had helped bankroll Boris Yeltsin’s re-election campaign in 1996.

The word "Semibankirschina" was subsequently coined by the Russian journalist Andrey Fadin of the Obschaya Gazeta newspaper, in a 14 November 1996 article titled "Semibankirschina as a New Russian Variation of Semiboyarschina". He wrote that "they control the access to budget money and basically all investment opportunities inside the country. They own the gigantic information resource of the major TV channels. They form the President's opinion. Those who didn't want to walk along them were either strangled or left the circle." Slightly over a year later, Fadin was killed in a car accident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn also used this word in his critical 1998 essay Russia under Avalanche to describe the current political regime and to warn people of what he considered an organized crime syndicate that controlled the President and 70% of all Russian money.

The identities of seven bankers are usually taken from the original Financial Times interview with Boris Berezovsky. Those include:

1. Boris Berezovsky – United Bank, Sibneft, ORT…

Since most of the seven oligarchs had Jewish roots, it led to a rise of antisemitism in Russia.…

Since Yeltsin was highly unpopular by that time, with only 3—8% support, a complex technology of crowd manipulation was developed by the Gleb Pavlovsky's and Marat Gelman's [Guelman] think tank Foundation for Effective Politics, with the involvement of American specialists (the latter fact was used as a basis for the comedy film Spinning Boris released in 2003).

Known as an extremely "dirty" election campaign both inside and outside of Russia, it was discussed in detail in Gleb Pavlovsky's report President in 1996: Scenarios and Technologies of the Victory published shortly after. As Nezavisimaya Gazeta summarized it, "the formula of victory: attracting the expert resources + dominating in the information field + blocking the competitor's moves + dominating in mass media + dominating in elites." The main analyst of the NTV TV channel Vsevolod Vilchek also admitted that they actively applied technologies of mass manipulation. Both Dmitry Medvedev and Mikhail Gorbachev confirmed that Yeltsin's victory was hoaxed.

Following the election, the seven bankers became the main power behind Russian politics and economy. Between 1996 and 2000 they gained control over the most valuable state enterprises in the natural resource and metal sectors and unofficially manipulated Yeltsin and his decisions. According to Boris Berezovsky, they acted through Anatoly Chubais — an architect of privatization in Russia and Yeltsin's right-hand man who granted access to him at any time.

All this resulted in further impoverishment of the population, criminalization of businesses and the infamous 1998 Russian financial crisis. This was also the time when the word oligarch grew in popularity, substituting the nouveau riche term (both with extremely negative subtext). The 1999 saw the sudden rise to power of the unknown FSB officer Vladimir Putin. Boris Berezovsky and his associates claimed that it was him who single-handedly promoted Putin and insisted on his candidature as a Prime-minister and a President.

Yet the following years saw a quick demise of most of the seven bankers and the rise of the new generation of "manageable" Russian oligarchy.

-- Semibankirschina [The Seven Bankers], by Wikipedia


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After a decade of President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian rule in which civil society seemed to be comatose, a new protest movement is growing in Russia. Infuriated by electoral fraud and galloping corruption, the so-called “creative class” is fighting back by means of music, poetry, multi-media, and daring art performances. In this presentation, Artem Troitsky gave a firsthand account of the situation.

Artem Troitsky is the first, and best known, Russian rock journalist, author of Back in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia and Tusovka: Whatever Happened to the Soviet Underground Culture. He currently teaches in the Journalism Department of Moscow State University, hosts TV and radio shows (including on Ekho Moskvy), writes for Novaya gazeta, is a member of the board of Greenpeace Russia, and is a well-known blogger and opposition activist.

-- Enemies of the State: Pussy Riot and the New Russian Protest Rock, by National Endowment for Democracy, Part of IERES’ Behind the Headlines Series, Co-sponsored with the National Endowment for Democracy’s International Forum for Democratic Studies with Artem Troitsky, Moscow State University


Maria Vladimirovna "Masha" Alyokhina has been involved in environmental activism with Greenpeace Russia, opposing development projects in the Khimki Forest...

-- Maria Alyokhina, by Wikipedia


The shift from the CIA to the NED

What little political aid the United States has attempted in the past 35 years has been more or less covert, largely financial and most often administered through the CIA. It did not take long for most policymakers to realize that such covert operations were inappropriate, awkward, and embarrassing.

-- Project Democracy consultant [29]


Political aid programs were sporadic and underdeveloped in the post-World War II period. Those programs that did exist were managed by the CIA. The Truman administration created the CIA out of its World War II precursor, the Office of Strategic Security, as a covert branch of the US state in the Cold War. Since its inception, the CIA has carried out thousands of covert operations; overthrown countless governments; and contributed to the death, directly or indirectly, of millions of people as a result of its actions.30 Alongside intelligence gathering and paramilitary campaigns,a major component of CIA intervention has been political operations involving the creation, covert funding and guidance of allied political groups and individuals in target countries -- media, political parties, trade unions, businesses, and associations.

At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, despite occasional scandals and failures like the Bay of Pigs, the CIA enjoyed the respect of much of the US public, and the full extent of its activities remained hidden from the international community. But during the 1970s, as many of its seamy covert operations became public, it fell into disrepute. In 1974-5, congressional investigations revealed the sordid underworld of CIA covert activity at home and abroad. Top-level CIA officers defected and exposed the history of overseas intrigues, and investigative journalists uncovered unsavory details of US secret activities.31 After the US defeat in Indochina and the delegitimization of foreign intervention, the CIA by the late 1970s was badly discredited. In the United States, bipartisan and constituent support crumbled. In target countries abroad, association with CIA programs meant instant repudiation. In addition to the stigma, there were other problems.The CIA had proved adept at staging coups, assassinations, and installing dictators. It achieved its stated goal in 1973 in Chile, for instance, when it orchestrated the military overthrow of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. In Guatemala, it was impeccably efficient in organizing the removal in 1954 of the elected government of Jacobo Arbenz. The CIA showed similar proficiency in operations in Brazil, Iran, the Congo, the Philippines, Iraq, and dozens of other countries.

Yet there was something clumsy about these operations. The political aftermath of covert operations seemed to create new, more complex problems over the long term. The CIA could destabilize quite well, but, its detractors argued, it was not good at creating stability. Nearly four decades after the CIA overthrew the Arbenz government, Guatemala remained a cauldron of guerrilla insurgency, gross human rights violations and social instability. The Pinochet regime lasted sixteen years but was an international pariah. Iran's nationalist prime minister, Mossadegh, was ousted in the CIA-led coup of 1954, which installed the Shah and recovered Iranian oil fields for Western petroleum companies. But, despite twenty years on the throne, the Shah was unable to sustain himself in the face of a rising Islamic fundamentalist movement and popular struggles against his policies. CIA operations seemingly lacked sophistication and long-term vision. The CIA was not able to create stable governments or to mold structures in civil society itself that could provide long-term protection for a core-dominated market economy and a pro-US political program. Here, the capable hands of a political surgeon were needed, not the heavy hand of a paramilitary assassin.

The new, post-Vietnam breed of political professionals lobbied for the transfer of crucial aspects of the CIA's political operations -- namely, "political aid" -- to a new agency. They lobbied for the establishment of an institution that would use sophisticated techniques, including elections, political aid, and other political operations, to achieve lasting results. Two of the original NED founders noted: "Since the advent of the Cold War, the United States has worked abroad politically, mainly covertly, with direct government action and secret financing of private groups." This US political intervention capacity "is necessary for protecting US security interests," but efforts to date have proven inadequate: "[The] various covert means for filling the political gap in US policy solved some short-term needs, but did not provide effective long-term solutions. Covert political aid provided directly by the US government is limited in its effectiveness."32 Thus, while CIA intervention has continued, a more specialized, sophisticated entity with a focus on political operations, a long-term vision, and a strategic agenda came into existence with the creation of the NED in 1983. This new entity would not only play the role of skillful political surgeon, but it would overcome the taint associated with the covert political operations that the CIA had been carrying out abroad. Specifically, NED would take over much of the funding and political guidance for political parties, trade unions, business groups, news media, and civic organizations that the CIA had traditionally supplied. The NED is a "combination of Government money, bureaucratic flexibility and anti-Communist commitment. .. which mixes public funds and private interests," noted the New York Times shortly after the Endowment's founding. The NED's work "resembles the aid given by the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1950s, 60s and 70s to bolster pro-American political groups."33 Former CIA director William Colby commented in regard to the NED program: "It is not necessary to turn to the covert approach. Many of the programs which ... were conducted as covert operations [can now be] conducted quite openly, and consequentially, without controversy."34 The idea was to create a further division of labor within the organs of US foreign policy. The NED would not replace the CIA, whose programs have continued and even expanded in the 1990s.35 Rather, it would specialize in the overt development through political aid programs of political and civic formations, supplementing CIA covert activities in synchronization with overall US policy towards the country or region in which it operated.

The NED, with its ideological underpinning of "promoting democracy," was well equipped for rebuilding US domestic consensus for political operations abroad. The name National Endowment for Democracy conjures up an apolitical and benevolent image not unlike that of the National Endowment for the Arts or other humanitarian societies. The efforts to project such an image are, in fact, part and parcel of the ideological dimensions of the new intervention, and have been remarkably successful. Standard university texts perpetuate such an uncritical image. "The National Endowment for Democracy, launched by the Reagan administration in 1983, is a recent manifestation of a tradition with a long heritage," states American Foreign Policy: Pattern and Process, one of the staple US college texts on foreign policy. "Its purpose is to encourage worldwide the development of autonomous political, economic, social and cultural institutions to serve as the foundations of democracy and the guarantors of individual rights and freedoms."36 Yet the NED was created in the highest echelons of the US national security state, as part of the same project that led to the illegal operations of the Iran-Contra scandal. It is organically integrated into the overall execution of US national security and foreign policy. In structure, organization, and operation, it is closer to clandestine and national security organs such as the CIA than apolitical or humanitarian endowments as its name would suggest. The NED has operated in tandem with all major interventionist undertakings in the 1980s and 1990s.

The NSC's Project Democracy

Efforts to create "political development" programs date back to the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, when Congress discussed, but declined to approve, several bills to establish a "Freedom Academy" that would conduct party-building in the Third World. The passage of the Title IX addition to the Foreign Aid Act in 1966 spurred renewed interest in such an agency. The Brookings Institute, one of the most important policy planning institutes, undertook an extensive research program on political development programs in coordination with the AID and other government agencies.37 In 1967, President Johnson appointed the three-member Katzenback Commission which recommended that the government "promptly develop and establish a public-private mechanism to provide public funds openly for overseas activities of organizations which are adjudged deserving, in the national interest, of public support."38 A bill was introduced in Congress in 1967 by Rep. Dante Fascell (D.-Fla.) to create an "Institute of International Affairs," but it was not approved.39 Meanwhile, the public outcry against intervention abroad in the early 1970s as a result of the Indochina war and the revelations of CIA activities, as well as the Watergate scandal, put these initiatives on hold for much of that decade.

Then, in 1979, with reassertionism taking hold, a group of government officials, academicians, and trade union, business, and political leaders connected to the foreign-policy establishment, created the American Political Foundation (APF), with funding from the State Department's United States Information Agency (USIA) and from several private foundations. The APF brought together representatives of all the dominant sectors of US society, including both parties and leaders from labor and business. It also brought together many of the leading figures who had been developing the ideas of the new political intervention, many of them associated with the transnationalized fraction of the US elite.40 Among those on the APF board were Lane Kirkland of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), former Republican National Committee chair William Brock, former Democratic National Committee chair Charles Manatt, international vice-president for the US Chamber of Commerce Michael Samuels, as well as Frank Fahrenkopf, Congressman Dante Fascell, Zbignew Brezezinski, John Richardson, and Henry Kissinger. The APF was chaired by Allen Weinstein, who would later become the first president of the NED. The names of APF activists and the composition of the APF board are revealing. They fall into three categories. One is members of the inner circle of second-generation post-World War II national security and foreign policymakers, such as Kissinger, Brezezinski, and Richard Allen, all former National Security Advisors. Another is top representatives of the four major constituencies that made up the post-World War II foreign-policy coalition -- the Democratic and Republican parties, labor and business. The third is operatives from the US intelligence and national security community. These intelligence and security operatives include people associated with the CIA and dozens of front organizations or foundations with which it works, as well as operatives from the USIA.

The prominence of the USIA is significant, since this is an agency with a long track record in political and psychological operations. It was created by the Eisenhower administration in 1953 as an agency within the NSC at the recommendation of a top-secret report issued by the President's Committee on International Information Activities. Its explicit purpose was to conduct propaganda, political and psychological operations abroad in conjunction with CIA activities.41 A National Security Action Memo in 1962 stipulated coordination among the USIA, the AID, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department in waging political warfare operations, including civic action, economic and military aid programs.42 Based on research programs it conducts directly or commissions governmental and non-governmental agencies to conduct, the USIA selects propaganda themes, determines target audiences, and develops comprehensive country plans for media manipulation and communications programs. As part of Project Democracy, USIA activities were greatly expanded in the 1980s.43

The APF recommended in 1981 that a presidential commission examine "how the US could promote democracy overseas." The White House approved the recommendation for Project Democracy. At its onset, Project Democracy was attached to the NSC, and supervised by Walter Raymond Jr., a high-ranking CIA propaganda specialist who worked closely with Oliver North, a key player in the Iran-Contra scandal, on covert projects.44 "Overt political action," explained Raymond, could help achieve foreign-policy objectives by providing "support to various institutions [and]... the development of networks and personal relationships with key people."45 Raymond explained that the creation of the NED as a "vehicle for quasi-public/private funds" would fill a "key gap" in US foreign-policy -- it would be a "new art form."46 Raymond and his staff at the NSC worked closely with Democratic Congressman Dante Fascell of Florida. Fascell chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee which would draft the legislation creating the NED and organized support for the project within Congress.47

In June 1982, in a speech before the British parliament considered the symbolic inauguration of the new policy, Ronald Reagan announced that the United States would pursue a major new program to help "foster the infrastructure of democracy around the world."48 A secret White House memo on the minutes of a Cabinet-level planning meeting to discuss Project Democracy held two months later, in August, set the agenda: "We need to examine how law and Executive Order can be made more liberal to permit covert action on a broader scale, as well as what we can do through substantially increased overt political action."49 Then, in January 1983, Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 77 (NSDD 77), which laid out a comprehensive framework for employing political operations and psychological warfare in US foreign policy. At least $65 million was allocated by the administration to underwrite the activities and programs contemplated in the NSC directive.50 NSDD 77 focused on three aspects of Project Democracy.51 One aspect was dubbed "public diplomacy" -- psychological operations aimed at winning support for US foreign policy among the US public and the international community -- and involved an expansion of propaganda and informational and psychological operations. The directive defined "public diplomacy" as "those actions of the US Government designed to generate support for our national security objectives." An Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD) operating out of the White House was established.52 The General Accounting Office ruled OPD an illegal domestic propaganda operation in 1988. Another aspect set out in the NSC directive was an expansion of covert operations. This aspect would develop into the clandestine, illegal government operations later exposed in the hearings on the Iran-Contra scandal of the late 1980s. Parallel to "the public arm of Project Democracy, now known as the National Endowment for Democracy," noted the New York Times, "the project's secret arm took an entirely different direction after Lieut.-Col. Oliver I. North, then an obscure National Security Council aide, was appointed to head it."53

The final aspect was the creation of a "quasi-governmental institute." This would engage in "political action strategies" abroad, stated NSDD 77.54 This led to the formal incorporation of the NED by Congress in November 1983. While the CIA and the NSC undertook "covert" operations under Project Democracy, some of which were exposed in the Iran-Contra investigations, the NED and related agencies went on to execute the "overt" side of what the New York Times described as "open and secret parts" of Project Democracy, "born as twins" in 1982 with NSDD 77.55 But while the Iran-Contra covert operations that grew out of Project Democracy were exposed and (assumed to be) terminated, the NED was consolidated and expanded as the decade progressed. With the mechanisms in place by the mid-1980s, the "reassertionists" turned to launching their global "democracy offensive." "The proposed campaign for democracy must be conceived in the broadest terms and must weave together a wide range of superficially disparate aspects of US foreign policy, including the efforts of private groups," noted one Project Democracy consultant. "A democracy campaign should become an increasingly important and highly cost-effective component of ... the defense effort of the United States and its allies."56 The countries in which the NED became most involved in the 1980s and early 1990s were those set as priorities for US foreign-policy. "Such a worldwide effort (a 'crusade for democracy'] directly or indirectly must strive to achieve three goals," one Project Democracy participant explained. "The preservation of democracies from internal subversion by either the Right or the Left; the establishment of new democracies where feasible; and keeping open the democratic alternative for all nondemocracies. To achieve each of these goals we must struggle militarily, economically, politically and ideologically."57

In countries designated as hostile and under Soviet influence, such as Nicaragua and Afghanistan, the United States organized "freedom fighters" (anti-government insurgents) in the framework of low-intensity conflict doctrine, while the NED and related organs introduced complementary political programs. Those countries designated for transition from right-wing military or civilian dictatorships to stable "democratic" governments inside the US orbit, including Chile, Haiti, Paraguay, and the Philippines, received special attention. By the late 1980s and early 1990s ,the NED had also launched campaigns in Cuba, Vietnam, and other countries on the US enemy list, and had also become deeply involved in the self-proclaimed socialist countries, including the Soviet Union itself. While these first programs were tied to the 1980s anti-communist crusade, the NED and other "democracy promotion" agencies made an easy transition to the post-Cold War era. As the rubric of anti-communism and national security became outdated, the rhetoric of "promoting democracy" took on even greater significance. Perestroika and glasnost highlighted authentic democratization as an aspiration of many peoples. But US strategists saw in the collapse of the Soviet system an opportunity to accelerate political intervention under the cover of promoting democracy. In the age of global society, the NED and other "democracy promotion" organs have become sophisticated instruments for penetrating the political systems and civil society in other countries down to the grassroots level.

-- Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention, and Hegemony, by William I. Robinson


That your action wasn’t ordered by anyone,
that you act of your own accord, by intuition,
that you write songs and texts with your own brain,
no one does it for you.
Whenever we wrote something longer than two paragraphs
people said it couldn’t be the girls, because they’re stupid,
someone must be controlling them.
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Re: Act & Punishment: The Pussy Riot Trials

Postby admin » Tue Aug 07, 2018 5:53 am

Part 4 of 6

[People’s march,” Moscow, 5/6/12]

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[Crowd] Free Pussy Riot! Free Pussy Riot!

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[Sign: La Guerre Du Vagin Avec Une Putin!!! The vagina war with Putin!!!]

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[Petr Verzilov, artist, “Voyna” group] In these particular times

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the streets in Russia are perceived as a battlefield,
because it’s a very conflictual space
as the power, first of all, sees any street actions
as a sacred process on which it enjoys monopoly.

[Crowd] Let them go! Let them go!
Don’t!
Free Verzilov!
Let them go! Let them go!

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[Remand prison #6, Mowcow, birthday of Masha Alekhina]
[Sign: HAPPY BIRTHDAY]

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[Singing: Mother of God, chase Putin away.

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[Alyokhina Maria Vladimorivna] There I made some discoveries
that may seem banal here, at liberty.
There, Jesus Christ and Socrates seem like brothers to you,
those millennia vanish.
Okay, you understand that it may be strange at liberty.

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[Boris Groys, Philosopher, Art Curator] Actually, the art practice in the XX c.
is about transgressing.
If we talk about the situation of the 1970s,

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the Moscow conceptualism,
it was a practice of reclamation of some territories
whose demarcation wasn’t clear.

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Erik Bulatov painted a huge portrait of Brezhnev at home
and exhibited it in his studio.
By this he did violate
some borderline between the official and the private.
While Monastrysky invited everyone to a field,
God knows which,
belonging to some collective farm,

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and did there something
that turned it into an art institution.

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That turned it into an exhibition area
and changed its nature altogether.

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[Cops] [Bang Arrested Man’s head on van door]

[Arrested Man] Why are you hitting me?
Look, they’re beating me.

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[Woman] I want the girls to get back to their children.

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[Boy] What they did doesn’t fit that Criminal code article.

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[Girl] We hold meetings at school, talk to people, and some understand.

[Petr Verzilov, artist, “Voyna” group] Their detention was prolonged

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and here was another boiling point –
we thought that on June 20th, they would at last be
out of the can.

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[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] Interrogator didn’t make any talks to us,
he would just come and say dryly that if we didn’t repent
and shop others, we’d get seven years in prison,
well, maybe four or five,
and if we did repent, we’d be set free.

[Sign: “Putin, stop pushing the string, this is dangerous.”

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[Dmitry Kuminov, Activist] At some point, I realized I’m quite unhappy
with what’s going on in the country.
I came to Moscow from Barnaul

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[Occupy Court” Camp]

[Dmitry Kuminov, Activist] I’m a programmer. I was into physics and math.
On all these sites, there was information
about Pussy Riot actions,
that’s where I heard about this action.
I saw the video that Pussy Riot had uploaded on Youtube,
I read their post.
I’m not sure from what I saw what prevailed there:
art or politics.
Probably the latter, the politics
is all over the text there.
But obviously it was art, too.
The negative reaction there was evaporated.
It was then that I thought:
if the authorities try to pressurize
and witch-hunt them,
I will go out in the street to support them.
On May 11,
there was a regular sitting of the Moscow city court.
I attended the meeting and in the evening went there

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and joined the camp.

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[Gang of thugs come running to camp and start destroying everything]

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[Woman] What the hell are you doing?

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[Roman Zaytsev, Activist] I liked being a deacon.
No false modesty here,
I was a cool deacon.

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[Occupy Protesters in a cage]

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[Roman Zaytsev, Activist] You should protect those who are beaten.
That’s it, there’s no other philosophy
about why I went there, why I needed it.
Lying is the worst thing in the world.
Today, Russia is a kingdom of lies.
I hope I live with God permanently.
Every minute I am with Him,

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and I’m not ashamed of being bad before Him.

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[Male Judge] Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna
is charged with committing a crime
in accordance with Part 2 of Article 213
of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.
Alyokhina Marie Vladimorovna
is charged with committing a crime
in accordance with Part 2 of Article 213
Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna
is charged with committing a crime
in accordance with Part 2 of Article 213
That they committed an act of hooliganism
that consisted of major violation of public order
showing blatant disrespect to the society
with the motives of hatred and religious animosity
and hatred towards a social group
committed by a group of persons by previous concert.


After the Russian Civil War of 1917-1922 ended, the Soviet government under Lenin introduced a semi-capitalist economic policy to stabilize Russia’s floundering economy. This reform, the New Economic Policy (NEP), introduced a new social policy of moderation and discipline, especially regarding Soviet youth....

However, the party was not very successful overall in recruiting Russian youth during the NEP period (1921-1928). This came about because of conflict and disillusionment among Soviet youth who romanticised the spontaneity and destruction characteristic of War Communism (1918-1921) and the Civil War period. They saw it as their duty, and the duty of the Communist Party itself, to eliminate all elements of Western culture from society. However, the NEP had the opposite effect: after it started, many aspects of Western social behavior began to reemerge. The contrast between the "Good Communist" extolled by the Party and the capitalism fostered by NEP confused many young people. They rebelled against the Party's ideals in two opposite ways: radicals gave up everything that had any Western or capitalist connotations, while the majority of Russian youths felt drawn to the Western-style popular culture of entertainment and fashion....

The ideal Komsomolets

Not only was the ideal Communist youth an asset to his or her organization, but (s)he also "lived correctly". This meant that every aspect of a Komsomolets’s life was to be in accordance with Party doctrine. Smoking, drinking, religion, and any other activity the Bolsheviks saw as threatening were discouraged as "hooliganism". The Komsomol sought to provide its members with alternative leisure activities that promoted the improvement of society, such as volunteer work, sports, and political and drama clubs....

It condemned sexual promiscuity, drinking, smoking and general mischievous behavior, as it posed moral danger to the organization’s young members. The majority of the youth did not take this well, as unsavory activities were enticing to them....

Many youths were drawn to "hooliganism" and the Western culture of entertainment, which included cinema and fashion magazines.

-- Komsomol, by Wikipedia


[Female Judge Syrova] Defendant, do you understand the charges?

[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] I understand the charges, but …

[Female Judge Syrova] Good. Take a seat.

[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] Can I add something?

[Female Judge Syrova] Don’t hurry.

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Alyokhina, do you understand the charges?

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[Alyokhina Maria Vladimorivna] I do not understand the charges.

[Female Judge Syrova] What do you not understand?

[Alyokhina Maria Vladimorivna] I would like to clarify that …

[Female Judge Syrova] What do you not understand in the brought charges?

[Alyokhina Maria Vladimorivna] I do not understand the ideological side of the issue.
I do not understand based on what
presumptions about my motives are made.
I do not know why I am not allowed to explicate it.

[Female Judge Syrova] Don’t hurry it.

[Alyokhina Maria Vladimorivna] I’m not.

[Female Judge Syrova] You will be given the floor.
Right now I am asking you
whether you understand the charges.

[Alyokhina Maria Vladimorivna] No.

[Female Judge Syrova] The prosecutor has just read your charges.

[Alyokhina Maria Vladimorivna] I don’t understand.

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[Aleksey Shulgin, Artist] This is a typical work of media art.
They played music in a different temple,
then they added sound --
this is manipulation of digital content.
This was the biggest confusion of the investigators.
The main charge was a blasphemous performance
but it transpired that there was no performance.
It was all edited later.
Then they incriminated them
with insulting believers with their video.

[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] It was our lamest work.
As regards the real action and not the video.
We didn’t want to upload it, didn’t want to talk about it.
We were told of it by chance, since a chance witness
uploaded his photos on the Net, and the word came about
that Pussy Riot had performed
in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour,
while we had almost thrown into the garbage all our records.
We were apprehended very quickly.
Most likely our plans had been known to the E centre.
Several people,
including members of ultra patriotic organizations
like the “People’s convocation,” were recruited.
It was curtailed, and we were thrown out. You can see it.
It’s a 30-40 second video of our incomprehensible jerkings.
Of course, nothing was performed there of what was supposed to.
[/quote][/quote]

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[Sign/Cartoon: [Man] Samutsevich’s thesis is the best ever in the Rodchenko School.
[Female Judge Syrova] We understand both her interest for art and how beautiful she is.]

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[Pussy Rioters in Cathedral] [Singing] The Church’s praise of rotten dictators,
the sacred procession of black limousines,
a teacher-preacher will meet you in school,
go to class – bring him money!

[Female Judge Syrova] Defendants, do you plead guilty as charged?
Tolokonnikova.

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[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] No, I do not plead guilty. Can I explicate?

[Female Judge Syrova] You will in due time.

[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] I just want everyone to understand …

[Female Judge Syrova] So you don’t. Take a seat.

[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] I don’t, because …
[Sits down] and keeps talking.

[Female Judge Syrova] Samutsevich, do you plead guilty as charged?
Samutsevich, rise and answer.
Do you plead guilty as charged?

[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] No, I don’t.

[Female Judge Syrova] Alyokhina, do you plead guilty as charged?

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[Alyokhina Maria Vladimorivna] I cannot plead guilty as I did not understand the charges.
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Re: Act & Punishment: The Pussy Riot Trials

Postby admin » Wed Aug 08, 2018 1:17 am

Part 5 of 6

[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] I do not plead guilty as charged (Article 213, Part 2),
first of all, because I cannot accept
the motive ascribed to me.
I had no motive of hatred or religious animosity
towards anyone.
I didn’t have this motive at all.

[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] [Singing] The gay science of occupying squares,
the will to power without those fucking leaders ...


The time is coming when we shall have to pay for having been Christians for two thousand years: we are losing the equilibrium which enables us to live—for a long while we shall not know in what direction we are travelling. We are hurling ourselves headlong into the opposite valuations, with that degree of energy which could only have been engendered in man by an overvaluation of himself.

Now, everything is false from the root, words and nothing but words, confused, feeble, or over-strained.

(a) There is a seeking after a sort of earthly solution of the problem of life, but in the same sense as that of the final triumph of truth, love, justice (socialism: "equality of persons").

(b) There is also an attempt to hold fast to the moral ideal (with altruism, self-sacrifice, and the denial of the will, in the front rank).

(c) There is even an attempt to hold fast to a "Beyond": were it only as an antilogical x; but it is forthwith interpreted in such a way that a kind of metaphysical solace, after the old style, may be derived from it.

(d) There is an attempt to read the phenomena of life in such a way as to arrive at the divine guidance of old, with its powers of rewarding, punishing, educating, and of generally conducing to a something better in the order of things.

(e) People once more believe in good and evil; so that the victory of the good and the annihilation of the evil is regarded as a duty (this is English, and is typical of that blockhead, John Stuart Mill).

(f) The contempt felt for "naturalness," for the desires and for the ego: the attempt to regard even the highest intellectuality of art as a result of an impersonal and disinterested attitude.

(g) The Church is still allowed to meddle in all the essential occurrences and incidents in the life of the individual, with a view to consecrating it and giving it a loftier meaning: we still have the "Christian state" and the "Christian marriage."…

Here there must be no compromise, but selection, annihilation, and war—the Christian Nihilistic standard of value must be withdrawn from all things and attacked beneath every disguise ... for instance, from modern sociology, music, and Pessimism (all forms of the Christian ideal of values)....

The priest, the shepherd of souls, should be looked upon as a form of life which must be suppressed….

We have transferred the label "Chandala" to the priests, the backworldsmen, and to the deformed Christian society which has become associated with these people, together with creatures of like origin, the pessimists, Nihilists, romanticists of pity, criminals, and men of vicious habits—the whole sphere in which the idea of "God" is that of Saviour....

The moral Christian values [are] to be regarded as the insurrection and mendacity of slaves (in comparison with the aristocratic values of the ancient world…

The Christian, the most puerile and backward man of this age, traces hope, peace, and the feeling of deliverance to a psychological inspiration on the part of God: being by nature a sufferer and a creature in need of repose, states of happiness, peace, and resignation, perforce seem strange to him, and seem to need some explanation…

Paganism—Christianity.—Paganism is that which says yea to all that is natural, it is innocence in being natural, "naturalness." Christianity is that which says no to all that is natural, it is a certain lack of dignity in being natural; hostility to Nature.

"Innocent":—Petronius is innocent, for instance. Beside this happy man a Christian is absolutely devoid of innocence. But since even the Christian status is ultimately only a natural condition, the term "Christian" soon begins to mean the counterfeiting of the psychological interpretation.

The Christian priest is from the root a mortal enemy of sensuality: one cannot imagine a greater contrast to his attitude than the guileless, slightly awed, and solemn attitude, which the religious rites of the most honourable women in Athens maintained in the presence of the symbol of sex. In all non-ascetic religions the procreative act is the secret per se: a sort of symbol of perfection and of the designs of the future: re-birth, immortality.

Our belief in ourselves is the greatest fetter, the most telling spur, and the strongest pinion. Christianity ought to have elevated the innocence of man to the position of an article of belief—men would then have become gods: in those days believing was still possible...

Buddha versus Christ.—Among the Nihilistic religions, Christianity and Buddhism may always be sharply distinguished. Buddhism is the expression of a fine evening, perfectly sweet and mild—it is a sort of gratitude towards all that lies hidden, including that which it entirely lacks, viz., bitterness, disillusionment, and resentment. Finally it possesses lofty intellectual love; it has got over all the subtlety of philosophical contradictions, and is even resting after it, though it is precisely from that source that it derives its intellectual glory and its glow as of a sunset (it originated in the higher classes).

Christianity is a degenerative movement, consisting of all kinds of decaying and excremental elements: it is not the expression of the downfall of a race, it is, from the root, an agglomeration of all the morbid elements which are mutually attractive and which gravitate to one another.... It is therefore not a national religion, not determined by race: it appeals to the disinherited everywhere; it consists of a foundation of resentment against all that is successful and dominant: it is in need of a symbol which represents the damnation of everything successful and dominant. It is opposed to every form of intellectual movement, to all philosophy: it takes up the cudgels for idiots, and utters a curse upon all intellect. Resentment against those who are gifted, learned, intellectually independent: in all these it suspects the element of success and domination.

-- The Will to Power, An Attempted Transvaluation of all Values, Book I, II, III, and IV, by Friedrich Nietzsche


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[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] I was the person who kept saying that maybe we were guilty,
maybe we did make an ethical error by performing in a temple.
This guilt made me want
to belittle myself, like the holy fools did.

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[Cartoon: [Pussy Rioters] This court manifests will of one man.]

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[Ekaterina Degot, Art Curator] The very sense and the result of this action
became possible exactly because it was done in a temple
and not just somewhere in the street.
If they’d just written in a newspaper
that they were against something,
it wouldn’t have had the same effect.

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[Female Judge Syrova] What we are trying today is not a political issue,
it’s not about the presidential or parliamentary election.
It’s a criminal issue.
It’s hooliganism with religious motives.

[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] We thought we’d have Article 282. Religious extremism.
We never expected “hooliganism.”
Many lawyers told us they’d never expected it.


[Ekaterina Degot, Art Curator] They went out there and started praying.
Praying to the Holy Virgin. Is this prayer legitimate?
It’s a difficult question, even theologically.

[Crowd] Free Pussy Riot! Free Pussy Riot!

[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] Those meetings in prison trucks
turned into endless conversations,
similar to seminars.
Few people there could understand us.
So we’d sit there in a circle and discuss,

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often it was religious issues.
Katya understood less,
while Masha and I were busy discussing
the Acts of the Apostles,
that’s why we always felt great in court,
few people could figure out why.

[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] You know the situation well. You know there’s no one behind you.
Not Berezovsky, nor Guelman, nor the U.S. State Department.
That your action wasn’t ordered by anyone,
that you act of your own accord, by intuition,
that you write songs and texts with your own brain,
no one does it for you.


Had we been separated, our faces wouldn’t be that happy.
But after we saw each other after six months of separation
to feel happy it took us only looking at each other’s faces
and realizing how harmonious our concept was.
With all our individual peculiarities,
different approaches, biographies,
without any discussions we come to
similar results in what matters most.

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[Female Judge Syrova] They illegally penetrated the fenced part of the temple
designated for religious solemnization
by which deeply insulting and hurting
the present Russian Orthodox believers.

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[Andrey Yerofeyev, Art Curator] The proverbial “hurt feelings,”
the main argument used in the criminal trial
against the artists --
I had been tried as well as an exhibition curator --
those hurt feelings are a great argument
for the investigation and the court
because it needs no evidence.

[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] Our actions in the temple …
I admit that I was in the temple and made this performance
but there was no motive of religious hatred and animosity
nor hatred and animosity towards any social group.
I do not understand why breaking the internal code
of conduct in a church

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means that the perpetrator hates Christianity.

[Petr Verzilov, artist, “Voyna” group] The judge Syrova and the prosecution

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didn’t try to keep any decorum of serving the justice.

[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] There were seemingly no violations of Russian laws
because people can be transported to court every day
but actually it’s a torture,

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we’re filing a suit in the European court, for torture,
several articles of the Human rights were violated.



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[Cartoon: Pussy Rioters: We want to go to the bathroom!
Judge: Not this time!]

[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] First, we were brought to court every day,
we were woken up at 5 AM, we came back late in the evening
and only had time to go to sleep.
They are supposed to give you hot water and a chance to eat –
they didn’t, or they’d give us hot water
and after a second would open the door
“Go out, we’re going to court.”

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[Police Officer] Get out, guys, let your colleagues make photos, too.

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[People Outisde] Free Pussy Riot! Free Pussy Riot!

[Woman] You see, only now you begin to understand what sanctity is,
because the sanctity of tombs …

[Woman 2] You can’t compare a tomb to a church,
these are totally different things …

[Woman 1] No, they are not.

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It is in church that the funeral service is performed.

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[Lev Rubinstein, Poet] Thanks to the efforts of the punitive bodies
it has become a world-scale event.

Poet, performer and columnist Lev Rubinstein (Moscow, 1947) is one of the founders of Russian conceptualism. With his passionate social engagement and nuanced personal statements, he is a role model for the young avant-garde. Pussy Riot poses for snapshots on his side, and his blogs and Facebook posts unleash a flood of responses.

In interviews, he advocates equal rights for minorities, the release of political prisoners and the cessation of armed violence. In his own words, Rubinstein is resentful of the current regime, which seems to uphold the standards and values of the criminal circuit and the secret services, for 'aesthetic reasons': 'They regard any sign of goodwill, any concession, as a weakness . . . Words like generosity and mercy sound foreign to them'. Via social media, Rubinstein urges abstainers to attend protest meetings because of 'something that sometimes, and only by approximation, can be called conscience'.

The same unwillingness to play with empty concepts is characteristic of his poetry. In the 1970s, he resorted to writing with only punctuation, suggesting silences with various connotations. The punctuation marks were written on little cards, identical to those in library catalogues. Rubinstein's 'note-card library' was born.

Minimalistic stacks were followed by sets with texts such as, 'Attention! Message follows', or sentences on different topics:

41. Oysters vary in number. What, you didn't know that?

42. You should have taught him good manners earlier. It's too late now.

43. Ideally, by Wednesday. Thursday is the absolute deadline.

Such poems, often named after a famous work of art or scientific concept are symphonies in cacophonous disguise, in which the disorderly choir of everyday life clashes with solemn interludes or demands for reflection:

55. QUIET!

56. Kind of a man. He kind of loves. He kind of suffers. He kind of speaks. He kind of breathes. He kind of lives.

-- Lev Rubinstein, by Poetry International Web


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[Female Judge Syrova] To find definition of values of contemporary art …
well, it’s probably good for a rally speech
or writing an article for the internet or the printed press,
I’m ready to debate it outside the court.

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[Andrey Yerofeyev, Art Curator] Today, power in Russia is cynical to the utmost
and has no ideology.
Any ideology is just empty rhetoric and babble for it.
I think is how it treats the Russian Orthodox Church, too –
as a useful rhetoric that helps you do certain things,
including this selection of art.

[Prosecutor] It is not clear why we should summon artists as witnesses.
Your honour, this case is not about
problems of contemporary art …
What they can tell the court, that is Mr. Yerofeev, artists,
doctors …
is not relevant proof.

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[Cartoon: Prosecutor asks to reject all the testimony for the defense]

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[Elena Volkova, Cultural Critic] I was one of the experts of the defense.
They wouldn’t listen to us.
Actually, the trial violated all possible laws.

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[Female Judge Syrova] Defence attorney Polozov.

[Defence attorney Polozov] May it please the court.
I think that in absence of witnesses
the court will not be able to establish the objective truth,
which is prerequisite
for passing a proper legal judgement …

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[Anatoly Osmolovsky, Artist] Talking about Pussy Riot, I think
it’s a very successful art project.
As regards pictures,

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this is the one that started all modern art –
“The origin of the world.”
Out of this image, our world was born.

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Of course, it is a very metaphoric
of the artist Gustave Courbet.
In this sense, Pussy Riot –
the very name of the group is associated with this painting.

[Defence Attorney] They took off their coats, and threw them by the door
leading to the sanctuary symbolizing the Heaven’s gates –
the Holy gates –
and found themselves dressed improperly for the temple.

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Their clothes inexcusably opened different parts of their bodies,

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while they covered their faces
with masks of defiantly bright colours.

[Anatoly Osmolovsky, Artist] Another thing one can say about Pussy Riot

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is animation or objectification of Malevich’s paintings.

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Related to the celebration of the Liberalia is the Procession of the Argei, celebrated on March 16 and 17. The Argei were 27 sacred shrines created by the Numina (very powerful ancient gods who are divine beings without form or face) and found throughout the regions of Rome. However, modern scholars have not discovered their meaning or use.

-- Liberalia, by Wikipedia
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Re: Act & Punishment: The Pussy Riot Trials

Postby admin » Wed Aug 08, 2018 2:45 am

Part 6 of 6

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[Elena Volkova, Cultural Critic] What Pussy Riot did in the temple
continues the holy fools’ tradition.
It is important to remember
that provocation is not only peculiar for art
and a part of art.
This tradition dates back to the gospels,
and even earlier – to the biblical prophets.
Provocation exposes the essence of people’s state of souls.
It tears off the masks.
It’s no coincidence that talking about Pussy Riot
people often say that they put masks on
to tear them off the society.
It is important that this is the voice of truth
that takes an unexpected shape.
By conceiving a protest action
as a prayer in a church intuitively,
and consciously to a large extent
as they opposed the coupling of the church and the state,
they undug whole layers of questions
on the history of the Russian church.
And Russian history.
The story of boyarina Morozova is very special.
It’s an extremely strong confrontation,
a spiritual confrontation, woman vs. power.
A woman against the dual power
of the church on the one side, and the state on the other.
She was exiled to the Pafnutievo-Borovsky monastery.
She was incarcerated in an underground cellar
where she dies from cold and starvation.

[Female Judge Syrova] All defendants said that they are feminists
and they consider quite reasonable this prayer

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that equates feminists with the Holy Virgin

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and that feminism is appropriate in a Russian Orthodox church.

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All this is not true, as we know what constitutes a mortal sin,
leading, as believers think, to the death of the soul
including all unnatural manifestations of person
related to their human life.

[Ekaterina Degot, Art Curator] Their voice, of course, is that

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of the “oppressed woman of the Orient.”
That’s why they wear balaclavas.
Actually, I see these balaclavas as a kind of burqa.

[Female Judge Syrova] Alyokhina, do you wish to express your attitude
to the charges?

[Alyokhina Maria Vladimorivna] Yes. I do.
I do not admit guilt of Article 213 Part 2,

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and I think that in a trial of a case related to this article,
the ideological issues are as important as the factual ones.
As we are talking about the motives,
and motives come from ideology.
Thus, we can’t, nor can the court,
but take into account ideology.
The prosecution tries
to downplay the ideological and the artistic elements,
but it is those that are crucial.

[Woman protester] Honour, dignity, and no men around.

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They’re all priests, strip dancers, mannequins, policemen,
but no men around, and no one can protect the motherland,
while we, fools, have taught not to live our own lives,
but to live that of the country, of the people.

[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] The only thing of the massive body of information there was
that was introduced into evidence
was the original video file, found on a notebook,
I note, belonging to none of the defendants,
with a recording of the events of February 21.

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Those video files work for our defence
and demonstrate the following:
Pussy Riot acted for 40 seconds,
in which time they managed to voice,
without any background music
the first verse of the composition
“Mother of God, Chase Putin Away,”
namely
“Black robe, golden epaulettes, all parishioners crawl to bow,
the phantom of liberty is in heaven,

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gay pride sent to Siberia in chains.”
This verse is enough to talk about a political motivation.

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[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] Art is a political phenomenon
and as such is unbeneficial
for authoritarian authorities like ours.
While actionism, media actionism, that we do
is a protest against it.
An attempt to break through to people,
showing there can be art in a society, every day.

[TV Reporter] There’s a case on the events of the 6th of May,

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other criminal cases …

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[Police] [Knock his microphone down] Hush! [Take him away]

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[Female Judge Syrova] Thus, a meticulous planning of the joint action

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by the members of the criminal group,
careful premeditation of every stage of the crime
and usage of props let them carry out successfully
all stages of the premeditated action
and come to the closing stage.

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[Crowd] Mother of God, chase Putin away!

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Free Pussy Riot!
Free Pussy Riot!

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[Dusty Pink Masked Pussy Riot participant] Yes, contemporary art is based on conflicts,
yes, it is provocation.
It’s a provocation of a little girl that cries
“The king is naked!”

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[Protesters] Free Pussy Riot! Free Pussy Riot!

[Police] [Carrying protesters away]

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[Crowd] Well done! Well done!

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[Faith No More, Arena Moscow] [With masks] [Singing “We Care a Lot.”]

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[Alexander Cheparukhin Musical Producer] I invited Faith No More to Moscow
for the Creation of Peace festival
but what is interesting is that
they carried out the action,
when they even invited
girls from Pussy Riot
unbeknownst to me.
It was five years that Peter Gabriel told me

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he was deeply concerned with human rights in Putin’s Russia.
After that, Sting made a statement here.

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Madonna, you know, a number of actions.

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Johnny Rotten, dedicated “Rebellion,”
his festival in Blackpool to them.
Many wrote personal letters.

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Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea and Anthony Kieddis,

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Alex Kapranos from Franz Ferdinand,

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Robert Plant’s guitarist Justin Adams – different people.

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Paul McCartney is the main artist of all times and peoples
for several generations of Soviet and post-Soviet people.
I wrote a very passionate letter to him.
It was two days before the court decision.
In one hour, I got a letter from McCartney.
A news sensation: McCartney supported Pussy Riot.

Pussy Riot Theatre

In December 2016, Maria Alyokhina and music producer Alexander Cheparukhin started a new project – Pussy Riot Theatre with Riot Days - a play based on Alyokhina's book Riot Days (published in UK in Summer 2017). There are 4 people on stage: 2 women and 2 men. Maria Alyokhina herself, Kyril Masheka - her main stage partner plus Nastya and Max of the music duo AWOTT (Asian Women On The Telephone). The project is produced by Alexander Cheparukhin and directed by Yury Muravitsky - one of the leading Russian theatre directors.

-- by Kulturfabrik


[Le Monde
New York Times
Chicago Tribune
BBC

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CNN

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Yoko Ono]

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[Oleg Kuli, Artist] They are great people, they are saints!
They quote the Bible, St. Paul Nietzsche.
Most cultured, most intelligent people.
This is what makes them strong. Forget about the opposition.
In this sense, “The Black square” is nothing,
the Pissoir is nothing, it’s all nothing.
Only Pussy Riot as this anonymous shining spontaneity,
the spiritual practices, the art practices,
the scientific practices all met strangely
and this is the focal point
where it all exploded and now there will be something new.
Brand new, and all across the board. It’s a dandelion.
There was a firm centre, but now it’s all over the place,
in all directions, 360 degrees,
There’s no tradition any more. New tradition is formed.
That’s all those stars lined up starting with Madonna
with those Pussy Riot tattoos, means it’s something different.
They instigated this desire in the world
by their ethereal freedom
and touching all points simultaneously,
they don’t “x” anything.

[Female Judge Syrova] Defendant Tolokonnikova testified in court hearings
that she was actively dissatisfied with the fact
on March 4th, 2012,
there would be an election
and the head of state would be Putin and the PM Medveev.
His Holiness Patriarch Kirill exhorted believers

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to give their voices to Putin,
His Holiness echoed the words of Vladislav Surkov
and Ramzan Kadryrov
who declared that Putin’s power came from God.
She, Tolokonnikova, was always saddened
and devastated by such declarations.

[Ekaterina Degot, Art Curator] I had always told my students

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many of whom wanted to do something
along the lines of Voina,
or even before,
that political actionism of the kind
should be done only by someone prepared to go to prison
and at the trial make a speech
that would go down the history of Russian social thought.
That’s what I told them: if you’re ready – do it,
if not – better not then. Here came people who are ready.
I take my hat off to them.

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[Female Judge Syrova] Take your seats!
Defendants, you have your right for the allocution.

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[Alyokhina Maria Vladimorivna] I’m so sorry.
A lot of words have been said here, and you still don’t get it.
You play cunning when you say our apologies are insincere.
What else do you want to hear?
For me, only this trial has the status of a so-called trial.
I am not afraid of you, I am not afraid of lies and fiction,
the poorly hidden deceit in the verdict of the so-called court.

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[Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna] The system cannot hide
the repressive character of this trial.
Once again, in the eyes of the world,
Russia doesn’t look the way Vladimir Putin wants to show it
in his many international meetings.
All steps toward the state of law that he promised to make
were not made.
While his statement that our trial
will come to a just and objective verdict
is yet another fraud of the country and the world.
That’s it. Thank you.

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[Pussy Riot Audience] [Clapping]

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[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] We are in desperate circumstances
but we don’t despair,
we are persecuted, but not abandoned,
open people are easy to humiliate and destroy
but when I am weak, I am strong.
Listen to us.
To us, and not to Arkady Mamomontov on us.
Do not distort and pervert all that we say.
And let us enter a dialogue, a contact with the country
that is ours as well,
and not only Putin’s and the Patriarch’s.
I hope that everybody remembers well what Jews told Christ:
“For a good work, we stone you not, but for blasphemy.”
Plus, we could do worse than keeping in mind
the following characteristic of Christ
“he has a demon and is insane.”
I think that if all authorities, kings,
elders, presidents and prime-ministers,
people and judges knew well and understood what means
“I desire mercy and not sacrifice,”
the innocent wouldn’t be condemned.

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And now I want to quote the following lines:
“Open all doors, take off your epaulettes,
breathe with us the air of freedom.”
That’s it.

[Pussy Riot Audience] [Clapping]

[Female Judge Syrova] Dear all, we are not in a theatre.

[Oleg Kulik, Artist] Like one saint said, either you love all or you love nothing.
One can’t discriminate.
In this respect, this is not a cultural action, it’s religious.
It’s all together in this strange union.

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The good and the evil are together,
it’s a special religious action.
And it was perceived as such, by church people too.
They understand they must be destroyed.
It’s impossible. God is substituted.
But this action is equal to God, equal to God’s manifestation.
That they cannot accept. What about the rest, then?


Abraxas is the God who is difficult to grasp. His power is greatest, because man does not see it. From the sun he draws the summum bonum; from the devil the infinum malum; but from Abraxas LIFE, altogether indefinite, the mother of good and evil....Good and evil unite in the flame. Good and evil unite in the growth of the tree. In their divinity life and love stand opposed.

-- The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung


Since the Apocalypse we now know again that God is not only to be loved, but also to be feared. He fills us with evil as well as with good, otherwise he would not need to be feared; and because he wants to become man, the uniting of his antinomy must take place in man. This involves man in a new responsibility. He can no longer wriggle out of it on the plea of his littleness and nothingness, for the dark God has slipped the atom bomb and chemical weapons into his hands and given him the power to empty out the apocalyptic vials of wrath on his fellow creatures. Since he has been granted an almost godlike power, he can no longer remain blind and unconscious. He must know something of God's nature and of metaphysical processes if he is to understand himself and thereby achieve gnosis of the Divine.

-- Answer to Job, by C.G. Jung


[Narrator] The relationship between a villain and their rival is more complicated than the question of right versus wrong, good versus evil. Together, they form a dynamic that is, at times, interdependent. A villain cannot exist without a hero, and a hero, his or her villain.

Necessary Evil: Super Villains of DC Comics, by DC Comics


The central prescription of pragmatism is compromise. Yet the consequences of pragmatism are inescapably toxic. As Ayn Rand pointed out, “In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.”46 That which is true and rational and right has nothing to gain from that which is false and irrational and wrong. The latter can offer no value. Those who practice any irrational doctrine are, of necessity, parasites. Since the practice of irrationality does not work—since ignoring or denying relevant facts cannot result in the achievement of the values that human existence requires—people engaged in irrationality endure only thanks to the support they receive from the rational. When a person makes concessions to irrationality, he is cooperating in his own exploitation. He is providing the lifeline to those who (knowingly or not) suck his blood. While a given pragmatist may not look as obviously rotten as an overt preacher of a more blatantly noxious thesis, by appeasing evil through inappropriate compromises, he paves the way for the more deliberately evil to be effective.

-- The Menace of Pragmatism, by Tara Smith


[Crowd] Freedom! Freedom!

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[Female Judge Syrova] Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna is found guilty

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of committing a crime provided by the Article 213, Part 2
of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation
and sentenced to imprisonment for two years
in a general regime penal colony.
Samutsevich Yekaterina Stanislavovna is found guilty

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of committing a crime provided by the Article 213, Part 2
of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation
and sentenced to imprisonment for two years
in a general regime penal colony.
Alyokhina Maria Vladimorovna is found guilty

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of committing a crime provided by the Article 213, Part 2
of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation
and sentenced to imprisonment for two years
in a general regime penal colony.

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[Man] Shame. Not just.

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[Elena Volkova, Cultural Critic] A very interesting gesture:
while she makes the sign of the cross with two fingers,
as opposed to three,

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Nadya Tolokonnikova enters the court
making the V sign, victory,
two fingers, too.

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[Crowd] Freedom! Freedom!

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[Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna] What happened to us was an artistic action.
But not ours, it was an artistic action by Putin.
That’s why to say where the beginning and the end are …
Well, we know the beginning
but the end of this action is too early to tell.

[Petr Verzilov, artist, “Voyna” group] After this story, it transpired

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that art can be a fully valid participant
in the political process.
It can influence and change the situation
according to the artists’ tasks.

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[Oleg Kulik, Artist] You see, Christ found immortality
and nothing could be done to him.
When the first Christians sang
it was, “You can’t reach Him with your hatred,
You can’t reach Him with your persecution,”
The same is true for Pussy Riot.
There’s nothing you can do to them.

[Elena Volkova, Cultural Critic] Let it be a defeat, alright.

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Christ was defeated too, he was crucified.
This is a high defeat.
Pussy Riot were defeated, too,
and it was a high defeat, like Christ’s.
They found themselves in prison, but they are changing us.

[Singing] Free Pussy Riot!
Free Pussy Riot!
Free Pussy Riot!
Free Pussy Riot!

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Director and Scriptwriter: Evgeny Mitta
Camera: Vladimir Kanareykin, Alexander Kuznetsov, Igor Malakhov
Editing: Ignor Malakhov, Sergey Ivanov
Music and Sound Design: Demyan Kurchenko
Assistant Director: Alyona (Belka) Gorlanova
Project Coordinator: Anna Samarskaya
Motion Design: Yury Gohubev
Graphic Design: Stepan Lukyanov
Grading: Yury Vorokhin
Subtitle Transation: Sergey Polatovsky
Subtitle Rendering: Daniil Medvedev
Legal Footwork: Feodor Nikonov
Musical Composions:
Free Pussy Riot
written by Peaces & Simonne Jones
courtesy of I U She Music GMBH
Peacesrocks.com
Faith No More
We Care a Lot
Pussy Riot
Kill the Sexist
Release the Cobblestones
Kropotkin Vodka
Death to Prison, Freedom to Protests
Putin Zassal
Mother of God, Drive Putin Away

[Captain] Well, shall we talk a little about this promotion of yours? You have mentioned the possibility to your wife I suppose?

[Montag] Yes, sir.

[Captain] And her reaction?

[Montag] Uh, she thought, sir, we might be able to have a second wall-screen, sir.

[Captain] Oh, you only have the one wall converted. I see. These matters of promotion are much more important to a married man, aren't they?

[Montag] I guess so, sir.

[Captain] Montag ... you have no children, I believe.

[Montag] No, sir. We have no children.

[Captain] Well, then, a commission seems in order. And I can't see any reason offhand why it shouldn't go through. You understand, of course, with the new amendment to the law, we must expect to be worked really very hard. Very hard, indeed, until we can arrange for new volunteers to be drafted.

[Montag] Yes, sir, I heard the men talking about it.

[Captain] How long have you been with us?

[Montag] For six years, sir. Yes, yes for six years. No, no, no, for five years, sir. For five years.

[Captain] Montag has one quality I appreciate greatly. He says very little. Have you seen my personal medallion? Oh, it's a remarkable likeness. You must remind me to let you have one sometime.

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Now, let's get back to this promotion of yours. I've been looking through your file. There are only six back views. We need 12 of them, you know. Two sets of six. Remember that, Montag.

Fahrenheit 451, directed by Francois Truffaut


Kirill Medvedev & Arkady Kots Group
Ku Ku Ku The Demons are Sitting on the Branch
Lyrics: Alexander Brener
Special thanks to Elena Bakanova for inspiration and support
Producer: Evgeny Mitta
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Re: Act & Punishment: The Pussy Riot Trials

Postby admin » Wed Aug 08, 2018 2:54 am

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot’s prison letters to Slavoj Žižek
Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova is currently in a prison hospital in Siberia; here she and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek meet in an extraordinary exchange of letters
The Guardian
16 November 2013

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Slavoj Žižek, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova
‘We are the children of Dionysus, sailing in a barrel and not ­recognising any authority’ … Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot writing to Slavoj Žižek. Photograph: David Levene/AFP/Getty/Guardian


2 January 2013
Dear Nadezhda,

I hope you have been able to organise your life in prison around small rituals that make it tolerable, and that you have time to read. Here are my thoughts on your predicament.

John Jay Chapman, an American political essayist, wrote this about radicals in 1900: “They are really always saying the same thing. They don’t change; everybody else changes. They are accused of the most incompatible crimes, of egoism and a mania for power, indifference to the fate of their cause, fanaticism, triviality, lack of humour, buffoonery and irreverence. But they sound a certain note. Hence the great practical power of persistent radicals. To all appearance, nobody follows them, yet everyone believes them. They hold a tuning-fork and sound A, and everybody knows it really is A, though the time-honoured pitch is G flat.” Isn’t this a good description of the effect of Pussy Riot performances? In spite of all accusations, you sound a certain note. It may appear that people do not follow you, but secretly, they believe you, they know you are telling the truth, or, even more, you are standing for truth.

But what is this truth? Why are the reactions to Pussy Riot performances so violent, not only in Russia? All hearts were beating for you as long as you were perceived as just another version of the liberal-democratic protest against the authoritarian state. The moment it became clear that you rejected global capitalism, reporting on Pussy Riot became much more ambiguous. What is so disturbing about Pussy Riot to the liberal gaze is that you make visible the hidden continuity between Stalinism and contemporary global capitalism.

[Žižek then explores what he sees as a global trend towards limiting democracy.] Since the 2008 crisis, this distrust of democracy, once limited to third-world or post-Communist developing economies, is gaining ground in western countries. But what if this distrust is justified? What if only experts can save us?

But the crisis provided proof that it is these experts who don’t know what they are doing, rather than the people. In western Europe, we are seeing that the ruling elite know less and less how to rule. Look at how Europe is dealing with Greece.

No wonder, then, that Pussy Riot make us all uneasy – you know very well what you don’t know, and you don’t pretend to have any quick or easy answers, but you are telling us that those in power don’t know either. Your message is that in Europe today the blind are leading the blind. This is why it is so important that you persist. In the same way that Hegel, after seeing Napoleon riding through Jena, wrote that it was as if he saw the World Spirit riding on a horse, you are nothing less than the critical awareness of us all, sitting in prison.

Comradely greetings, Slavoj

23 February 2013
Dear Slavoj,

Once, in the autumn of 2012, when I was still in the pre-trial prison in Moscow with other Pussy Riot activists, I visited you. In a dream, of course.

I see your argument about horses, the World Spirit, and about tomfoolery and disrespect, as well as why and how all these elements are so connected to each other.

Pussy Riot did turn out be a part of this force, the purpose of which is criticism, creativity and co-creation, experimentation and constantly provocative events. Borrowing Nietzsche’s definition, we are the children of Dionysus, sailing in a barrel and not recognising any authority.

We are a part of this force that has no final answers or absolute truths, for our mission is to question. There are architects of apollonian statics and there are (punk) singers of dynamics and transformation. One is not better than the other. But it is only together that we can ensure the world functions in the way Heraclitus defined it: “This world has been and will eternally be living on the rhythm of fire, inflaming according to the measure, and dying away according to the measure. This is the functioning of the eternal world breath.”

We are the rebels asking for the storm, and believing that truth is only to be found in an endless search. If the “World Spirit” touches you, do not expect that it will be painless.

Laurie Anderson sang: “Only an expert can deal with the problem.” It would have been nice if Laurie and I could cut these experts down to size and take care of our own problems. Because expert status by no means grants access to the kingdom of absolute truth.

Two years of prison for Pussy Riot is our tribute to a destiny that gave us sharp ears, allowing us to sound the note A when everyone else is used to hearing G flat.

At the right moment, there will always come a miracle in the lives of those who childishly believe in the triumph of truth over lies, of mutual assistance, of those who live according to the economics of the gift.

Nadia

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Nadezhda Tolokonnikova in a single confinement cell at a penal colony in Partza on 25 September 2013. Photograph: Ilya Shablinsky/AFP/Getty Images

4 April 2013
Dear Nadezhda,

I was so pleasantly surprised when your letter arrived – the delay made me fear that the authorities would prevent our communication. I was deeply honoured, flattered even, by my appearance in your dream.

You are right to question the idea that the “experts” close to power are competent to make decisions. Experts are, by definition, servants of those in power: they don’t really think, they just apply their knowledge to the problems defined by those in power (how to bring back stability? how to squash protests?). So are today’s capitalists, the so-called financial wizards, really experts? Are they not just stupid babies playing with our money and our fate? I remember a cruel joke from Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be Or Not to Be. When asked about the German concentration camps in occupied Poland, the Nazi officer snaps back: “We do the concentrating, and the Poles do the camping.” Does the same not hold for the Enron bankruptcy in 2002? The thousands of employees who lost their jobs were certainly exposed to risk, but with no true choice – for them the risk was like blind fate. But those who did have insight into the risks, and the ability to intervene (the top managers), minimised their risks by cashing in their stocks before the bankruptcy. So it is true that we live in a society of risky choices, but some people (the managers) do the choosing, while others (the common people) do the risking.

For me, the true task of radical emancipatory movements is not just to shake things out of their complacent inertia, but to change the very co-ordinates of social reality so that, when things return to normal, there will be a new, more satisfying, “apollonian statics”. And, even more crucially, how does today’s global capitalism enter this scheme?

The Deleuzian philosopher Brian Massumi tells how capitalism has already overcome the logic of totalising normality and adopted the logic of erratic excess: “The more varied, and even erratic, the better. Normality starts to lose its hold. The regularities start to loosen. This loosening is part of capitalism’s dynamic.”

But I feel guilty writing this: who am I to explode in such narcissistic theoretical outbursts when you are exposed to very real deprivations? So please, if you can and want, do let me know about your situation in prison: about your daily rhythm, about the little private rituals that make it easier to survive, about how much time you have to read and write, about how other prisoners and guards treat you, about your contact with your child … true heroism resides in these seemingly small ways of organising one’s life in order to survive in crazy times without losing dignity.

With love, respect and admiration, my thoughts are with you!

Slavoj

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A Pussy Riot protest in Red Square in Moscow in January 2012. Photograph: Denis Sinyakov/Reuters

16 April 2013
Dear Slavoj,

Has modern capitalism really overtaken the logic of totalising norms? Or is it willing to make us believe that it has overpassed the logic of hierarchical structures and normalisation?

As a child I wanted to go into advertising. I had a love affair with the advertising industry. And this is why I am in a position to judge its merits. The anti-hierarchical structures and rhizomes of late capitalism are its successful ad campaign. Modern capitalism has to manifest itself as flexible and even eccentric. Everything is geared towards gripping the emotion of the consumer. Modern capitalism seeks to assure us that it operates according to the principles of free creativity, endless development and diversity. It glosses over its other side in order to hide the reality that millions of people are enslaved by an all-powerful and fantastically stable norm of production. We want to reveal this lie.

You should not worry that you are exposing theoretical fabrications while I am supposed to suffer the “real hardship”. I value the strict limits, and the challenge. I am genuinely curious: how will I cope with this? And how can I turn this into a productive experience for me and my comrades? I find sources of inspiration; it contributes to my own development. Not because of, but in spite of the system. And in my struggle, your thoughts, ideas and stories are helpful to me.

I am happy to correspond with you. I await your reply and I wish you good luck in our common cause.

Nadia

Link to video: Pussy Riot on Putin, ‘punk prayers’ and superheroes

10 June 2013
Dear Nadezhda,

I felt deeply ashamed after reading your reply. You wrote: “You should not worry about the fact that you are exposing theoretical fabrications while I am supposed to suffer the ‘real hardship’.” This simple sentence made me aware that the final sentiment in my last letter was false: my expression of sympathy with your plight basically meant, “I have the privilege of doing real theory and teaching you about it while you are good for reporting on your experience of hardship …” Your last letter demonstrates that you are much more than that, that you are an equal partner in a theoretical dialogue. So my sincere apologies for this proof of how deeply entrenched is male chauvinism, especially when it is masked as sympathy for the other’s suffering, and let me go on with our dialogue.

It is the crazy dynamics of global capitalism that make effective resistance to it so difficult and frustrating. Recall the great wave of protests that spilled all over Europe in 2011, from Greece and Spain to London and Paris. Even if there was no consistent political platform mobilising the protesters, the protests functioned as part of a large-scale educational process: the protesters’ misery and discontent were transformed into a great collective act of mobilisation – hundreds of thousands gathered in public squares, proclaiming that they had enough, that things could not go on like that. However, what these protests add up to is a purely negative gesture of angry rejection and an equally abstract demand for justice, lacking the ability to translate this demand into a concrete political programme.

What can be done in such a situation, where demonstrations and protests are of no use, where democratic elections are of no use? Can we convince the tired and manipulated crowds that we are not only ready to undermine the existing order, to engage in provocative acts of resistance, but also to offer the prospect of a new order?

The Pussy Riot performances cannot be reduced just to subversive provocations. Beneath the dynamics of their acts, there is the inner stability of a firm ethico-political attitude. In some deeper sense, it is today’s society that is caught in a crazy capitalist dynamic with no inner sense and measure, and it is Pussy Riot that de facto provides a stable ethico-political point. The very existence of Pussy Riot tells thousands that opportunist cynicism is not the only option, that we are not totally disoriented, that there still is a common cause worth fighting for.

So I also wish you good luck in our common cause. To be faithful to our common cause means to be brave, especially now, and, as the old saying goes, luck is on the side of the brave!

Yours, Slavoj

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Nadezhda Tolokonnikova in court in April this year. Photograph: Maxim Shipenkov/EPA

13 July 2013
Dear Slavoj,

In my last letter, written in haste as I worked in the sewing shop, I was not as clear as I should have been about the distinction between how “global capitalism” functions in Europe and the US on the one hand, and in Russia on the other. However, recent events in Russia – the trial of Alexei Navalny, the passing of unconstitutional, anti-freedom laws – have infuriated me. I feel compelled to speak about the specific political and economic practices of my country. The last time I felt this angry was in 2011 when Putin declared he was running for the presidency for a third time. My anger and resolve led to the birth of Pussy Riot. What will happen now? Time will tell.

Here in Russia I have a strong sense of the cynicism of so-called first-world countries towards poorer nations. In my humble opinion, “developed” countries display an exaggerated loyalty towards governments that oppress their citizens and violate their rights. The European and US governments freely collaborate with Russia as it imposes laws from the middle ages and throws opposition politicians in jail. They collaborate with China, where oppression is so bad that my hair stands on end just to think about it. What are the limits of tolerance? And when does tolerance become collaboration, conformism and complicity?

To think, cynically, “let them do what they want in their own country”, doesn’t work any longer, because Russia and China and countries like them are now part of the global capitalist system.

Russia under Putin, with its dependence on raw materials, would have been massively weakened if those nations that import Russian oil and gas had shown the courage of their convictions and stopped buying. Even if Europe were to take as modest a step as passing a “Magnitsky law” [the Magnitsky Act in the US allows it to place sanctions on Russian officials believed to have taken part in human-rights violations], morally it would speak volumes. A boycott of the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014 would be another ethical gesture. But the continued trade in raw materials constitutes a tacit approval of the Russian regime – not through words, but through money. It betrays the desire to protect the political and economic status quo and the division of labour that lies at the heart of the world economic system.

You quote Marx: “A social system that seizes up and rusts … cannot survive.” But here I am, working out my prison sentence in a country where the 10 people who control the biggest sectors of the economy are Vladimir Putin’s oldest friends. He studied or played sports with some, and served in the KGB with others. Isn’t this a social system that has seized up? Isn’t this a feudal system?

I thank you sincerely, Slavoj, for our correspondence and can hardly wait for your reply.

Yours, Nadia

• The correspondence was organised by Philosophie magazine in cooperation with New Times. Longer versions can be found in German at philomag.de or in French at philomag.com. Tolokonnikova’s letters were translated from Russian by Galia Ackerman
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Re: Act & Punishment: The Pussy Riot Trials

Postby admin » Wed Aug 08, 2018 3:26 am

Photos Leak of Jailed Pussy Riot Member's Punk Protest-Orgy in Museum
by Joe Lynch
fuse.tv
August 21, 2012

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


Last Friday Russian courts sentenced three members of punk protest outfit Pussy Riot to two years in prison for performing an anti-President Putin song in a church. While many artists and politicians blasted the decision, not many people know a lot about the women who have become the face of prosecuted free speech in Russia.

Well, the Internet has just provided us with more than we ever needed to know—or see—of one member of Pussy Riot.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, one of the three women found guilty, attracted special attention from the beginning. A philosophy student and mother by age 18, Tolokonnikova was—according to the Guardian—made out to be the "evil genius behind Pussy Riot" by the prosecution during their trial.

They noted that performing the "punk prayer" against Putin wasn't Tolokonnikova's first time creating a public spectacle to protest presidential politics. In February of 2008, she participated in an event called "F—k for the heir Puppy Bear!" which slammed Dmitry Medvedev, who was running for president at the time with Putin's support (he won and was succeeded by Putin in May 2012).

As you might have guessed with a title like "F—k for the heir Puppy Bear!" this wasn't your typical protest. Actually, this particular instance of civil disobedience found members of another Russian punk group called Voina (of which Tolokonnikova was a member) undressing in Moscow's Biological Museum and tearing into a graphic, public orgy.

The Internet's ravenous appetite for naked pictures of everyone has now yielded photographic evidence of Tolokonnikova's involvement in this museum orgy (what, you haven't made it in a museum before?). Compounding the weirdness is the fact that Tolokonnikova was very pregnant at the time—it seems she gave birth four days after jumping on the protest-orgy train.

So…. yeah. These pics are obviously very NSFW and you should only click at your own risk. But if you're compelled to check them out, Hipster Runoff has them (along with an "Eiffel tower in Russia?" joke) over here.

BTW, if you're interested in actually, you know, HEARING Pussy Riot's music, Washington Post has rounded up their limited catalog.

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-- Google images
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Re: Act & Punishment: The Pussy Riot Trials

Postby admin » Wed Aug 08, 2018 4:07 am

They shall not pass
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 8/7/18

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

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Halte la! On ne passe pas !
French card, 1915


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On ne passe pas !
Propaganda poster by Maurice Neumont (fr)


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A banner reading ¡No pasarán! Madrid will be the graveyard of fascism from the Siege of Madrid; photo taken by Soviet journalist Mikhail Koltsov

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On ne passe pas! on a French medal commemorating the Battle of Verdun

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The people of East London rallied to Cable Street on the 4th October 1936 and forced back the march of the fascist Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts through the streets of the East End. 'They Shall Not Pass'. Red plaque commemorating the Battle of Cable Street

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Tomb of the unknown soldier at the Mausoleum of Mărășești with the inscription "Pe aici nu se trece"

"They shall not pass" (French: On ne passe pas !; Spanish: ¡No pasarán!; Romanian: Pe aici nu se trece!) is a slogan used to express determination to defend a position against an enemy. "On ne passe pas" literally means "one does not pass"; this being a common French idiom to express interdiction.

It was most famously used during the Battle of Verdun in the First World War by French General Robert Nivelle. It appears on propaganda posters, such as that by Maurice Neumont after the Second Battle of the Marne, which was later adopted on uniform badges by units manning the Maginot Line. Later during the war, it also was used by Romanian soldiers during the Battle of Mărășești (the Romanian translation of the phrase is "Pe aici nu se trece", literally meaning "One does not pass through here").

It was also used during the Spanish Civil War, this time at the Siege of Madrid by Dolores Ibárruri Gómez, a member of the Communist Party of Spain, in her famous "No pasarán" speech on 19 July 1936. The leader of the fascist forces, Generalísimo Francisco Franco, upon gaining Madrid, responded to this slogan by declaring "Hemos pasado" ("We have passed").

"¡No pasarán!" was used by British anti-fascists during the October 1936 Battle of Cable Street, and is still used in this context in some political circles. It was often accompanied by the words nosotros pasaremos (we will pass) to indicate that communists rather than fascists will be the ones to seize state power.[1]

... accompanied by the words nosotros pasaremos (we will pass) to indicate that fascists rather than communists will be the ones to seize state power.


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The flash and circle is a political symbol used by several organisations. It was first used by the British Union of Fascists (BUF), and was adopted in 1935….Oswald Mosley's post-war group the Union Movement and his National Party of Europe initiative continued to use the flash.
-- Flash and circle, by Wikipedia


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"¡No pasarán!" was used by British anti-fascists during the October 1936 Battle of Cable Street, and is still used in this context in some political circles.
-- They shall not pass, by Wikipedia


Tolokonnikova Nadezhda Andreevna, Pussy Riot


The phrase was brought to the public consciousness again following action in December 1943 by French-Canadian officer Paul Triquet of the Royal 22e Regiment; his action included his use of Nivelle's phrase "to win a key objective at Ortona, Italy, in the face of overwhelming German opposition."[2]

In the 1980s, the phrase ¡No pasarán! was a theme in the civil wars in Central America, particularly in Nicaragua.[3] Nicaragua no pasarán is also the title of a 1984 documentary by David Bradbury about the events in Nicaragua that led to the overthrow of Somoza's dictatorship.[4][5][6]

In popular culture

• The WWI first-person shooter video game, Battlefield 1, features a downloadable content update titled "They Shall Not Pass". The update features the Battle of Verdun, Battle of Soissons, Fort de Vaux, Second Battle of the Marne and the Nivelle Offensive.[7][8]
• The phrase is used in Max Brooks' World War Z.

See also

• Awake iron!
• Molon labe
• Order No. 227 (Stalin's "Not one step back" order)
• Venceremos
• Raised fist
• List of last stands

References

1. Audrey Gillan (2006-10-02). "Day the East End said No pasaran to Blackshirts". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 2012-06-21.
2. "French Canadian Wins Victoria Cross". Ottawa Citizen. March 6, 1944. Retrieved September 15, 2014.
3. Kunzle, David (1995). The Murals of Revolutionary Nicaragua, 1979–1992. University of California Press. p. 168. ISBN 9780520081925.
4. Kallen, Stuart A. (2009). The Aftermath of the Sandinista Revolution. Twenty-First Century Books. p. 152. ISBN 9780822590910.
5. "Nicaragua: No Pasaran". Frontline Films. Retrieved 30 June 2015.
6. FitzSimons, Trish; Laughren, Pat; Williamson, Dugald (2011). Australian Documentary: History, Practices and Genres. Cambridge University Press. p. 267. ISBN 9780521167994.
7. "Battlefield 1 Update Notes – They Shall Not Pass Update". Battlefield. Retrieved 2017-10-22.
8. "Battlefield 1: They Shall Not Pass guide: trench raider class, new maps, tanks, weapons, release date – everything you need to know". VG247.com. Retrieved 2017-10-22.
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