Words Will Break Cement (20 page)

I have mixed feelings right now about this trial. On one hand, we are expecting a guilty verdict now. Compared to the judicial machine, we are nobodies and we have lost. On the other hand, we have won. The entire world can see now that the case against us is trumped up. The system cannot hide the repressive nature of this trial. Yet again the world sees Russia not as Vladimir Putin tries to present it in his daily international meetings. None of the steps he has promised to take toward a rule-of-law society have actually been taken. And his declaration that the court in our case will be objective and will announce a just decision is yet another lie told to the whole country and the world. That’s all. Thank you.

The judge scheduled the sentencing for August 17, eight days later. Nadya, Maria, and Kat spent those days back in pretrial detention, going over all the signs. The prosecutor had asked for three years, but some of the victims’ lawyers had asked for a suspended sentence. Plus, Putin had said the sentence should not be too harsh. All of this pointed to a suspended sentence. On the other hand, Mark Feigin, who had grown glum right after the probable-cause hearing and never really recovered, had talked about a possible sentence of a year and a half. But he had also said he would petition to have the three women kept in pretrial detention if the sentence was that short—short?—and they could work in the same jail where they were now, perhaps in the kitchen or, better yet, the library. This seemed like a good option to Kat, though Maria and Nadya were thinking they might prefer a prison colony to the cramped monotony of jail. And then again, Volkova had mentioned that hooliganism was the kind of offense that, if you were found guilty, always got you three years of real time. That could happen too. It had clearly happened to a lot of other people.

T
HE CROWD GATHERED
in front of the courthouse on August 17 looked happy. It was a sunny day, and the faces in the crowd were so good, so familiar, that it seemed nothing terrible could happen. Back when people used to come to the courthouse for arrest hearings, someone—perhaps it was Petya—had coined the term
cultural festival
to replace
protest
or
vigil
. It had been forgotten since, but now the atmosphere actually felt festive. There was music, some people held up witty signs, and an occasional balaclava could be glimpsed. Orthodox believers were there too, with their signs, but, being clearly outnumbered by Pussy Riot supporters, they looked like bad actors playing themselves and not at all scary.

The judge began reading the verdict just after three. It was “guilty,” which surprised no one, but, following the tradition of Russian courts, the judge would plow through a tedious recounting of most testimony heard and evidence reviewed in the course of the trial before announcing the sentence; it could take hours. Some of the people in the crowd tuned their phones to radio stations that had reporters in the courthouse and stuck earphones in their ears; clumps of people convened around these listeners, looking at them expectantly, as though something depended on being first to hear the news.

“In sum, and in light of the danger to society caused by the offense committed, as well as the circumstances of the crime and its goals and motives,” the judge said just before six in the evening, “the court believes that justice can be served and the defendants can be reformed only if they are sentenced to time behind bars and are ordered to actually serve this time.”

“Two years,” said the people with headphones throughout the crowd.

“Two years,” the entire crowd sighed at once.

A shadow fell over hundreds of faces. The festivities were over. The mood had darkened.

It was as though something had fallen with a loud bang. A retired woman in the building across the street from the courthouse heard the sound and called the police. They discovered the sound had come from the roof, where someone had dropped a padlock. The police found a young man on the roof, and a lot of equipment: microphones, amplifiers, and four speakers large enough to blast the sound through the neighborhood, certainly large enough to make sure the windows of the courtroom across the narrow street shook. The police also found rock-climbing equipment.

It would have been a spectacular action. Three women were going to descend the wall of the building, tethered to cables hung from the roof, wearing balaclavas and singing:

In jail the state is stronger than time.

The more arrests there are, the happier.

Every arrest is a gift of love to the sexist

Who has been pumping his cheeks the way he pumps his chest and his abs.

But you can’t put us in a box.

Overthrow the Chekists,
*
do it better and more often.

Putin lights the fire of revolution.

He is bored and frightened of silence.

An execution to him is a rotten ashberry
*

And a long prison sentence a cause for nocturnal emissions.

The country is on the march, marching in the streets with nerve,

The country is on the march, marching to say good-bye to the regime,

The country is on the march, marching in feminist formation.

And Putin is on the march, marching to say good-bye.

Put the whole city in jail for May 6.
*

Seven years is not enough, give us eighteen.

Ban screaming, libel, going outside,

And take Lukashenko
*
to be your wife.

It had been a beautifully prepared action. The song had been mastered ahead of time, so it would blast from the speakers as the women descended the wall. The three women had trained with experienced rock climbers, practicing on abandoned buildings outside of Moscow. And they had hauled all that equipment up on the roof during the night. And Petya had told Pussy Riot’s international supporters to expect a big surprise after the sentencing, and his contact people had told everyone else. Some people thought this meant Pussy Riot would be released an hour or two after the sentencing.

But then someone had dropped a padlock.

Punishment

Kat

“
T
HE DRIVE BACK
after the sentencing was very strange. It was an open prisoner transport, the first time we had an open one.” Kat made it sound like they were taken back to jail in a convertible. It was just a prisoner transport with plain windows: no dark film, no curtains. It was a rambling old bus with the three of them and several special forces officers in riot gear inside. They could see the city and breathe its dusty summer air. Nadya was agitated, and one might have thought she felt happy. Maria had an emotionless air about her. She said, “That’s that,” as though she had expected this all along, which she had not. Kat felt angry. She cursed Putin and the patriarch. It was like she had nothing to lose—and neither did the special forces guys, who failed to reprimand her; one of them asked to have his picture taken with the three of them. They got to the jail. Nadya hugged Kat, then Maria, then Kat again. That was that.

All talk in the “spec” was now of life in penal colonies. This struck Kat as nothing more than a coincidence: one of her cellmates had also recently been sentenced, and another one would be sentenced imminently, so the only experienced one in the cell, a woman who called herself Irina Orlova, was telling them about life in the colonies morning to night now. To be more precise, she was telling them how awful it would be. She started with the hardships of the transport; some women spent grueling weeks going from train to transit jail back to train, lugging all their crap each time, facing hazing and sleepless nights at every step. “I don’t know if you’ll make it,” Orlova would say before moving on to the ways of the colonies. There would be hundreds of people to a barracks, she said. There would be work, unremitting, backbreaking slave labor. There would be no hot water, and the toilets would be outdoors. And the colony would likely be someplace where it was winter most of the year—with a break for a short scorching summer when the mosquitoes ate you alive and the smell spreading from the outdoor toilets knocked you over. The two less experienced inmates acted terrified. They sighed, perhaps cried a little; one of them kept repeating “I hope they don’t make me go” over and over again, and then asked for more detail.

The technique of placing an older, more experienced inmate in a cell to cow and pressure younger ones into a pliable state in which they might sign confessions and testify against themselves and others—in the usually unfounded hope of securing release—went back to at least the middle of the twentieth century. Kat did not wonder why Orlova was apparently doing everything she could to frighten her cellmates. She did not wonder if it was too much of a coincidence that three of the four of them faced sentencing at roughly the same time. And, of course, she did not wonder what Orlova or whoever might have sent her could possibly want from her; after all, the trial was over and Kat was about to be shipped off to a penal colony. She just hoped it would not be that far away and the toilets would be indoors. And she really worried about surviving the transport. Whatever Orlova might or might not have been trying to do was working.

Kat escaped the harping and the whining by thinking back over the trial, reviewing it in her head day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. It had all happened so fast. As she rewound and replayed her mental recording, she noticed new things—many new things—and they made her very angry. The defense attorneys had handled so many things so badly. There was the time Volkova ran out of the courtroom. The time Feigin snapped at the judge. The time Volkova read out the very long text of an expert opinion they had commissioned—it seemed to Kat that Volkova was simply unprepared and had nothing to say at the hearing that day. And anyway, how could she be prepared when she barely spoke to Kat? She rarely came to see her at the jail, and now, after the sentencing, with an appeal pending, she seemed to have disappeared altogether: friends were telling her they could not get hold of her.

She also suspected that the lawyers were in cahoots with Petya. They had bad-mouthed him to Kat, but this meant nothing, and anyway, they all seemed interested in the same thing: money. Petya wanted to trademark Pussy Riot, to produce a record, to have the group go on tour, and the lawyers were right there with him. They had even had Kat sign a document allowing them to register Pussy Riot the brand. This was what they discussed with her during their infrequent visits in jail—instead of talking about her defense strategy. In fact, they probably realized it was better, from the point of view of commerce, to have her and Nadya and Maria do time. It would make the story more compelling and the enterprise more profitable.

Some of the episodes Kat recalled had reasonable explanations of which she was not aware. For example, Volkova’s reading expert testimony out loud was an ingenious ploy to get it into the court record after the judge had refused to allow the expert’s opinion into evidence. Other incidents, such as the running out of the courtroom or the snapping at the judge, were true lapses that could only be explained by the lawyers’ lack of experience and the extreme stress they were under. Still others really were expressions of profit seeking and, to an even greater extent, vanity. For example, as Kat lay on her bunk day after day mentally sifting through evidence from the trial and her friends kept dialing Volkova and the other lawyers to no avail, the lawyers were in New York, helping Petya collect the LennonOno Grant for Peace on behalf of Pussy Riot; Petya had not asked for their help.

Could the women have gotten a lighter sentence if they had had different lawyers? Kat grew convinced that they could have. After all, their lawyers had been objectively terrible: unprepared, incoherent, in addition to being rude, disrespectful of the court, and just plain ugly and stupid. Was Kat supposed to believe that if she had had, say, a smart, professional, attractive, well-spoken, hardworking, well-prepared defense attorney, she would still have been sentenced to two years behind bars? Was she supposed to believe that having a lawyer made no difference whatsoever and you could dispense with the whole pretense of the trial and just wait for Putin to name his price? That is probably what the legal trio would want her to believe—that would conveniently absolve them of all responsibility past and future—but Kat refused to believe that nothing could have made any difference. And if the choice of lawyers mattered, then the fact that she had had the worst ones on earth had to matter. It was their fault she had been in jail for six months and was about to be shipped off to an overcrowded, freezing penal colony with outdoor toilets.

Orlova and the other two kept going over the same depressing details of penal colony life; it was like their conversation was stuck in an endless loop. But inside Kat, something was changing. Despair was giving way to a new feeling, a desire to act—a desire for vengeance. It was probably too late to do something about her sentence. But it was not too late to teach the lawyers a lesson. She would disgrace them by firing them from the biggest trial of their careers.

K
AT KNEW SHE WAS RIGHT,
but she also knew she should try to talk to Nadya and Maria about this. How, though? Ask one of the three lawyers to carry a note saying she wanted to fire them? They had offered their services before, saying they would deliver notes back and forth without looking at them, but Kat had never quite trusted their assurances—and she certainly did not now. She decided to write a note that suggested adding another lawyer to the team. Maybe that would get them thinking.

The ploy did not work. Volkova said she was searched on the way out of the jail that day and had to dispose of the note; communication between defenders in the same criminal case is strictly forbidden, and a lawyer can be disqualified for facilitating it. Kat did not believe Volkova; she was sure lawyers never got searched. (She was wrong; lawyers do get searched, though the law forbids this.)

Kat found herself agreeing to have her fortune told by Orlova. The senior cellmate had some technique: you had to have drunk a cup of coffee yourself and dumped the grounds on a napkin that preserved whatever picture they had formed at the bottom of the cup. Orlova told fortunes incessantly—mostly her own—and Kat the computer programmer, Kat who did not have a mystical bone in her body, looked upon this disdainfully. But Orlova kept offering, and as Kat found herself growing closer and closer to Orlova—she had to admit she had been warming to her since early in the summer, the woman was so consistently kind and attentive to her—she also found herself saying, “Yeah, whatever, go ahead, I don’t care.”

Orlova said, “I see space all around you buzzing. I see a man running toward you.” Kat thought maybe it was her new lawyer.

Two women from a human rights organization came to see Kat; they were the only people, aside from lawyers and immediate relatives, who could get visitation rights, and they had been coming occasionally. Kat had her doubts about whether she could trust them, but she decided to tell them she was firing her lawyers. They told her to be cautious, to think twice, to consider her own reputation, and Nadya’s and Maria’s. She told them she did not care. Once she convinced them of her resolve, one of them gave her detailed instructions about getting it done: make sure you have the motion in writing; tell the court you have a difference of opinions on your defense; and tell the court you already have a new lawyer—if you have no one to represent you, the court may deny your motion because then you will be lawyerless. Kat did not have a new lawyer. But by this time she was convinced that having no lawyer was better than having Volkova or the other two.

The next day one of the human rights women came back. “Don’t do it,” she told Kat. “It’s not going to help. You are still going to go to the penal colony, but your reputations will be ruined.” Kat objected. She said the lawyers were dishonest; she said they had been signing commercial contracts on the group’s behalf; she said they and Petya were in cahoots. “What does it all matter?” the woman said, exasperated. It mattered to Kat. Also, she was certain this woman, who claimed to be a human rights advocate, was doing the lawyers’ bidding. This only strengthened her resolve.

In fact, the human rights advocate had had virtually no contact with the lawyers. She was just sincerely convinced that, since Kat had no hope of changing her sentence, her firing the lawyers would be seen by the public as what it was: an act of vengeance. With so much attention still fixed on the trial, this seemed like an ill-chosen coda.

T
HE MORNING OF
O
CTOBER 1,
when Pussy Riot’s appeal was scheduled to be heard in Moscow City Court, Orlova gave Kat a pill. She said it was for her nerves, something mild. Kat figured they wouldn’t have let her have a serious sedative in the cell. She took it, and she did not feel anything in particular.

Then they had their hair done. It was another misplaced act of goodwill; someone from the support group had paid for hair services for them, and the woman in charge of the jail’s so-called salon thought it would be a good idea to give each of them a wash and blow-dry the morning of the appeal. So six weeks after they were sentenced, Kat, Nadya, and Maria met at the hair place.

Kat started by broaching the subject of money and contracts the lawyers had apparently been signing on their behalf. Maria said she knew something about this and had asked Polozov to provide the documents.

“Why should you be asking him to provide stuff?” Kat was outraged. “He should be bringing all this stuff to you without being asked.”

“Why are you being so loud?” Nadya asked Kat.

“Because I’m irritated. I’m angry.”

“So I guess you’ll be firing them,” said Nadya.

“I’m firing them,” Kat confirmed.

“I’m not,” said Maria.

“I’m not either,” said Nadya. Then she said it was going to look bad. She said the lawyers were perceived as opposition lawyers and the firing would look like a split in the group, or even like they had broken Kat. She asked Kat to give it some more thought. Kat said she had given it all the thought it needed.

In the prisoner transport going to court, Kat threw up. It might have been that pill.

In court, things went just as the human rights activist had predicted: the judge tried to ignore Kat’s attempts to make a motion, then finally asked if she had it in written form, accepted it reluctantly, and, hearing that Kat already had another lawyer lined up but that the lawyer needed time to get acquainted with the case, granted the motion and continued the hearing until October 10. Then there were a lot of cameras clicking, most of them aimed at Kat for the first time since the trial began, and a lot of microphones and Dictaphones being pushed out of the way by the court marshals, and then they were back in the prisoner transport and back at the jail. Nadya and Maria did not seem to be angry at Kat; they even said that now, thanks to her, they could pressure their lawyers into working harder and being more attentive—lest they also get fired by the two of them.

T
HE NEXT DAY,
a prison guard told Kat to come out of her cell “lightly.” That was the opposite of going “with your stuff.” If you are being transferred, or even going to court, you always go with your stuff—all your stuff, including soap and books and food—because you do not know if you are coming back to your cell. If you are told to come out “lightly,” you are just going for a talk, probably within the jail compound.

Kat was taken to see one of the female inspectors.

“I heard you fired your lawyers.”

“Yes.”

“They’ll probably be going after you now, trying to come see you, pressure you.”

Kat had no idea what this woman wanted.

“So just so you know, if one of the three of them comes, we are going to let you know and you can say you don’t want to see them. You should put it in writing, and then we can tell them to get lost.”

“Okay.”

They sat in silence for a minute.

“Can I go back to my cell now?” Kat asked.

“Wait, sit here awhile,” the officer said. She seemed sympathetic, and Kat felt, if not touched exactly, at least surprised by the concern she was showing. “I heard there is now a vodka called Pussy Riot,” the inspector continued. “Your old lawyers seem to have had something to do with it.”