Words Will Break Cement (25 page)

The large and well-ventilated wood-and-glass defendants’ box in the courtroom was empty: Maria was visible on two large flat-screen monitors in the courtroom. She had been delivered to a pretrial detention center in Perm, and there she sat in a metal cage. The camera was positioned outside the cage, so the court had a view of Maria through the grates.

The Perm judge lost his composure soon after lunch, when Maria requested, for the fourth or fifth time that day, a break in the proceedings to allow her to consult with counsel. Every time she did this, the video link had to be broken and rerouted to a separate office in the courthouse, where Khrunova could go to talk with Maria in confidence. Maria had mentioned, a time or two or ten, that this kind of conferring would have been carried out easily and without disrupting the proceedings if only she had been allowed to be physically present in court. In any event, now that the court was moving to the substantive part of her complaint, the moment had come when she needed to discuss with Khrunova their strategy for the remainder of the hearing.

“And what were you and your lawyer discussing before?” screamed the judge. He was tall and thin and he looked elegant in his long black robe. His fine-featured face, framed by salt-and-pepper hair, was handsome in a way that put one in mind of a mythic, refined, aristocratic Russia. Now this face was contorted in annoyance. “I mean if it’s not a secret, of course. You did not discuss your strategy for the remainder of the hearing?” Of course, it was a secret, by law.

“It seems that the court is denying my right to a defense,” said Maria, and it looked like she might be smiling a little up there on her screen in her cage.

After a short conference with Khrunova, Maria announced that she had decided not to take part in court proceedings where her right to a defense was being violated. She had done this once before, in May, when the Berezniki court heard her original motion for parole. Back then she had not only pulled out of the proceedings herself but forbade her defense team to participate. The judge had had something resembling a breakdown and ended up appointing an attorney to represent Maria, who had refused to be represented—or to meet with this court-appointed lawyer. Now the Perm judge was terrified he would find himself in a similar position.

Maria was kinder to him. She said she would allow Khrunova to continue to participate in the hearing on her behalf. And then she turned her back to the court. Literally—she was seated on a swiveling office chair in her cage, and she swiveled it around until all the court could see on its screens was the mane of slightly frizzy red hair that covered most of Maria’s back.

It took the judge a few minutes to realize he should order the video link cut.

If Pussy Riot put together a video clip of their court performances, it might cut from Maria’s back, turned to the court, to an April 2013 hearing in Zubova Polyana—the first time Nadya went to court after she left Moscow. The largest courtroom in Zubova Polyana was too small to fit all the journalists, cameras, and assorted supporters. The courtroom was sweltering, and the smell of human bodies hung heavier as the afternoon wore on. The judge, a prim middle-aged woman with a blond perm, tried to conduct an exemplary hearing in these trying circumstances. “I felt like I was in television court,” Khrunova told me later. “I’ve never seen a Russian judge act like that—asking the marshals to carry papers from the defense table to the bench, for example. Except on TV, of course.”

But in the late afternoon, something snapped: either the judge’s resources had run dry, or someone had called to tell her to wrap up the hearing, which was being broadcast live by every independent media outlet in Russia, and a couple of foreign ones too. And so the judge asked for the prosecution’s opinion, called a break in order to draft a verdict, and hurried out of the courtroom. Nadya stared out of her cage, her mouth slightly open. She had drafted a four-page speech to deliver at the end of the hearing. Khrunova looked like she was having a breakdown. Standing behind the defense desk, all five feet of her, she screamed hoarsely as the judge left: “In my fifteen years as a defense attorney, nothing like this has ever happened to me!”

Nadya made sure nothing like that ever happened to her again. Before every court hearing, she drafted several speeches of various lengths. She ranked them according to importance and started saying them, in turn, whenever and as soon as she had the opportunity to say anything in court.

Two days after Maria’s hearing in Perm, at Nadya’s own hearing on the appeal of her denial of parole, before the Supreme Court of Mordovia, she said her longest and most important speech at the first opening.

“I would like to discuss the very concept of correction,” she began, standing up in the steel cage in the court. “I have once again observed that the only true education possible in Russia is self-education. If you don’t teach yourself, no one will teach you. Or they’ll teach you who knows what.” She had been thinking about this at least since she wrote that turgid article titled “What’s the World Coming To” at the age of fourteen. Her life since then had been a series of confrontations and adaptations to educational institutions, of which IK-14 was the latest.

“I acknowledge that I have a great many stylistic disagreements with this regime, this aesthetic, and this ideology.” She was quoting Andrei Sinyavsky, a writer and literary critic, one of the Soviet Union’s first dissident political prisoners and one of the earliest political emigres of the post-Stalin era. He had said that his disagreements with the Soviet regime were “purely stylistic in nature.” Not that the judge or any other member of the court would recognize the quote, of course, but Nadya was not addressing the court: she was speaking to the public outside the courtroom and outside Mordovia, and to some of the public outside of Russia as well.

“So it stands to reason that a state institution that represents the dominant aesthetics would not see me as having been reformed,” she conceded.

“What can a state institution teach us? In what way can I be reformed by a penal colony and you by, say, Russian TV Channel 1? In his Nobel lecture, Joseph Brodsky said, ‘The more substantial an individual’s aesthetic experience is, the sounder his taste, the sharper his moral focus, the freer—though not necessarily the happier—he is.’ We in Russia once again find ourselves in a situation where resistance, especially aesthetic resistance, becomes the only viable moral choice as well as a civic duty.”

Nadya then lectured briefly on the origins of contemporary Russian aesthetics, which she called a combination of imperial Czarist aesthetics and “a faulty understanding of the aesthetics of socialist realism.” This, she said, was on display at IK-14. At the parole hearing in April, penal colony representatives had reproached her for not taking part in reformative activities such as the singing contest or the Miss Charm contest. “I assert that it is the principles in accordance with which I conduct my life—feminist, antipatriarchal, and aesthetically nonconformist principles—that are the basis for boycotting the Miss Charm contest. These principles—and mine alone, for they are certainly not shared by the guards who run the camp—lead me to study books and magazines, for which I have to wrestle time away from the colony’s stupefying daily schedule.”

When Nadya began detailing some of the infractions with which she had been charged—such as concealing her notes on life in the colony; failing to greet a member of the administration; being present at the clubhouse without a permission slip—and the system of aesthetic values that would view these as violations, the prosecutor interrupted her and asked to address “the substance of the case and not the Putin regime.”

The judge nodded kindly. “I will allow you to continue,” he said, “but please try to stick to the topic at hand. The question before the court is a little narrower.”

“But I am calling on you to take a wider view,” Nadya responded frankly, and continued reciting her prepared speech. “I know that as long as Russia is subjugated by Putin, I will not see early release. But I came here, to this courtroom, so that I could shed a light, once again, on the absurdity of oil-and-gas justice that condemns people to spend senseless years in jail based on the fact that they wrote a note or failed to cover their head.”

After a few procedural remarks by the prosecutor, the judge, and Khrunova, Nadya saw an opportunity to read her second prepared speech, a slightly shorter one.

“I am proud of everyone who is willing to make sacrifices for the sake of standing up for their principles. That is the only way to achieve large-scale change in politics, values, or aesthetics. I am proud of those who sacrificed their quotidian comfort on a summer evening and went out into the streets on July 18 to affirm their rights and defend their human dignity.” She was referring to the largest unsanctioned protest in contemporary Russian history. A week before, about ten thousand people had come out into the streets of Moscow after opposition leader Alexei Navalny was sentenced to five years in prison, and Navalny had been released the following day—all of which Petya had told Nadya the day before the hearing, when he visited her. “I know that our symbolic power, which grows out of conviction and courage, will eventually be converted to something greater. And that is when Putin and his cronies will lose state power.”

Not too much later, she found the opening for her third speech.

“I’ll be happy if I am released when my term runs out rather than slapped with an additional term, like Khodorkovsky was . . . The word ‘correction’ is one of those upside-down words characteristic of a totalitarian state that calls slavery ‘liberty.’”

Here the imaginary Pussy Riot clip might have come back to Maria turning her back to the court and saying, “It seems that the court is denying my right to a defense.”

Nadya’s, Maria’s, and Kat’s arrests had heralded a new Russian crackdown. In the months following, dozens of people were arrested on charges stemming from various kinds of peaceful protest. Twenty-eight people were facing trial in connection with police-instigated violence that broke out during a march to protest Putin’s inauguration in May 2012. Thirty more were facing piracy charges for being on a Greenpeace ship protesting oil and gas drilling in the Arctic. The courts had become Russia’s sole venue for political conversation, the only place where the individual and the state confronted each other. Not that most political defendants in Russia had a clear idea of how to use such a venue, or a language for speaking in it. But Maria and Nadya knew a stage when they saw one. In the old dissident drama, Maria was choosing the role of the person who fights the court on legal grounds and Nadya was refusing to recognize the court as such and choosing to use it only for the pulpit it offered.

They were doing what Pussy Riot had always done: illuminating the issues and proposing a conceptual framework for discussing them. As is often the case with great art, most people did not understand what they were doing. But eventually, Nadya and Maria knew, they would.

Maria had always been moved to activism by the events or circumstances of her own life—as when she became a defender of the Utrish national park after camping there with infant Philip. Now her home was a penal colony and other inmates were her family. She felt obligated to give voice to their experience and to use her place in the public eye to draw attention to the injustice they all faced. Nadya, on the other hand, had always been driven by theory rather than experience, and now she naturally separated her public, performing persona from the daily existence of an IK-14 inmate. She endeavored to either accept or ignore the circumstances of her daily life: as she told Petya during that June visit, she just wanted her time in captivity to pass quickly and uneventfully. That was also part of the reason she deflected attempts to elicit more details of colony life that day. That, and the fact that too detailed a description would have been both shameful and dangerous.

Some things were never talked about. Even Maria’s friend Lena Tkachenko, who described the violations in IK-28 with precision, driven by a natural aptitude for detail multiplied by five years of observation and by the will to tell as much as she could to help those she had left behind—even she would not talk to me about the particulars of what they called “personal hygiene,” or what might better be called a desperate quest to maintain dignity in the face of circumstances she was too ashamed to describe. Other things not only could be described but had to be publicized and fought. Maria did that by filing complaints on her own behalf, but more often on behalf of other inmates, against the systematic violations of inmates’ rights: the long work hours, the close quarters, the lack of hot water. The administration of IK-28 retaliated by restricting inmates’ freedom of movement further and stopping the movement of packages to inmates—closing off the prisoners’ lifeline. Maria responded by declaring a hunger strike. A war of nerves ensued. On Day Ten of her hunger strike in May 2013, Maria had to be hospitalized; she could no longer walk. On Day Eleven, the administration admitted defeat: locks that had been added to barracks apparently to teach Maria a lesson were removed and packages once again started being delivered. Petya was convinced that someone from Moscow had directed the administration to avoid at any cost having Maria die on them.

Khrunova was devastated: “They’ll never forgive her for this,” she told me. “They’ve caved in and they’ve now made it clear to the entire inmate population that it’s Maria Alyokhina who sets policy there. And they also know this will persist even after she leaves—inmates will know they can make the administration cave.” She was right: within weeks, IK-28 engineered Maria’s transfer to a colony in a different region. After the initial shock and a bit of outrage, everyone involved had to admit that everybody had won: IK-28 was now rid of Maria, Maria was in a colony with much better living and working conditions, and the inmates of her new colony now had the benefit of sharing their lives with Maria Alyokhina, who immediately commenced her jailhouse lawyering there.