On July 30th, the first day of the trial, we presented our reaction to the prosecutors’ indictments. At that time, the court categorically refused us the right to speak, and our written texts were read aloud by our defense lawyer, Violetta Volkova. For us, this was the first opportunity we had to express ourselves after five months of incarceration. Until then we had been incarcerated, confined; we can’t do anything from there, we can’t write appeals, we can’t film what is happening around us, we have no Internet, our lawyer can’t even bring us papers because even that is forbidden. On July 30th, we spoke openly for the first time; we called for making contact and facilitating dialogue, not for battle and confrontation. We reached our hands out to the people who, for some reason, consider us their enemies, and they spat into our open hands. “You are not sincere,” they said to us. Too bad. Do not judge us according to your behavior. We spoke sincerely, as we always do—we said what we thought. We were unbelievably childlike, naïve in our truth, but nonetheless we are not sorry for our words, and this includes our words on that day. And having been maligned, we do not want to malign others in response. We are in desperate circumstances, but we do not despair. We are persecuted, but we have not been abandoned. It is easy to degrade and destroy people who are open, but “When I am weak, then I am strong.”
Listen to our words and not to what [pro-Putin television journalist] Arkady Mamontov says about us. Do not distort and falsify what we say. Allow us to enter into a dialogue, into contact with this country, which is also ours and not only the land of Putin and the Patriarch. Just like Solzhenitsyn, I believe that in the end the word will break cement. Solzhenitsyn wrote: “Thus, the word is more essential than cement. Thus, the word is not a small nothing. In this manner, noble people begin to grow, and their word will break cement.” [Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle]
Katya, Masha and I may be in prison, but I do not consider us defeated. Just as the dissidents were not defeated; although they disappeared into mental institutions and prisons, they pronounced their verdict upon the regime. The art of creating the image of an epoch does not know winners or losers. It was the same with the OBERIU poets, who remained artists until the end, inexplicable and incomprehensible. Purged in 1937, Alexander Vvedensky wrote, “The incomprehensible pleases us, the inexplicable is our friend.” According to the official death certificate, Aleksandr Vvedensky died on December 20th, 1941. No one knows the cause of death. It could have been dysentery on the train on the way to the camps; it could have been the bullet of a guard. It occurred somewhere on the railroad between Voronezh and Kazan.
Pussy Riot are Vvedensky’s students and heirs. His principle of the bad rhyme is dear to us. He wrote, “Occasionally, I think of two different rhymes, a good one and a bad one, and I always choose the bad one because it is always the right one.”
“The inexplicable is our friend”: the highbrow and refined works of the OBERIU poets and their search for thought on the edge of meaning were finally embodied when they paid with their lives, which were taken by the senseless and inexplicable Great Terror. Paying with their lives, these poets unintentionally proved that they were right to consider irrationality and senselessness the nerves of their era. Thus, the artistic became an historical fact. The price of participation in the creation of history is immeasurably great for the individual. But the essence of human existence lies precisely in this participation. To be a beggar, and yet to enrich others. To have nothing, but to possess all. One considers the OBERIU dissidents dead, but they are alive. They are punished, but they do not die.
Do you remember why young Dostoyevsky was sentenced to death? His entire guilt lay in the fact that he was fascinated by socialist theories, and during meetings of freethinkers and friends—which met on Fridays in the apartment of [Mikhail] Petrashevsky—he discussed the writings of Fourier and George Sand. On one of the last Fridays, he read Belinsky’s letter to Gogol aloud, a letter that was filled, according to the court that tried Dostoevsky (listen!) “with impudent statements against the Orthodox Church and the State government.” After all the preparations for execution and “ten agonizing, infinitely terrifying minutes awaiting death” (Dostoyevsky), it was announced that the sentence was changed to four years of hard labor in Siberia followed by military service.
Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth with his philosophical discussions and refusing to accept the Athenian gods. He had a living connection with the divine voice, and he was not, as he insisted many times, by any account an enemy of the gods. But what did that matter when Socrates irritated the influential citizens of his city with his critical, dialectical thought, free of prejudice? Socrates was sentenced to death and, having refused to escape Athens (as his students proposed), he courageously emptied a cup of hemlock and died. Have you forgotten under what circumstances Stephen, the disciple of the Apostles, concluded his earthly life? “Then they secretly induced men to say, ‘We have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses and against God.’ And they stirred up the people, the elders and the scribes, and they came up to him and dragged him away and brought him before the Council. They put forward false witnesses who said, ‘This man incessantly speaks against this holy place and the Law.” [Acts 6:11-13] He was found guilty and stoned to death. I also hope that you all remember well how the Jews answered Christ: “It is not for good works that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy.” [John 10:33] And finally we would do well to keep in mind the following characterization of Christ: “He is demon-possessed and raving mad.” [John 10:20]
If the authorities, tsars, presidents, prime ministers, the people, and judges understood what “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” meant [Matthew 9:13], they would not put the innocent on trial.
Our authorities, however, still rush with condemnations, and never reprieves. To this point, I would like to thank Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev for providing us with the following excellent aphorism. He summarized his presidential term with the statement: “Liberty is better than non-liberty.” Thus in line with Medvedev’s apt words, Putin’s third term can well be characterized by the aphorism “Prison is better than stoning.” I ask that you consider carefully the following from Montaigne’s Essays, which were written in the 16th century, preaching tolerance and the skeptical rejection of any unilateral system or doctrine: “It is putting a very high value on one’s conjectures, to have a man roasted alive because of them.”
Is it worth it to pass judgment on living people and put them in prison based on conjectures not substantiated by the prosecution? Since we truly have never harbored any religious hatred or animosity, our accusers have to rely on false witnesses. One of them, Matilda Ivashchenko, became ashamed of herself and did not appear in court. Then there were the false testimonies of Mr. Troitsky and Mr. Ponkin, as well as Mrs. Abramenkova. There is no other proof of our hatred and animosity except for the so-called “expert evaluation,” which the court, if it is honest and fair, must consider unacceptable as factual proof, as it is not a rigorous and objective text but a dirty and false little paper reminiscent of the Inquisition. There is no other evidence that can confirm the existence of a motive. The prosecutors have refused to voice excerpts from Pussy Riot interviews, since these excepts would only further prove the absence of any motive. Why wasn’t the following text by us—which, incidentally, appeared in the affidavit—presented by the prosecution? “We respect religion in general and the Orthodox faith in particular. This is why we are especially infuriated when Christian philosophy, which is full of light, is used in such a dirty fashion. It makes us sick to see such beautiful ideas forced to their knees.” This quote appeared in an interview that The Russian Reporter conducted with Pussy Riot the day after our performance. We still feel sick, and it causes us real pain to look at all this. Finally, the lack of any hatred or animosity toward religion and the religious is affirmed by all character witnesses called in to testify by our lawyers. Apart from all these character references, I ask you to consider the results of the psychological and psychiatric evaluations in jail number 6, ordered by the prison authorities. The report revealed the following: the values that I embrace are justice, mutual respect, humaneness, equality, and freedom.