Shit, shit, this God stuff is all shit!
Shit, shit, this God stuff is all shit!
Pussy Riot perform their Punk Prayer at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, be a feminist!
Be a feminist, be a feminist!
The Church now praises corrupt dictators,
A cross-bearing procession in black limousines.
… The Patriarch believes in Putin!
Mary, Mother of God, join in with our protest!
Patriarch Kirill was the first to fulminate against Pussy Riot’s lese- majesty. ‘The Devil has laughed at all of us,’ he thundered. ‘We have no future if we allow such mockery … if people think this is acceptable as some sort of political expression.’ In response to calls for mercy to be shown to the women, Kirill refused, saying that hearing Orthodox believers ask for such indulgence made his ‘heart break with bitterness’. Putin followed up with more outrage, planting the thought that Pussy Riot were the agents of hostile foreign powers sent to undermine Russia’s moral fibre. Russia, he said, must look to its traditional spiritual values, ‘to the power of the Russian people with Russian traditions … and absolutely not the realisation of standards imposed on us from outside’. A couple of months later, he signed a new law that made it a criminal offence to ‘insult the feelings of religious believers’, punishable by fines and up to three years in prison. The three Pussy Riot women could count themselves lucky that they ‘only’ got two years in jail for ‘hooliganism motivated by religious hatred’.
Pussy Riot’s cathedral performance came at a difficult time for Putin. Allegations of fraud in the legislative elections of 2011 had sparked large street protests opposing his return to the presidency, which was scheduled for May 2012. Demonstrations in Moscow, St Petersburg and other cities had coalesced into a self-named Bolotnaya or ‘Snow’ Revolution, conjuring memories of the successful Orange Revolution against Ukraine’s pro-Moscow government. Crowds chanting ‘Russia without Putin!’ were an ominous signal of discontent. The Kremlin declared the protesters traitors to the motherland and bussed in pro-government supporters to mount counter rallies. Fast-track legislation was introduced to increase penalties for unsanctioned demonstrations and other infringements of public assembly regulations. Putin’s response to the protests was a sharp turn to the conservative right.
The cultivation of the Orthodox Church allowed him to appeal to the anti-liberal values of many believers, while ‘Western immorality’ was loudly denounced. He pandered to traditional Russian homophobia by passing laws criminalising ‘gay propaganda’ and to male chauvinism by decriminalising domestic violence. The Orthodox hierarchy – which has no opinion on domestic violence, but considers homosexuality a sign of the Apocalypse – gave him their enthusiastic backing.
Putin framed the measures as a campaign to protect Russia’s purity against outside efforts to corrupt her. ‘The West knows no difference between good and evil,’ he told the Valdai International Discussion Forum. ‘They have rejected the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilisation. They deny moral principles and traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual … They are implementing policies that put normal families on a par with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with belief in Satan. The excesses of political correctness have reached the point where people are seriously talking about registering political parties whose aim is to promote paedophilia … And they are aggressively trying to export this model [to Russia]! This would open a direct path to degradation and primitivism, resulting in a profound moral crisis.’
Having served their jail sentences, the Pussy Rioters might have been expected to keep their heads down, but they failed to learn the lesson Putin had taught them and made an unscheduled appearance at the Sochi Olympics. Sochi was one of Putin’s many self-aggrandising projects – he had spent over $50 billion of taxpayers’ money to put on an international display of his success as Russia’s leader – so, in February 2014, it was a natural target for dissent. Wearing their trademark fluorescent balaclavas, Pussy Riot hardly had time to sing the first verse of ‘Putin Will Teach You to Love the Motherland’ before a detachment of Cossack militia started to lash them with horsewhips.
Successive reports by international monitoring organisations reveal how rapidly the electoral process in Russia has been undermined since Putin came to power. Despite the upheaval of the 1990s, observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) described Boris Yeltsin’s final set of parliamentary elections, in December 1999, as ‘competitive and pluralistic’, marking ‘significant progress for the consolidation of democracy in the Russian Federation’. Three years into the Putin era, the OSCE reported that the 2003 parliamentary vote ‘failed to meet many Council of Europe commitments for democratic elections’ and queried ‘Russia’s fundamental willingness to meet European and international standards for democratic elections’. The 2004 presidential election was marred by problems concerning the secrecy of the ballot and the biased role of the state-controlled media, with OSCE observers concluding that ‘a vibrant political discourse and meaningful pluralism were lacking’. For the 2007 parliamentary elections, in which the pro-Putin United Russia party secured a two-thirds majority, and the 2008 presidential race, won overwhelmingly by Vladimir Putin, there was no monitoring because European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights and OSCE observers were refused visas by the Kremlin. The Council of Europe called the 2008 poll ‘more of a plebiscite’, or a one-horse race, than a genuine exercise in democracy, because the Kremlin had disbarred Putin’s only credible challenger, the former prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, who had been dismissed by Putin in 2004. In subsequent elections, the OSCE has noted the increasing move towards a one-party state – ‘the convergence of the State and the governing party’ – and the absence of genuine choice for voters.
Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova attacked by a Cossack with a whip during the Sochi Olympics in 2014
In addition to manipulating the vote, Putin has subverted legal norms to ensure his continued hold on power. Article 81 of the Russian constitution stipulates that the same person cannot hold the office of president for more than two terms. Having come to the end of his second stint in the job in 2008, he declared that the rule actually meant two consecutive terms, so he would temporarily swap jobs with his compliant prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, before returning to the presidency in 2012. With his second set of consecutive terms due to end in 2024, Putin initially accepted that he would not be able to run for a fifth time, but later changed his mind. In July 2020 he rewrote the constitution and reset his term limit to zero, opening the way for him to appropriate two more presidential mandates and stay in the Kremlin until he is 83.
You will not be surprised to learn that the Russian people have discerned the truth behind the shenanigans and that electoral fraud figures high on the list of topics for the political jokes characteristic of our folk humour. My favourite is the story of the Kremlin lackey who rushes in to give Putin the results of the presidential election.
‘Mr President, I have good news and bad news,’ the lackey says.
‘What is the good news?’ Putin asks.
‘You won the election,’ comes the reply.
‘And what is the bad news?’