With sporadic downpours scheduled throughout the weekend, it almost made sense when Pussy Riot pulled up to Glastonbury’s Park Stage in a tank last Friday, unlike much else about their appearance at the British festival. Later that day, Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina joined The Guardian for an fairly inane on-stage conversation. They humored the interviewer’s questions. No, Putin is probably not really into indie-rock; yes, riot police are a feature of Russian music festivals; Glastonbury’s toilets really aren’t much like those of the Siberian penal colony where the women served part of their near-two-year sentences, ha ha ha.
Glastonbury is one of the few big music festivals that has palpable political aims. It’s a non-profit that benefits WaterAid, Oxfam, and Greenpeace. Organizers Michael and Emily Eavis have donated over £1m to local organizations every year since 2000. There’s a huge political presence at the festival: Programmed by Billy Bragg, The Left Field hosts political debates all weekend, with topics this year ranging from intersectional feminism to protecting the rights of single mothers threatened with eviction from their East London homes by the Conservative government. Tickets, however, cost an exclusionary £225.
Pussy Riot’s presence at Glastonbury follows a series of high-profile public appearances in the 18 months since Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina were released from prison. They played themselves along a Putin-styled Russian president in the final season of “House of Cards”, posed for American Vogue and the notorious Terry Richardson. Just prior to Glastonbury, they participated in New York Pride. They are celebrity darlings, offered Prizes for Peace by Yoko Ono and photo opportunities with Hillary Clinton. In 2014, after they took part in an Amnesty International event sponsored by Barclays and backed by Madonna, they were disowned by the rest of the collective for contravening Pussy Riot’s anti-corporate stance.
Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina replied that they are just two random faces and in fact, everybody can be part of the international resistance group if they want to. Since then, they’ve been out on their own. As much as their actions have been tremendously important in exposing the realities of dissent in Russia, it’s hard not to ask what their goal is now.
Thinking from a perspective of three years, it seems that but for these three nice, young, eloquent girls being imprisoned by the Russian state, the West's news and entertainment spectacle would barely take any interest in Russian leftist artists and activists. Or at least, it would drop the insurgents of Bolotnaya Square in the late 2011 and early 2012 much quicker. Although many of them remain in prison, the western media are not even faking any interest now. They got obsessed just with Pussy Riot; they are young, pretty and their cause of human rights is tangled in that of rock n’ roll. Thousands of political prisoners of this world wait to be noticed, and let along namechecked during concerts; Madonna doesn’t wear Sergei Udaltsov on her t-shirt.
This commercial turn the remaining two members took (after Ekaterina Samusevich was released during the trial) still seems surprising given their dim view of the media. When interviewed by the socialite-turned-actvist Ksenia Sobchak on the only independent Russian channel TV Rain, they appeared militant and unwilling to take any bullshit. What happened? This brings me to their beginnings in the Moscow-based radical performance group Voina (War) or more broadly, radical left activist scene in oppressive post-Soviet countries. What is too rarely mentioned is that Pussy Riot are not a proper “punk group” - but rather have used a punk style performance as one of many means in their provocative strategy. Their performance of “Punk Prayer” in neon-coloured balaclavas was spurred by their radical activities in the public space of Russian cities with outrageous, abstract performances, which was intended to shake their audiences out of political lethargy. Voina, among other things, disrupted political trials, organised a wild feast in the Moscow metro car, staged a fake hanging of Asian guest workers in a big department store in protest against racism and homophobia, simulated sex acts in the Biology Museum and most notoriously, painted a giant dick on the drawbridge leading to the Russian security service building in St. Petersburg. Their works were a frequent talk even of President Putin, who tried to use them as a symbol of western moral degeneration.
However, the group split in 2009 for unclear reasons. Tolokonnikova, then a young philosophy student, and her husband Pyotr Verzilov, left among controversies around Verzilov, who was accused of stealing discs with the work of the rest of the group for self-promotional goals. Voina's leader Oleg Vorotnikov considers him a police provocateur, but plays and unclear role in the stunts and protests staged by Pussy Riot. He has a dual Canadian-Russian citizenship and while Pussy Riot members were in prison, he kept acting "in their name", among others, collecting the Yoko Ono prize and meeting Madonna before her Moscow concert. This brought accusations of co-opting their name, and the group members disowned him in 2012. "The only person who can legitimately represent the group is a girl in a balaclava," they stated.
Yet he did accompany them in Glastonbury a few days ago, dressed like a member of Russian riot police, with a Kalashnikov he maintained was "real". For a group so aware of media-image, appropriation and misrepresentation, it's all the more bizarre why they’ve continued to participate in media spectacle. Perhaps they might still think these media acts are akin, at some level, to what they were engaged in Russian public space. The difference is that now they are in the "free world", allegedly without censorship or harassment, where you can speak the truth and say anything you want. If they are using their status as media darlings to make the plight of political prisoners visible, the method of delivery and the message attached to it are becoming increasing difficult to decipher.
Perhaps, it's the spectacle that directs them now, not otherwise. Like so many Russian exiles before them, Pussy Riot have become token dissidents, that western people will like to look at, and like to think their concern had a part in releasing them. Perhaps it is also about the endured suffering that makes for their revolutionary aura in the West--the title of Masha Gessen’s book, The Passion of Pussy Riot, leaves no doubts on why they were easy pegs for western media, who have a thing for young, pretty and suffering women. The media may them, but the media can also render your words meaningless.
These days, the real power of their subversive acts back in Russia is easily patronised, stifled and incorporated into entertainment. Whenever they appear back in Russia, we're reminded of the horrible reality they escaped--during the Olympics in Sochi, for instance, the protesting group was beaten and arrested by a group of nationalist paramilitaries serving as security for the event, so-called "Cossacks". Yet tragically, this was reported mostly in the context of PR themselves and not Russian political prisoners they wanted to raise awareness about. The personal focus on Pussy Riot as dissident heroes mirrors the celebrity obsessionover Putin himself, who serves as the stand-in explanation for every single evil happening in Russia right now. The truth, invariably, is more complicated than how it is presented.
In the past months, Pussy Riot have assumed a new role: mascots, dissidents charmingly bestowing on Glastonbury the title of “People's Republic”. The appearance at Glastonbury felt like a culmination of a long process of recuperation. Pussy Riot may not be a “band” in the typical sense, but they're facing the perils of becoming pop stars like any other, begging the question: how much can their dissidence really exceed that of their new fans?