Pussy Riot's Challenge.

"Holy Mother, Blessed Virgin, chase Putin out," they sang only to receive 2 years for less than 2 minutes of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. Out of the convicted Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich have participated in performances staged by Voina. In one such instance Samutsevich released Madagascan giant cockroaches into a courtroom and went on to kiss on duty female police officers. Tolokonnikova took part in an orgy staged in the Biology Museum in Moscow. Pussy Riot could be seen as an off-shoot of this movement in its devotion to shock and challenge the assumptions of conservative Russians. Predictably Pussy Riot has come up against the cursed spirit of Russian chauvinism in its personification of a pallid dwarfish man-beast. This hardline strain of intolerance ought to be a source of shame for a country that produced so many great artists - from Dostoevsky to Mayakovsky - and particularly great in literature with which the West can hardly compete to this day. Now art has become a battleground for the faithful and the political in present day Russia.

In defence of the trial and sentencing Alexander Nekrassov pointed to the cathedral as an anti-Stalinist monument. Except Nekrassov conveniently forgets that the parodic punk prayer was meant to strike at age old pillars of Russian authoritarianism. The first target was Putin's Kremlin, the secondary target was Russian Orthodoxy as a superstructural spectre of the conditions in Russian society. It has to be said that the Orthodox Church has long served to legitimise the status quo in Russia. This was true in the days when the Tsar stood as the semi-divine head of the Church and it's unfortunately true in the present Mafia state. It was the Russian Orthodox Church which fabricated The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, blaming the evils of the world on the Jewish people, and in doing so contributed greatly to the Judeophobia rife in Europe at the time. Indeed, it became Hitler's "warrant" for genocide. Today it is the bedtime reading of neo-Nazis everywhere, it has been distributed by Henry Ford and Hamas while David Icke has cited it as a 'factual document'.

 

Even Nekrassov's claim that the Church can be taken as an anti-Stalinist symbol shouldn't be taken too seriously. Although the Church had flirtations with oppositional activity, the suicidal regime of Stalin's creation fell back on religiosity as well as nationalism to support the war effort. The campaigns against religion in the 1920s and 30s were put on hold until Khrushchev began to close churches once again in the 60s. Indeed, it made sense given that the war with Germany was a bloodbath for Russia – leaving in excess of 20 million dead. The breach left open after the fall of the Tsar was filled by Stalin as he took on the guise of a god-king complete with an era of heresy hunts, miracles and even an inquisition. It was the Orthodoxy that had worked to instil a cultural credulity among Russians to the benefit of the Tsars and later Stalinism. This isn't to say that the Soviet Union was a religious state, but the Church can hardly be taken as anti-Stalinist so totally. We should turn to the question of Russia's politics and the rudderlessness of organised religion.

The real test is whether or not the Orthodox Church will rise to its stated commitment to the principles by which Christ lived by. As Giles Fraser points out "The legal case against Jesus was that he violated the holy. He was criticised for allowing his disciples to eat without washing properly and for picking corn on the day set aside as holy. He said he was God yet he was born in a filthy stable and willingly laid hands on lepers. He had no problem with being touched by menstruating women or eating with those regarded as unwholesome." This constituted a thoroughgoing deconstruction of the holy, as Fraser notes, that had become an alibi for political injustice. The same challenge was made by the Hebrew prophets, being profane is precisely the point. This should be taken as an opportunity for Russia's progressive Christians to reassert themselves as an alternative to the Kremlin's mascot church. Right now, the Russian Orthodoxy is just another rod with which Putin can kosh dissidents. But the Church will survive as a weapon for future administrations. So it's vital that there be an alternative Christianity to the established Church.