Comradely Greetings (9 page)

Slavoj

Dear Slavoj, a good day to you,

As fate would have it, your last letter found me already out of prison. Which came as quite a surprise, since my time there was marked by a completely unfounded, irrational certainty that prison goes on forever.

But in some sense, prison really does go on forever. My “co-conspirator” Masha Alyokhina and I lost no time after our release in founding the “Zona Prava”
¹
movement, the goal of which is the reeducation of prison wardens and
the establishment of a protest training program inside the camps. We're beginning with women's camps, since female prisoners are the ones most totally deprived of voice. Why is this so? Probably because women have long had inculcated into them a deep a sense of weakness, of their need for a big, strong man … Our work is already turning up evidence that a lot of them buy into this garbage. And their “big, strong man,” since these women are prisoners, can come only from the prison administration. Our task, Zona Prava's task, is to provide them an equally big and strong alternative.

In due time, we and Zona Prava will have to answer an old question: can the—pardon me—subaltern speak? How can sister-inmates develop their own language, existing alongside the official one spoken by prison administrators? How can they draw up the map to another world, a world different than that of the administrators? The story of the subject's development in prison is extremely meaningful.

A Russian jail is an island of institutional totalitarianism, a site where thought and action become unified. Further, the template for this unification has little in common with other officially promulgated prisons, like our conception of motherhood, orthodox religion, and respect for the law. In fact, so long as the administration isn't inconvenienced, a person's decline and fall is encouraged. A high level of aggression is encouraged, and a foundation is set for baseless anger and hatred. By what right can we call this a system of “corrections”? Is it not, rather, the rubric for a slavishly obedient, oppressed, and humiliated existence? Or an existence that is two-faced, cynical, and hypocritical, one that survives by the reptilian law of “you die today, I'll wait until
tomorrow”? What can we make of people being expected to form their personalities in a place where they can barely even try rethinking the assumptions that form their daily lives? How is such a personal reformation possible when every act of protest is met with diabolical evil and reprisals from the agents of state authority?

Prison goes on forever. And because it's run not by official rules but according to its own internal processes, it makes you understand how the structures of power, subordination, and protest are related in a community whose ultimate purpose is unification and degradation. In a community for whose creation any elite of unbounded power de facto strives.

The only thing we can offer up in opposition to the current transformation of our communities into a prison is an absurd, unfounded faith that another state of affairs is possible. Will we be able to infect others with our dreams before we find ourselves again deprived of voice—returned, perhaps, to prison?

The other day we traveled to Nizhny Novgorod's Penal Colony No. 2, where Masha had been held. We went to lend our support to some female inmates who'd had the temerity to disagree with the infallible prison administration. These women took the camp administration to court, challenging the legality of their humiliatingly meager pay of $7–$10. At the Nizhny Novgorod train station, we were attacked by a gang who doused our eyes with a caustic liquid. We put up no physical resistance, but only asked our attackers
to explain why they were doing this. We were left with chemical burns to our eyes. Masha suffered a concussion and needed stitches.

Facing physical violence was a test of my usually friendly and composed response to opposition. To what degree can this goodwill be preserved? At what point does such a situation become an actual threat to one's life? When I reflect how I might conduct myself, I take comfort in the story of how St. Paul, fleeing his pursuers, had himself lowered from the Damascus city walls in a basket, “In Damascus the governor under Aretas the king kept the city of the Damascenes with a garrison, desirous to apprehend me: And through a window in a basket was I let down by the wall, and escaped his hands.” (2 Cor 11:32–33) This episode has for me become key, opening as it does the possibility of resistance, of saving one's own life, of being calculating, even sly, in apostolic Christianity.

Slavoj, it wasn't too long ago that you suggested it might be a good idea for Masha and me to speak our minds about Edward Snowden. This is no simple thing to do when Snowden is living in your country under the protection of the same intelligence services that have ordered and overseen physical violence against you and your friends. At the same moment that we two were in prison, Edward Snowden was finding himself in quite an awkward situation—a fighter for the free dissemination of information, he found himself in Russia, where, like it or not, his presence inevitably conferred legitimacy on the Kremlin's information policy. The
same Kremlin that was directing an aggressive propaganda campaign on TV, destroying all independent channels, condoning the murder of independent journalists—professionals, heroes like Anna Politkovskaya. Snowden, however, had been cornered into a dismal position from which he could not expose any of this. He now lives in Russia, but he can't tell the truth about how information is collected and disseminated here. He has no choice but to keep his mouth shut. Russia's intelligence and propaganda sectors have used Snowden for their own grubby games. And for me, as one of Russia's activists, it's horrible to watch. There's no doubt that his persecution is a drastic misstep by the US, which is keeping far too busy destroying the possibilities for true democracy around the world. This error is made visible by Russia's cynical use of the whistleblower to stabilize the Kremlin's own reactionary information policy.

Once in an interview you said that you wanted to write an essay criticizing Pussy Riot for our inordinate conservatism. I think I know what you were getting at, but it would be inordinately interesting all the same for this essay to see the light of day.

Pussy Riot is a mask: a simplifying, modernizing mask. Prison, confinement, these are also masks, different masks, ones that help people of our generation to shake off cynicism and irony. When you put on a mask, you leave your own time, you abandon the world in which any sincerity will be mocked, you move into the world of cartoon heroes, where Sailor Moon and Spiderman, those consummate modern role
models, can be found. Somewhere in that world our other role models live on, too: Kazimir Malevich, Dziga Vertov, Wassily Kandinsky.

Pussy Riot has proved so effective that its promise—simple to the point of impossibility, minimalist to the point of indecency—rings loud and clear. The masks that members of Pussy Riot wear hold, if any, a therapeutic function: yes, we belong to a generation raised on irony, but we also put on masks to reduce that impotent irony. We go out in the streets and speak plainly, without varnish, about the things that matter most.

The most penetrating speeches, writings, and actions are born of modernist condensation, of the modern age. True crises—imprisonment, war, the crisis of democracy that you have described in which people grow alarmed, stop trusting the elites, and realize that it is now
truly
up to them alone—catalyze the emergence of such historic periods.

No one is speaking out more truthfully about contemporary Russia than the May 6
^th
protesters,
²
now sentenced to the camps for as many of four years' deprivation of liberty. Their final words in the courtroom are worth remembering: “We've been taken hostage by the authorities. We've been tried for the sore feelings bureaucrats still harbor for the civil disobedience of 2011 and 2012, for the apparitions that still haunt the police bosses. They're forcing us on stage in their
theatrics of societal punishment.” (Alexei Polikhovich) “I know that even in prison I'll be freer than most because my conscience will be clear.” (Alexandra Dukhanina) There are few today speaking such simple, clear, passionate truths—all of them behind bars.

In Russia, recent days have seen a sincere discussion of the threat of armed conflict in Crimea. Journalists, poets, and artists are composing incendiary texts against war. Schoolteachers are extending alarmed exhortations to everyone they know to join the peace demonstrations. People have poured into the streets with placards bearing anti-war slogans, even releasing doves, though we all know that in a minute everyone's going to be manhandled and arrested by the cops. I, for one, welcome this mood, which is trading out doubt and irony for a new, decisive voice.

By the way, the modernist and zealous declarations of today are being used far more successfully by Russia's officially sanctioned journalism establishment than by the independent or opposition media. The mouthpieces of state propaganda, I'm forced to admit, have learned a lot from the early Soviet avant-garde's methods of agitation. Sharing Pierre Bourdieu's slogan “Pour un savoir engagé,” I would like to see more combustion and personal, emotional involvement in the statements and gestures of those who today rise up against unfreedom, social corruption, humiliation, and lack of prospects for a decent life in Russia.

It is impossible not to sympathize with the passionarity
³
of the Ukrainians involved in Euromaidan. The perseverance, the courage, and—sure, I'll say it—the heroism with which Ukrainians, from the lowliest workers to the upper echelons of management, have defended their political interests comprise, without question, an utter miracle. As surely a miracle as the turning of water to wine for the Marriage at Cana.