Words Will Break Cement (24 page)

Activist Ambition sat on the second floor of a café near Chistye Prudy metro. She had no way of knowing it was the same table at which Violetta Volkova and Nikolai Polozov had met almost exactly a year earlier. She chose the table because it had a good view out the window. She was drinking wine. Activist Ambition—she did not remember exactly, but the nickname must have been coined by Petya when he recruited her for Voina near the end of that group’s active life—was in her late teens, which in Russia meant she was of drinking age. This did not change the fact that she was small and not a very experienced drinker: she felt the effects of the alcohol by the time she got to the bottom of her first glass, and on her second, she grew maudlin and sentimental. She started thinking of Pussy Riot.

No one had made her leave: she had decided herself, for all the right reasons. It was the time Pussy Riot was detained in the Metro for singing on the platform. Activist Ambition had been very clear with Kat and Nadya from the outset: she told them she only had three hours before her lecture, and unlike them she arrived not in Pussy Riot dress but in her school clothes—Kat had had to shield her while she changed. A few minutes later she was up at the top of the platform looking down. The song was over and police had surrounded the platform. She started throwing confetti at the police, and this did not make a difference. A train came: all she had to do now was climb down and jump on board the train before the police could grab her. She did—but the train did not move. Women in gray tried to force her back out through the open doors. Several men in black ran in and quickly grabbed her—and Kat and Nadya and Morzh, who she discovered were next to her—and twisted their arms behind their backs.

At the police station, while Nadya haggled with the cops and Tasya kept filming and Kat fretted that they had called her father, Activist Ambition realized something important: not only did none of them care that she had missed her lecture, but they would not have cared even if one of them had missed a lecture. They lived for the actions. She had been trying to be like them for several months. After the Feed the Road action, which had been her first, her father had stopped giving her pocket money, and she had been reduced to finding ways to ride public transit for free and to shoplifting, which she learned from Nadya and Petya and Kat. Now, at the police station, she realized that she had landed there not by accident but by design: the life they led had to include incarceration. And she was the only one in the group who cared.

They kept inviting her to actions after that, and she did help in filming one, but by the time the Cathedral of Christ the Savior happened, she learned about it from the media. While Maria, Nadya, and Kat were in hiding, they gathered several women in a safe space—it was some sort of cellar, which seemed fitting—and Activist Ambition went, of course. They talked about future actions. The feeling of being part of the group was elusive, it kept teasing her and dissipating, leaving a painful longing in its place.

Then the three women got arrested, and regret replaced the longing. She tried to help by joining in press events organized by Petya: several women would sit down in balaclavas and be interviewed on camera. The balaclavas were not foolproof: Activist Ambition’s boss recognized her and she was fired—for giving an interview to the television channel where she was interning. The worst part was, the interviews did nothing to help with the regret. She felt like an actress who had retired from the stage—she had enough irony to think of herself that way, but this did not help either. There is that moment in every action, when you have handed over your personal belongings to whoever is helping and you know exactly why you are there and you know what you are about to do and you feel that you can do anything at all and at the same time it is as though you could see yourself, so lithe, so young, so bright in every way, climbing up onto that platform—it was this moment she remembered when she brooded alone at a table on the second floor of a café overlooking a desolate autumn park.

She saw Kat. She knew Kat had been released from prison a few weeks earlier. She had been hoping to hear from her. Activist Ambition could have called Kat herself, but she wouldn’t have known what to say: she wanted Kat to need her, to call her to action. She slapped a few bills on the table and ran out of the café after the woman she thought might be Kat.

It was Kat. She was friendly in a flat way, as she always was—Activist Ambition thought Kat generally kept all her feelings and most of her thoughts inside—but she seemed happy enough to spend time talking. She talked about the lawyers. She said they had betrayed her and Nadya and Maria. She said the only way to get justice for everyone was to confront them, fight them, and expose them for the traitors they were. Activist Ambition agreed—how could she not agree—and tried to change the subject. She asked what new actions Kat was thinking about. Kat talked about the lawyers. And when Activist Ambition asked straight out—even though it seemed a little tactless and possibly illegal—what Pussy Riot was going to do, Kat talked about the lawyers.

Activist Ambition decided she was going to wait for Nadya to get out of prison. She knew that once she did, Nadya would start something—and Activist Ambition would feel that feeling again. She read all she could about Nadya to try to get a glimpse of what she might do next. Sometimes she even thought she could tell what it would be.

Kat was living back at the apartment with her father. For the first few weeks, maybe two months, she was a celebrity. She went to parties thrown by foreign journalists; she was recognized on public transport; people asked to have their pictures taken with her. She obliged—Kat usually did what people asked, if she could—but she was not sure she liked it. And they all wanted to know what she was going to do—what Pussy Riot was going to do. As though they did not realize that a suspended sentence meant she was on parole, and her sentence could be un-suspended at any moment.

Lest she forget, once a month she had to report to an office on the first floor of one of the yellow apartment towers not far from her home. It smelled of stale sweat, a faint reminder of the stench of the pretrial detention facility. She waited in a narrow corridor with her fellow paroled felons, then entered a small office where a squat policewoman shoved a piece of paper across a desk without looking and told her to sign it, using the condescending, familiar form of the imperative. The piece of paper certified that the officer had conducted an educational talk with Kat. She signed and got another piece of paper, instructing her to report back in another month.

Once, the police summoned her for questioning in the case of the cutting down of an Orthodox cross at a chapel outside of Moscow. It had been said that Pussy Riot might be responsible. Kat was questioned, said she had nothing to do with it, and was released.

If she could not be Pussy Riot in any visible, familiar way, Kat could at least get justice for Pussy Riot. If she could only prove that they had been denied proper legal representation, then the sentence could be overturned. To do that, she would have to expose the defense attorneys as the traitors they were. Irina Khrunova, the lawyer who had secured her release, slowly backed away from Kat’s case. “I can’t really claim that a thirty-year-old woman with a master’s degree did not understand the proceedings,” she told Kat, whose claim by that point more or less amounted to this. They agreed they would tell the larger world that Khrunova was too busy to handle Kat’s complaints. Kat found a lawyer on the Internet. She was doing most of the work herself by now, helped by a self-styled and self-taught legal expert, but she needed someone with a defense attorney’s license to sign her complaints. The new lawyer would meet her outside his apartment building in a suburb clear on the other end of Moscow and sign the papers she brought, using the trunk of a parked car as his desk. Then Kat would deliver the papers to the court—the guards at Khamovnichesky recognized her from when she’d been on trial there, and were nice to her—or to the Defense Attorneys Collegium, the rough equivalent of a bar association, where she also filed complaints. The collegium reviewed her long list and found only one clear violation of legal procedure among the many she had attempted to document: Violetta Volkova had failed to enter into a proper remunerative contract with her client, an offense under Russian regulations, which banned pro bono representation.

Kat still thought of herself as Pussy Riot, as did three other women who spent time with her. They were the two participants in the cathedral action who had not gone into hiding and had not gotten caught, and Natasha, Kat’s Rodchenko classmate and collaborator, who had participated in Voina but had not been living in Moscow during Pussy Riot’s brief period of activity before the arrests. They were quick to condemn as fake a tightly produced video that appeared in the summer of 2013, in which women in brightly colored dresses and tights and balaclavas belted lyrics—at least partly written by Nadya—that took aim at the unholy alliance between Putin and the oil industry. Among other things, Kat’s group felt that it did not correspond to Pussy Riot’s idea of serial performance: it consisted of several performances, but these, Kat’s group believed, had been staged solely for the purpose of producing the video rather than as independent actions. It was a subtle distinction, and a difficult argument to make given the group’s brief but varied history, but for Kat’s Pussy Riot, it was serious.

Arguably, serial performance—a months-long joint serial performance, unrehearsed and largely unscripted—was exactly what Nadya and Maria were engaged in. Their venues were the courtrooms of Berezniki and Perm in the Urals, Zubova Polyana and Saransk in Mordovia, and Nizhny Novgorod, where Maria was eventually transferred. Although, as convicted felons and coconspirators, they were banned from communicating with each other, they located their roles, as they always had, through a series of public performative experiments. They found ways of doing exactly what they had, in effect, promised to do in their closing statements in the Moscow court in August 2012.

Nadya had then said that it was the regime that was on trial and had pledged to continue to “act and live politically” to fight Russia’s overarching problems: “the use of force and coercion to regulate social processes” and the “forced civic passivity of the majority of the population as well as the total domination of the executive branch over the legislative and judicial ones.” That and the “scandalously low level of political culture . . . intentionally maintained by the state system and its helpers.” And the “scandalous weakness of horizontal links in society” and the “manipulation of public opinion, carried out with ease because the state controls the vast majority of media outlets.”

Maria had chosen the opposite approach in her closing argument, moving from the general to the specific. Like Nadya, she had addressed the sham nature of the trial, but it was the particulars that engaged her. She had talked about the psychiatric facility for children—in part because her visits there, of all her experiences before jail, had prepared her best for life behind bars, but also because the similarities between its specific horror and the insanity of the court proceedings served to highlight the absolute absurdity of the trial. Nadya, on the other hand, pointed to the trial as a small example of the larger travesty—of justice, decency, and reason—that Pussy Riot had been screaming about.

And Kat had spoken only of the results of the trial and conclusions from it.

Almost as soon as Nadya and Maria arrived in their penal colonies and arranged for new legal representation, both began filing all the appeals, complaints, and motions they and their lawyers—but mostly Maria with her legal books—found grounds to file. Petya shuttled back and forth between the colonies, the inmates, and the lawyers, collecting paperwork and delivering messages. Most important, he coordinated the ragtag support group, fashioning it into a working entity that distributed information, served as bodies—tweeting, texting, and videotaping bodies—at every hearing, and ultimately helped ensure that all hearings were open to the public and covered by the media. In late January, less than three months after leaving pretrial detention in Moscow, the Pussy Riot inmates commenced a regular schedule of court hearings, which also guaranteed them regular appearances in Russian and international media.

If Pussy Riot ever edited their court performances into a clip, its refrain would be “It seems that the court is denying my right to a defense.” (Indeed, the same might be claimed by any defendant in any court in Russia.) After a few hearings, Maria worked out her MO. She confronted the court to the point where the violations, and their routine nature, were exposed, obvious even to the clerks and court marshals, who had long ago stopped paying attention. At this point, the judge usually lost composure, along with the seemingly inherent sense of his or her own superiority. Judges snapped at Maria, screamed at her, and sometimes became belligerent. As soon as that happened—and it happened every time—Maria, whose own voice, by this point in the proceedings, had begun to crack traitorously, instantly regained her calm. And then she said, “It seems that the court is denying my right to a defense.”

After the very first hearing in Berezniki, the one where Maria had quoted Heidegger and Martin Luther and had merely mentioned Orwell and Kafka because quoting them would have been redundant, courts and prison authorities kept her out of the courtroom: she participated by a video uplink from the penal colony or another local facility. In late July 2013, the regional court in Perm took up her appeal of a denial of parole.

It started, as it usually did, looking like an actual court proceeding. The recently built regional courthouse, an eight-story structure of glass and concrete and modest but evident architectural ambition, would not have looked out of place in a medium-size U.S. city. The lobby was decorated with large glass panels engraved with Latin sayings of the
Dura lex, sed lex
variety, and the court’s press secretary was exceedingly polite and made sure everyone had a seat. The marshals manning the metal detectors did not do quite as well: one barked at Khrunova, “Lady, place your shopping bag in the metal detector!” Khrunova shot back, “I am not a lady, I’m a lawyer, and these are not shopping bags, this is the legal case.”