Words Will Break Cement (27 page)

It is possible to tolerate anything as long as it affects you alone. But the method of collective correction at the prison is something else. It means that your unit, or even the entire prison, has to endure your punishment along with you. The most vile thing of all is that this includes people you’ve come to care about. One of my friends was denied parole, which she had been working toward for seven years by diligently overfulfilling quotas in the manufacturing zone. She was reprimanded for drinking tea with me. Lieutenant Colonel Kupriyanov transferred her to another unit the same day. Another close acquaintance of mine, a very cultured woman, was thrown into the pressure-cooker unit for daily beatings because she had read and discussed with me a Justice Ministry document entitled “Internal Regulations at Correctional Facilities.” Disciplinary reports were filed on everyone who talked to me. It hurt me that people I cared about were forced to suffer. Laughing, Lieutenant Colonel Kupriyanov said to me then, “You probably don’t have any friends left!” He explained it was all happening because of Dinze’s complaints.

Now I see I should have gone on a hunger strike back in May, when I first found myself in this situation. However, seeing the tremendous pressure put on other convicts, I stopped the process of filing complaints against the prison.

Three weeks ago, on August 30, I asked Lieutenant Colonel Kupriyanov to grant the inmates in my work shift eight hours of sleep. The idea was to decrease the workday from sixteen to twelve hours. “Fine, starting Monday, the shift can even work eight hours,” he replied. I knew this was another trap because it is physically impossible to make our increased quota in eight hours. So the work shift would lag behind and face punishment. “If they find out you were the one behind this,” the lieutenant colonel continued, “you definitely will never have it bad again, because there is no such thing as bad in the afterlife.” Kupriyanov paused. “And finally, never make requests for everyone. Make requests only for yourself. I’ve been working in the prison camps for many years, and whenever someone has come to me to request something for other people, they have always gone straight from my office to solitary confinement. You’re the first person this won’t happen to.”

Over the following weeks, life in my dorm unit and work shift was made intolerable. Convicts close to the wardens incited the unit to violence. “You’ve been punished by having tea and food, bathroom breaks, and smoking banned for a week. And now you’re always going to be punished unless you start treating the newcomers, especially Tolokonnikova, differently. Treat them like the old-timers used to treat you back in the day. Did they beat you up? Of course they did. Did they rip your mouths? They did. Fuck them up. You won’t be punished for it.”

I was repeatedly provoked to get involved in conflicts and fights, but what is the point of fighting with people who have no will of their own, who are only acting at the behest of the wardens?

The Mordovian convicts are afraid of their own shadows. They are completely intimidated. It was only the other day that they were well disposed toward me and begging me to do something about the sixteen-hour workday, and now they are afraid even to speak to me after the administration has come down hard on me.

I made the wardens a proposal for resolving the conflict. I asked that they release me from the pressure artificially manufactured by them and enacted by the prisoners they control, and that they abolish slave labor at the prison by reducing the length of the workday and decreasing the quotas to bring them into compliance with the law. But in response the pressure has only intensified. Therefore, as of September 23, I declare a hunger strike and refuse to be involved in the slave labor at the prison until the administration complies with the law and treats women convicts not like cattle banished from the legal realm for the needs of the garment industry, but like human beings.
*

By the time she declared her hunger strike, Nadya had been depleted by a summer of abuse, sleep deprivation, and undereating. Once she stopped eating, she quickly became very ill. Then she disappeared. IK-14 officials would not let anyone call her, and even the defense lawyers, when they showed up, were turned away. Nadya, they were told, had been hospitalized in serious condition. After two weeks she resurfaced at a prison hospital. Her hunger strike was over and she was awaiting transfer to a different penal colony. On October 18, she was, instead, sent back to IK-14. She declared a hunger strike again. Then she disappeared again. Prison authorities said she had been sent to a penal colony in a different region but they would not say which or where until she had arrived there. Every two days or so, rumors placed her at a new colony somewhere in the Urals or in Siberia or in Chuvashia—but no one really knew where she was.

I kept thinking of the first book I sent to Nadya in prison:
My Testimony
by Anatoly Marchenko, which she had requested. Marchenko had been an odd bird among Soviet dissidents, a manual laborer whom self-education had turned into a “political.” He spent about fifteen of his forty-eight years in camps, including in Mordovia, and jails and political prisons. It was at a special prison for “politicals” in Tatarstan that Marchenko declared a hunger strike in August 1986, demanding that Mikhail Gorbachev make good on his talk of reform by releasing all political prisoners. Many dissidents thought then he was rash and irrational: it would take years for the Soviet Union to rid itself of political prisoners, they believed, if it ever happened at all. Marchenko was hospitalized, force-fed, started his hunger strike again, and finally stopped after more than three months. Less than two weeks later he fell ill. He died in prison in December 1986. A few days later, Gorbachev launched the process of releasing all Soviet political prisoners. I am sure that in perestroika-era USSR no one had really wanted Marchenko to die: he was an almost accidental victim, a side effect of a system created to exert maximum pressure on anyone who resisted it. The system had changed little since the 1980s, and now it was crushing a woman, not yet twenty-four years old, who had not even wanted to fight it.

It had been two years since Pussy Riot started recording its first song, “Free the Cobblestones.”

Moscow, October 2013

Postscript, December 2013

Twenty-six days passed before there was any news of Nadya. Petya and the support group roamed Russia, first camping out in Mordovia, then following one in a long series of leads to Siberia. It was in Siberia that Nadya finally surfaced, in a prison authority-run TB hospital in Krasnoyarsk. She had apparently been greatly weakened by the hunger strike and the nearly four-week transport, but she was alive. She was told she would be allowed to serve out the last three months of her sentence in the relatively comfortable conditions of the prison hospital and would be given a job there if she regained her physical strength.

Less than a month later, Putin authorized an amnesty bill that would free all first-time female offenders who had small children. In a magnanimous gesture that garnered much positive press at home and abroad, Putin shaved two months off Maria and Nadya's sentences. In the end, forty seconds of lip-syncing cost them around 660 days behind bars.

Writing about people whom I cannot, for one reason or another, interview has become something of a specialty for me. It has taught me to cast a wide reporting net. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich all knew I was working on the book from the moment this project began, and each helped me collect information. Yekaterina sat for many hours of recorded interviews, allowed me to trail along with her some days as she went about living the life of a convicted felon on parole, and also provided me with documentation of all her legal battles. Nadezhda and Maria corresponded with me, answering my questions to the extent that time, their physical condition, and prison censors allowed. I was also fortunate to be able to meet with Nadezhda in the penal colony for nearly four hours in June 2013. Maria and her friends and family gave me access to letters she had written to them; excerpts from these letters are reproduced in this book with her permission. I attended most of the court hearings described or mentioned in the book; where I could not be physically present, I used audio and video recordings prepared by journalists or lawyers. Defense attorneys Mark Feigin, Nikolai Polozov, and Violetta Volkova not only sat for interviews but also gave me access to case documents, correspondence, and audio recordings. Defense attorney Irina Khrunova made herself available for interviews and accessible for running commentary before, after, and even during many legal proceedings. Friends and family of the three Pussy Riot convicts talked to me at length: all of their quotes in this book come from original interviews. Tasya Krugovykh shared film footage documenting the group’s history. Finally, I interviewed seven Pussy Riot participants other than the three whose names are known to the public; some but not all of them are quoted in this book. The one unfortunate omission are the two participants in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior action who were not arrested. I was forced to forgo interviewing them because one of them asked that I pay for the interview; I do not know whether she was asking for herself or for both of them, because the other one never responded to me directly. In the many months of intensive reporting for this book, this was the only interaction that contradicted the spirit of openness, accessibility, and free flow of information that had always marked Pussy Riot. The rest of the time, I was not only grateful for but often awed by the ability of Pussy Riot and their family and friends to maintain this spirit under the most trying of circumstances.

*
Patriarch Kirill’s worldly last name

*
Denis Yevsyukov was a police major who, while intoxicated, opened fire in a Moscow supermarket, killing two people and wounding twenty-two in April 2009.

*
Unlike some versions of Pussy Riot’s closing statements, these are the speeches as they were spoken during the trial, not as they had been written. I have translated them from transcripts prepared by Elena Kostyuchenko for
Novaya Gazeta
. I have intentionally kept the occasional repetitions, incomplete sentences, and ambiguous or factually incorrect statements (e.g., Putin does not hold international meetings daily or even weekly). These are the statements as Kat, Maria, and Nadya made them, sleep-deprived, drained, and almost entirely deprived of the benefit of one another’s intellectual or editorial input.

*
A prominent television journalist who made three consecutive films about Pussy Riot, aimed to show them as heretics and enemies of the Russian state. The films aired on state television in prime time.

*
The Union of Real Art, a collective of futurist artists, writers, and musicians in the 1920s and ’30s.

*
Brodsky stood trial for the crime of “social parasitism” in Leningrad in 1964. His “so-called poetry” was judged not to be work and he served eighteen months in exile in the Far North.

*
Chekists
were members of the Cheka, the first incarnation of the Soviet secret police. The term has become generic for secret-police officers.

*
This is an allusion to a line from Osip Mandelstam’s Stalin epigram, which is believed to have gotten the poet arrested and ultimately killed in prison. In the Mandelstam poem, Stalin enjoyed executions like one enjoys raspberries; in the Pussy Riot version, Putin had a bad taste in his mouth.

*
A peaceful march with tens of thousands of participants on May 6, 2012, the eve of Putin’s inauguration for his third term as president, turned into a riot after the marchers were attacked by police. Hundreds of people were detained that day and soon released, but by the time this song was written, more than a dozen were facing charges and likely prison time in connection with the clashes.

*
Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, once known as “the last dictator in Europe”—until Putin himself reached dictator status.

*
No one else came either, but the defense attorneys would have been virtually the only ones in a position to demand a meeting with Maria. It is not, however, standard practice for defense attorneys to visit their clients while they are in transit.

*
Merab Mamardashvili (1930–1990) was a Soviet Georgian philosopher.

*
Books are brought separately from the rest of the package because they must be seen by the censor. The censor disallows any books in a foreign language or books with any handwritten marks in the pages, as well as anything deemed subversive or likely to aid in organizing an escape.

*
Vladimir Gandelsman is a contemporary Russian poet.

*
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

*
The Russian word for piping is
kant
, as in the philosopher, which may be why Maria thought it sounded great.