Luis Granena
The location is the White House, a papier-mâché White House inhabited by Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright in House of Cards. It is the year 2015. Maria Alyokhina, Masha, has already been detained and released more than once. She has started writing her book, a Vonnegutesque memoir, Riot Days, yet to be published in Spain, in which she recounts: 1) how each of the actions of Pussy Riot, the feminist punk collective that fell into the vein of star who can make a combative cameo in the political series of the moment; 2) everyday life in prison, which highlights the excruciating cold that is spent there, the systemic abuse and forced labor that seems to have changed not an iota since Dostoyevsky’s time, and 3) his need for girls not to date rule to prevent the world from continuing to belong to those who rule.
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The chapter in which both Masha and her wrestling partner Nadya Tolokonnikova refuse to toast Viktor Petrov, the series’ Vladimir Putin Lars Mikkelsen, is the third of the third season. The act is an act of protest inserted into an artistic product that she considered part of history, capitalized. Actually questioner of it. “When I was a teenager,” Masha recounts at Riot Days, “I drew graffiti on one of the school walls.” The wall was painted with historical motifs depicting a Russia she hadn’t seen and didn’t believe in. “I liked to see how the graffiti gained ground and began to mix with these historical episodes, giving shape to another truth, ours,” he describes. Even then, the growing Masha thought how an activist would become, without being one more.
Born in Moscow in 1988, Maria Alyokhina grew up in Russia in the 1990s and remembers “the people queuing everywhere, queuing for food, clothes, vouchers”. Something he says hasn’t changed. “They tell us the country has changed, but I keep seeing the queues.” The daughter of a math teacher, whom she only met when she was 21, and a single mother programmer, she hated the Russian education system and changed schools up to four times. “They taught you not to think. They wanted us to just play by the rules. Obviously I didn’t like it at all,” he once said. Poet, actress and mother Masha, who studied journalism and creative writing and was a Greenpeace activist, always kept the legacy of performance artist and political time bomber Aleksandr Brener in mind.
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In fact, the first action of the Pussy Riot took place at the very spot where Brener stood in front of the Kremlin with a pair of boxing gloves – he was dressed as a boxer, the image is mythical – and asked Yeltsin to go outside. “And we were eight, like the eight dissidents in 1968” who protested against the occupation of Czechoslovakia, he recalls. The snapshot that went around the world and forever changed the West’s idea of the Russia that supposedly had nothing to do with the Soviet Union was that of Moscow Cathedral. The action that landed her in prison for the first time. In it, the collective calls on the Blessed Mother to become a feminist and liberate Russia from Putin. Masha dresses in green and wears a yellow balaclava. And he’s doing something very necessary, says Lara Alcázar, founder of Femen Spain. “Create a click in the mind of whoever sees it,” he says.
“The protest is trying to evoke an opinion, a set of questions. It has always been necessary, but now there is an emergency. It shows you the other side. In your case, where are the oppressors and where are the oppressed,” says Alcázar. The fact that Masha is hiding somewhere in Iceland today, having fled Russia with her partner Lucy Shtein, both disguised as delivery girls and their lives are in danger, doesn’t miss the other side of the story, with capital letters. Alcázar also points out that a woman who engages in activism crosses many boundaries and that the value of the Pussy Riot protest, like Femen, is that it does not ask for permission and relies on direct action and provocation based, which doubles the effect.
Carol Paris, Spanish editor of The Pussy Riot Book (Roca Editorial), believes that what is most interesting about the collective is that it eliminates the idea of individuality and the subject. “They show us how to become active free agents. We should all be Pussy Riot.” And yet, as writer-translator Monika Zgustova points out, we mustn’t forget that Masha and the rest of Pussy Riot “are in real danger, in danger of being shot in the forehead or Being killed by an elaborate poison, as has happened to so many people to make the Kremlin uncomfortable.” This danger “gives value, weight and seriousness to her message,” a message that, as Tolokonnikova writes in “The Book Pussy Riot says, contains a lot of “political, barbaric and primitive cabaret”.
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