by Masha Gessen)
"I threw a fit," Nadya said. "I screamed until they gave me the book." This was one of the nicest things anyone had ever said to me. The conversation had begun half a year earlier, when I visited Nadezhda "Nadya" Tolokonnikova in prison. "Tell me what to read," she said. "What do you want to get out of it?" I asked. Did she, as a perennial autodidact, want new knowledge, or did she, as a prisoner, want high-quality entertainment? "Inspiration," she said.
I was in awe of the intelligence with which she read, so I feared anything less than brilliant would fail to impress her. I was also acutely aware of the fact that she was only allowed to have a few books at once and that she had very little time to read (though I did not realise then just how little). Worst of all, I suspected nothing could inspire her. After 15 months behind bars, seven of them in this penal colony in Mordovia, Nadya seemed to be descending into depression.
See the Pussy Riot performance at The Cathedral of Christ The Saviour here.
Back in February 2012, when Pussy Riot staged Punk Prayer – a musical protest at Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in which they appealed to the Holy Virgin to "chase Putin out" – a two-year jail sentence for a 40-second peaceful protest would have seemed unimaginable. The five young women in balaclavas chose a location sure to draw attention – the capital's largest cathedral, where the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church officiates on church holidays and the country's rulers attend, as do the cameras – and they aimed at one of the most potent forces in Russian politics: the church, which was then campaigning for Vladimir Putin as he sought to return for his third term as president. They expected controversy – as protest artists, they sought it – but they did not expect to go to jail. Their performance came at the height of the Russian protest movement, which felt exhilarating – and relatively safe: the most any protester had netted was 15 days of administrative arrest. The arrest of Pussy Riot on 4 March 2012, the day Putin was re‑elected president, marked the beginning of the crackdown, and their trial in August of that year set the dark absurdist tone for the trials to come. People jailed for peaceful protest now number in the dozens in Russia, and trials like Pussy Riot's, less well attended but similarly cruel and bizarre, have become the familiar reality of Russian opposition. But Pussy Riot were the first, perhaps because they had aimed and articulated their protest so well.
A month or so before my visit to the jail – just over a year into Nadya's sentence – she had written to me that she felt herself turning into a "Russian man" (by which she meant a non-thinking individual of any gender), that she found herself looking forward only to tea and sweets and she envied me my existence "in the life of the intellect". I wrote back assuring her that once tea and sweets could once again be taken for granted, her mind would certainly return to life.
But for now, Nadya seemed to be losing her battle to maintain motivation of any kind. When her husband, Petya, tried to convince her to join the other Pussy Riot convict, Maria Alyokhina, in filing formal complaints against prison authorities, she waved him off. When he insisted, she grew irritated. She said she wanted only for her term to pass as quickly as possible, and monotony was good for that while fighting was not. And when he told her she looked beautiful, she scowled and said it was the green prison uniform.
What Nadya did not tell us during that visit – what she could not and would not tell us with the guard present – was that her life in the colony had become torture. The work day in the sewing factory was growing ever longer; by the end of the summer it would reach 17 hours. The production quotas were swelling, and punishment for not fulfilling them was becoming more common. This included being denied hot water for tea, food and sweets sent by friends and relatives, access to the dormitory except to sleep for a few hours, and, of course, beatings, usually administered by other inmates. In addition to the factory work, inmates were given jobs in the grounds, lugging around stones, dirt and whatever else, often pointlessly. Nadya had been sleep-deprived for weeks; she was also often hungry.
Her tentative attempts to fight the conditions at the penal colony had resulted in a harsher regime not only for her but for other inmates, turning them against Nadya. It seemed to be a dead end: protest was clearly not only dangerous to Nadya personally, it was harmful to other inmates. No wonder she seemed desperate and depressed. I had to re-read whatever I was going to send to Nadya, to ensure my memory was right and I was helping her make the most of the small amount of time she had for reading. The matter was further complicated by the fact that the book had to be in Russian – prison censors do not read other languages, so they reject foreign books out of hand – and it had been years since I'd been impressed by anything written in my native language. I dug up a few books that I found stirring when they were first published in the 1990s, when I was in my 20s and early 30s. They now seemed petty and flat. I reached further back, to books that had affected me when I was a teenager, and finally hit paydirt. A Lawyer's Notes, a memoir by Dina Kaminskaya (the English translation, published in 1982, was titled Final Judgment: My Life as a Soviet Defence Attorney) detailed her transformation from a criminal defence lawyer into a lawyer who defended Soviet dissidents, then into a dissident and, finally, a political exile. It also cogently explained how the Soviet courts became as corrupt as they were: after years of carrying out the Central Committee's whims – now handing out 10-year sentences for petty theft, now showing indiscriminate leniency – judges and prosecutors had so much experience with power and cruelty, and so little experience with accountability and agency, that it's a wonder they didn't accept bribes more often. Two generations later, Nadya and Maria faced the Russian court, a direct descendant of the Soviet one, except even more predictable – and devoid of defence lawyers such as Kaminskaya.
The book also contained detailed accounts of the most important dissident trials and stories of the dissidents themselves: Kaminskaya had watched them evolve, either having met and become friends with them before she became their lawyer, or forming relationships with them over the intense months or years before and during their trial. Many of these people had also written books, and Petya and I had delivered most of them to Nadya on a previous visit, but Kaminskaya's was by far the best of the Soviet-era memoirs. She also described the prosecutors and quoted their speeches, and on several occasions I was struck by the similarities between their rhetoric and the rhetoric of those who had convicted Pussy Riot.
In the case of Nadya and Maria and their third co-defendant, Ekaterina "Kat" Samutsevich (she was convicted but her sentence was later suspended), the prosecution sought to prove they hated Russian Orthodox believers, since they were accused of committing a hate crime called "felony hooliganism". In Soviet times, prosecutors tried to prove that the dissident defendants hated the regime. Both cases were religious in nature and rested simply on the defendants' stubborn otherness: if the public, and the court, hated the women sitting in the box in the courtroom, then surely the defendants must hate them back and should therefore be sent to prison.
I stole my copy of Kaminskaya's book from my mother's library about 30 years ago and was unwilling to part with it; the only Russian edition had had a tiny print run and I could not even find a used copy for sale. I downloaded a digital copy, printed it out, and waited for Petya to take it on his next visit to Nadya. He stopped by in late September. Three months later I found out that Nadya had never received the other dissidents' books we had taken to her – they were held up by the censors – but when Petya told her I had sent her a book that would inspire her and they refused to hand that over too, she threw such a fit that the warden relented.
By this time Nadya herself had created a piece of extraordinary writing. I had been corresponding with her for a while and had read other pieces of hers. I did not think of her as a gifted writer. Her thinking was clear though quite complicated, but she had trouble finding the verbal constructions that would convey that clarity. The problem, at least in part, was with the Russian language itself: most of what had interested Nadya before going to prison had to do with philosophy, feminism and conceptual art – three areas in which Russia had systematically thwarted discussion, roughly for ever. To explain a concept often required an excursion into another concept and then a dependent construction and an additional reference, and in the end, rather than crystallising and clarifying an idea, things fell on a page to be untangled by the reader. Here, for example, is what she wrote to me when I asked how someone like her could have grown up in a place like Norilsk, the perennially dark, shockingly polluted, culturally desolate, and very, very cold city north of the Arctic Circle:
"On the subject of independent education and the origins of a rebellious personality type. A significant role in my story was played by my father, Andrei Tolokonnikov. He managed, amazingly, to focus my vision in such a way that now I am able to find things that are interesting, challenging, and curious anywhere at all. That includes the experience of being incarcerated. My father gave me the ability to receive all kinds of cultural production, from Rachmaninov to the [ska punk] band Leningrad, from European arthouse film to Shrek. At the age of four I could distinguish a baroque building from a rococo one, and by the age of 13 I loved [Venedikt Erofeev's profanity-filled novella of alcoholic rumination] Moskva-Petushki and Limonov [the nationalist opposition activist known for sexually explicit writing]. The lack of censorship in my education and, in fact, the concentration on that which could not pass the censorship of official Russian education pushed me to be passionate about possessing knowledge that privileged the culture of rebellion."
This was not an exceptional failure of style: Nadya has sounded like this more recently. After her release from prison she has tried to explain what kind of changes she and Maria want to see in the penal system, and careened quickly and hopelessly into bureaucratese: Russian does not have a language for discussing social and legislative change any more than it has a language for discussing feminism. But in September last year, when she was drafting her open letter from a Mordovian penal colony, she was using Russian for what it does incomparably well: describing human misery and humiliation in its many shades and varieties.
"It's both funny and frightening when a 40-year-old woman tells you, 'So we're being punished today! I wonder whether we'll be punished tomorrow, too.' She can't leave the sewing workshop to pee or take a piece of chocolate from her purse. It's forbidden.
"Dreaming only of sleep and a sip of tea, the exhausted, harassed and dirty convict becomes obedient putty in the hands of the administration, which sees us solely as a free work force. So, in June 2013, my monthly wages came to 29 rubles [50p] – 29 rubles!
"A threatening, anxious atmosphere pervades the manufacturing zone. Eternally sleep-deprived, overwhelmed by the endless race to fulfil impossibly large quotas, the convicts are always on the verge of breaking down, screaming at each other, fighting over the smallest things. A young woman was stabbed in the head with a pair of scissors because she didn't turn in a pair of trousers on time. Another tried to cut her own stomach open with a hacksaw. She was stopped from finishing the job."
Nadya's evolution over the three months after our visit to the penal colony, when she claimed to wish only for monotony, went something like this: she tried to reconcile herself to the life of the inmate as putty, to dream only of living to see the end of her term. Prison conditions, meanwhile, continued to get worse and protest continued to seem both dangerous and impossible. The solution had been there all along though, described in many of the dissident memoirs the censors were withholding from Nadya: she had to declare a hunger strike. A hunger strike means automatic solitary confinement, thereby protecting other inmates from the wrath of the wardens – and protecting Nadya from prisoners who would harm her. Before going on strike, though, Nadya went to see a warden and asked to have the length of the working day reduced in accordance with the law. The warden threatened to have her killed by other inmates.
Nadya's demands, then, would have to include the transfer to a different colony. But before going on strike, she needed to tell people what was going on in the prison – all of it, even the things no one ever talks about, not even years after being released. She drafted her letter on scraps of paper she would pass to Petya when he came to see her; she also dictated passages to him.
"Sanitary conditions at the prison are calculated to make the prisoner feel like a disempowered, filthy animal. Although there are hygiene rooms in the dorm units, a 'general hygiene room' has been set up for corrective and punitive purposes. This room can accommodate five people, but all 800 prisoners are sent there to wash up. We must not wash ourselves in the hygiene rooms in our barracks: that would be too easy. There is always a stampede in the 'general hygiene room' as women with little tubs try and wash their 'breadwinners' (as they are called in Mordovia) as fast as they can, clambering on top of each other. We are allowed to wash our hair once a week. However, even this bathing day gets cancelled. A pump will break or the plumbing will be stopped up. At times, my dorm unit has been unable to bathe for two or three weeks.
"When the pipes are clogged, urine gushes out of the hygiene rooms and clumps of faeces go flying. We've learned to unclog the pipes ourselves, but it doesn't last long: they soon get stopped up again. The prison does not have a plumber's snake for cleaning out the pipes. We get to do laundry once a week. The laundry is a small room with three faucets from which a thin trickle of cold water flows."
After months of sleep deprivation and malnourishment, Nadya was in no shape to maintain a hunger strike. She was hospitalised within a few days. In the prison hospital that serves the entire Dubrovlag, the many-branched Mordovian gulag, she met women whose stories made the torture she had seen seem like a dress rehearsal. These women came from a penal colony for repeat offenders. Nadya's second open letter mentioned them.
"I have seen the eyes of women from Penal Colony #2, eyes full of silent fear and resignation … Unlike in my colony, where the administration prefers to use the hands of other inmates to punish the undesirables, there prison staff themselves beat the inmates who attempt to protest or resist; they place them in solitary, where only two arguments are used: the beatings and the cold."
A newfound confidence was evident in this letter, as though Nadya were aware she had found her voice for addressing the Russian public and its officials. There was another new element as well: a number of references to the cases of Soviet dissidents described in Kaminskaya's book, the one she had won by throwing a fit at the beginning of her hunger strike. She had read it and discovered she had a legacy: she was following in the footsteps of people who had fought the same battle and slept on the same bunks.
If Nadya had been aware of any legacy before, it would have been that of the Moscow Conceptualists, a group of contemporary performance and visual artists and writers who, in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, had reappropriated the language and rituals of Soviet officialdom for the purposes of disarming it. Punk Prayer had been designed and performed very much in the Moscow Conceptualist mould: it was a brilliant prank of an artwork, and no one had planned to go to prison over it. Indeed, several participants in Pussy Riot's previous actions backed out precisely because they thought the group was pushing its luck and might get into serious trouble.
Pussy Riot was an open-membership collective in which every participant performed anonymously. "Being Pussy Riot is like being Batman," one participant told me. "You put on the mask – and you become Pussy Riot. You take it off – and you are no longer Pussy Riot." The mask, in this case, was a balaclava. It could be any colour as long as it was bright and one wore tights to not match it.
There were five women at the cathedral that day wearing balaclavas (one more appears in the resulting video clip because some of the footage was shot the day before – in the intervening sleepless night this woman had changed her mind about participating). Three of them – Nadya, Kat, and Maria – were ultimately arrested and therefore unmasked, and stood trial as Pussy Riot. All had travelled very different roads to Pussy Riot, the cathedral and jail. Kat was a disillusioned software engineer who had worked on nuclear submarine missile systems before becoming a photographer and attaching herself to Nadya on one art project after another. Nadya was a philosophy student who had been part of the radical art collective Voina and then, as she read more and more feminist theory, invented Pussy Riot. Maria had come by way of environmental activism and a love of writing and film. Still, with the exception of Maria, none of the women thought of herself primarily as an activist: some were artists, one was a musician, but all of them wanted to scream about different things that made them mad about Putin's Russia.
Together they created a great work of art, a distillation of tensions that made people intensely uncomfortable, challenged their assumptions, and provided them with images and concepts for describing their reality. "Mother of God, chase Putin out," Punk Prayer's refrain became the single most important meme of Russian protest culture, spanning many variations and allusions – in jokes and protest posters ("But Mother of God, didn't we ask nicely?"). The trial, an undrafted piece of absurdist theatre that played for nine stifling days in August 2012, became a part of the performance. The prosecution played the inquisition; the judge played its enthusiastic helper; the defence attorneys played the fool; and only the defendants themselves played it straight, giving pointed political speeches at the end of their ridiculous ordeal. And more than a year later, Nadya read Kaminskaya's book and recognised whole chunks of her own witch trial in the Soviet dissident lawyer's descriptions.
Perhaps because Maria had long regarded herself as an activist, she found her feet in prison fairly fast and with seeming ease. Soon after she arrived she was threatened by a group of inmates, and felt compelled to ask for "protective solitary", which is exactly the same cold and dark place as punitive solitary except one goes there voluntarily, to the extent that anything in prison is done voluntarily. "I arrived in solitary, dropped my things, and realised that if they were going to use their rules and regulations against me, I'd better study them," Maria told me soon after her release. There is nothing obvious about the conclusion she drew: a more reasonable – and certainly a more common one – would be "then I may as well give up". But Maria became a jailhouse lawyer. She collected documentation and filed endless complaints, on her own behalf and on behalf of other inmates. Within months, she had the prison administration scared of her – to the point that she was never actually allowed to enter the sewing factory, where she surely would have discovered numerous violations of labour and safety codes. As it was, Maria spent many days in court fighting the penal colony – and, miraculously, even winning a few victories.
Nadya had a few hearings as well, though while Maria focused on law and procedure, Nadya used the public forum – and, especially, the media, whose interest in the Pussy Riot inmates dwindled but never entirely disappeared – to speak publicly. It was a performance that grew increasingly political as time went on. By her last court hearing she had perfected the art of using every opening in the proceedings to make a statement and managed to give four prepared speeches in the course of one morning.
Then she lived through her desperate summer and her hunger strike and, in the hospital, discovered both the horrors other inmates had experienced and the inspiration that a long-dead woman's book could provide. Thus was born another lifelong dissident.
Outside the prison, the Putin regime was evolving, too. The hopeful period during which Pussy Riot had come into being, gone to jail, and become world-famous, was long over. The current moment in Russian history is at once much darker and possessed of starker contrasts: Putin and the church have declared war not only on the opposition but, it seems, on modernity itself. Pussy Riot's trial was this war's first great battle. As I corresponded with Nadya and Maria in jail and watched them fight it out in court hearings that followed their big trials, I worried they might not be ready for the reality they would find when they were released: rarely has a country – even Russia – changed so profoundly in just two years.
In late December 2013 Putin, in a gesture timed to polish his image ahead of the Sochi Olympics, released several high-profile political prisoners, including Nadya and Maria, who had two months knocked off their sentences. They walked out of their respective penal colonies three months to the day after Nadya declared her hunger strike, and 27 years to the day after nuclear physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov returned to Moscow from internal exile. They immediately announced that they would be launching a movement to fight for the rights of Russian prisoners, showing that they were not only ready to face Russia's new political reality – they were already swinging at it. In the month since, they have been collecting documentation on human rights abuses in prisons, organising court cases and letter-writing campaigns, and travelling to co-ordinate individual efforts; they have not paused for a minute.
• Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot by Masha Gessen is published by Granta.
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