Jailed Pussy Riot Activist’s Defiant Speech at Parole Hearing

A Euronews video report on the parole hearing of Pussy Riot activist Nadezhda Tolokonnikova last week in Saransk, Russia.

As my colleague Melena Ryzik reported, the two members of the Russian activist collective Pussy Riot who remain imprisoned were both denied parole last week. At separate hearings, Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova were judged to be insufficiently repentant for the “punk prayer” they performed in a Moscow cathedral last year, calling on the Virgin Mary to “send Putin packing!”

The women, who were arrested together last March and sentenced to two years in prison for “hooliganism aimed at inciting religious hatred,” both denounced the Russian justice system during the parole hearings in Perm and Saransk.

On Thursday, the literary journal n+1 published an English translation of Ms. Tolokonnikova’s defiant statement, in which she said: “I know that in Russia under Putin I will never receive parole. But I came here, to this courtroom, in order to cast light once again on the absurdity of the justice of the oil-and-gas-resource kingdom, which condemns people to rot pointlessly in camps.”

RIA Novosti During her parole hearing last week, the Pussy Riot activist Nadezhda Tolokonnikova referred to protests in Moscow following the conviction of the anti-corruption blogger Aleksei Navalny.

As one Russian art blogger explained, Ms. Tolokonnikova also took issue with the charge that she had failed to display “a positive attitude” in the penal colony by boycotting an essentially mandatory beauty contest for female prisoners. According to the n+1 translation by Kevin M. F. Platt, Ms. Tolokonnikova told the court:

The style of the Putin regime is a conservative, secret-police aesthetic. By no accidentâ€"and actually quite logicallyâ€"this aesthetic persistently samples and recreates the principles of two previous regimes, both of them historical precedents to the present one: the tsarist-imperial aesthetic and the wrongly understood aesthetic of Socialist Realism, complete with workers from some kind of standard-issue Train-Car Assembly Plant of the Urals. Given the clumsiness and thoughtlessness with which all of this is being recreated, the present political regime’s ideological apparatus deserves no praise. Empty space, in its minimalism, is more attractive and tempting than the results of the aesthetic efforts of the current regime.

This worthless aesthetic is lovingly recreated by each and every state institution in Russia, including of course the prison colonies, which form such an important part of the repressive machine of the state.

And so, if you are a woman, and what is more if you are a young woman and even the slightest bit attractive, then you are basically required to take part in beauty contests. If you refuse to participate, you will be denied parole, based on your disdain for the “Miss Charm” event. In the opinion of the prison colony administration and the court that supports it, non-participation means that you lack a “positive attitude.” However, I claim that in boycotting the beauty contest I express my own principled and painstakingly formulated “positive attitude.” My own position, in distinction from the conservative, secret-police aesthetic of the camp administration, consists in reading my books and journals during moments that I extract by force from the deadening daily schedule of the prison colony.

On the same day that Ms. Tolokonnikova made her impassioned plea for justice to the court in Saransk, a third Pussy Riot member, Yekaterina Samutsevich â€" who was jailed with the other women but released on appeal last October â€" took part in a bizarre protest in the Netherlands organized by Amnesty International to press for the release of the Russian activists. Ms. Samutsevich fired the starter’s pistol, via videolink, for Amnesty’s “Naked Run for Freedom,” but the Russian judges were somehow unmoved by the spectacle of hundreds of Dutch protesters running around a muddy track during a music festival in the Netherlands wearing only motorcycle helmets.

Video of Pussy Riot’s Yekaterina Samutsevich that was played at the start of a naked run in the Netherlands last week.