Matthew on August 9, 2012 at 9:22 am. Reply #

One of the aspects of the Pussy Riot controversy is the venue they played their music in–the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. The cathedral has a very checkered past with state power and is highly symbolic to both supporters of Orthodoxy’s political embrace of the state and opponents. Built to show conservative Russia’s victory over the French Revolution (i.e., Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow), the Cathedral was intended as a massive edifice to cement the link between Church and State–an edifice that took generations to construct (literally). It was consciously modeled on the Hagia Sophia, Byzantium’s great construction, and was a physical manifestation of Russia’s claims to be the continuator of the Byzantine political tradition. Perhaps most interesting for a Church, it became the major site commemorating the victory in the Great Patriotic War with huge numbers of marble reliefs. This was state propaganda made spiritual with an explicit message that military victory was granted by God to the righteous Russian Empire (Poles can be forgiven for wondering where God was for them the next 150 years).
The building was massive, ugly and situated in a swamp so it had weak foundations (insert metaphor analysis here) and it was hated by the entire Russian intelligentsia, including pro-Orthodox slavophiles. Like so much other cultural vandalism, its destruction was authored by Stalin who planned to build the grandious palace of the Soviets here. It took over a year to demolish the massive cathedral and they never could execute on Stalin’s dreams of a massive temple to communism here (insert metaphor analysis yet again). For the last decades of Communism, the site was given over to a pool.
The Cathedral was rebuilt in the 1990s almost exactly the way it had been prior to demolition (with its architect, Tsereteli, however, adding bronze reliefs which are rather too much like statues to be cannonical for an Orthodox church). It’s connection to the renewed Church-State alliance was made clear when former President Yeltsin was laid in state in it before being buried in Novodevichy Cemetary. Nicholas II and his family were cannonized in the Cathedral. It’s administration fund is rumored to have a shadowy financial empire but no corruption charges have stuck to it or the Patriarch of Moscow, whose seat it is. The cathedral is opulent and (in my mind) extraordinarily ugly–breaking with the elegant traditions of Russian medieval church architecture such as St. Basil’s or the collection of churchs in the Kremlin or at Trinity-Sergeev (admittedly an aesthetic judgment, but there seems very little spirituality in the place compared to even modern churches, such as the nice little church at the heart of Victory Park).
In other words, Pussy Riot sang its protest song against church-state collusion and the corruption of the church hierarch in support of dictatorial power precisely where that relationship is so powerfully instantiated. It is a cathedral dedicated to war, for christ sakes. This, of course, is the real blashphemy–the corrupt alliance between Orthodoxy and the Putin regime, but don’t expect to see that on trial very soon.

Michelle on August 10, 2012 at 8:48 pm. Reply #

In their own words:
Yekaterina Samutsevich: Closing Statement at the Pussy Riot Trial

https://chtodelat.wordpress.com/2012/08/08/yekaterina-samutsevich-closing-statement/

During the closing statement, the defendant is expected to repent or express regret for her deeds, or to enumerate attenuating circumstances. In my case, as in the case of my colleagues in the group, this is completely unnecessary. Instead, I want to express my views about the causes of what has happened with us.

The fact that Christ the Savior Cathedral had become a significant symbol in the political strategy of our powers that be was already clear to many thinking people when Vladimir Putin’s former [KGB] colleague Kirill Gundyaev took over as head of the Russian Orthodox Church. After this happened, Christ the Savior Cathedral began to be used openly as a flashy setting for the politics of the security services, which are the main source of power [in Russia].

Why did Putin feel the need to exploit the Orthodox religion and its aesthetics? After all, he could have employed his own, far more secular tools of power—for example, national corporations, or his menacing police system, or his own obedient judiciary system. It may be that the tough, failed policies of Putin’s government, the incident with the submarine Kursk, the bombings of civilians in broad daylight, and other unpleasant moments in his political career forced him to ponder the fact that it was high time to resign; otherwise, the citizens of Russia would help him do this. Apparently, it was then that he felt the need for more convincing, transcendental guarantees of his long tenure at the helm. It was here that the need arose to make use of the aesthetics of the Orthodox religion, historically associated with the heyday of Imperial Russia, where power came not from earthly manifestations such as democratic elections and civil society, but from God Himself.

How did he succeed in doing this? After all, we still have a secular state, and shouldn’t any intersection of the religious and political spheres be dealt with severely by our vigilant and critically minded society? Here, apparently, the authorities took advantage of a certain deficit of Orthodox aesthetics in Soviet times, when the Orthodox religion had the aura of a lost history, of something crushed and damaged by the Soviet totalitarian regime, and was thus an opposition culture. The authorities decided to appropriate this historical effect of loss and present their new political project to restore Russia’s lost spiritual values, a project which has little to do with a genuine concern for preservation of Russian Orthodoxy’s history and culture.

It was also fairly logical that the Russian Orthodox Church, which has long had a mystical connection with power, emerged as this project’s principal executor in the media. Moreover, it was also agreed that the Russian Orthodox Church, unlike the Soviet era, when the church opposed, above all, the crudeness of the authorities towards history itself, should also confront all baleful manifestations of contemporary mass culture, with its concept of diversity and tolerance.

Implementing this thoroughly interesting political project has required considerable quantities of professional lighting and video equipment, air time on national TV channels for hours-long live broadcasts, and numerous background shoots for morally and ethically edifying news stories, where in fact the Patriarch’s well-constructed speeches would be pronounced, helping the faithful make the right political choice during the election campaign, a difficult time for Putin. Moreover, all shooting has to take place continuously; the necessary images must sink into the memory and be constantly updated, to create the impression of something natural, constant and compulsory.

Our sudden musical appearance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior with the song “Mother of God, Drive Putin Out” violated the integrity of this media image, generated and maintained by the authorities for so long, and revealed its falsity. In our performance we dared, without the Patriarch’s blessing, to combine the visual image of Orthodox culture and protest culture, suggesting to smart people that Orthodox culture belongs not only to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Patriarch and Putin, that it might also take the side of civic rebellion and protest in Russia.

Perhaps such an unpleasant large-scale effect from our media intrusion into the cathedral was a surprise to the authorities themselves. First they tried to present our performance as the prank of heartless militant atheists. But they made a huge blunder, since by this time we were already known as an anti-Putin feminist punk band that carried out their media raids on the country’s major political symbols.

In the end, considering all the irreversible political and symbolic losses caused by our innocent creativity, the authorities decided to protect the public from us and our nonconformist thinking. Thus ended our complicated punk adventure in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.

I now have mixed feelings about this trial. On the one hand, we now expect a guilty verdict. Compared to the judicial machine, we are nobodies, and we have lost. On the other hand, we have won. Now the whole world sees that the criminal case against us has been fabricated. The system cannot conceal the repressive nature of this trial. Once again, Russia looks different in the eyes of the world from the way Putin tries to present it at daily international meetings. All the steps toward a state governed by the rule of law that he promised have obviously not been made. And his statement that the court in our case will be objective and make a fair decision is another deception of the entire country and the international community. That is all. Thank you.

Matthew on August 14, 2012 at 8:36 pm. Reply #

Bozhe moi! Eto chepukha!