Rather than being the new Solzhenitsyn, who spoke to everyone with clear moral actions in the USSR, the group captured the vanity and, ironically, the unpolitical nature of the radical art scene. They were interested in protest, not politics. Pyotr Verzilov, 24, the husband of Nadia Tolokonnikova, 22, the lead singer in the ‘band’, pranced around the court grinning, with a scraggly pubic beard, visibly thrilled to be in the floodlights of fame. We talked one afternoon by the courtroom door. I asked him if he realized that so many people I was speaking to in the regions now believed that the opposition was in fact Pussy Riot: ‘Well, if they believe that, there is absolutely nothing that can be done for them.’
One of the three girls on trial, Yekaterina Samutsevich, barely understood what was going on. ‘We were so confused, tired and not sure what was happening,’ she remembered. ‘We did it to show that the Church is now all a bunch of paid-up bureaucrats controlled by the state.’ This was not the first of her stunts. She had been filmed grabbing policewomen in the marble halls of the Moscow metro trying to force-kiss them. ‘We really didn’t understand what was happening during the trial, especially with the lawyers.’ In a squalid signal of how embezzlement permeated all corners of Russian life, some of the girls’ lawyers had been asking for cash to be handed over by journalists for access and even tried to register Pussy Riot as a trademark.15 Nor did Samutsevich appear to have grasped the political repercussions of the stunt. Her two other brightly coloured rioters were sent to prison camps. Luckily, after byzantine negotiations, Samutsevich was freed. We met one evening after her release to talk. She had brown circles under her eyes and the pallor of late nights, or jail cells:
‘Did you think that you might create propaganda for Surkov?’ I asked
‘I don’t know. Maybe. We didn’t think about that,’ she mused looking upwards.
‘So what about the people in the regions that now think the opposition is against the Church?’ I asked.
‘They are not our audience. What people don’t understand is that we are not just a political anti-Putin group. We are an art group. But I do see we created a conflictual situation though.’
The Kremlin, though, had thought things through. Surkov must have been delighted when he checked the polls. Only 10 per cent of Russians felt no punishment was in order and just 30 per cent disapproved of the Church’s new politics.16 It seemed such good fortune that conspiracy theories swirled. Regardless, the show trial captured how vicious, manipulative and devoid of legal basis the Russian legal system had become. It showed that the law only existed as Putin’s weapon. This, of course, was the whole point.
‘They got what they were asking for,’ smirked Putin.17 They may have turned a serious issue into a joke, but their sentence was no laughing matter. Two of the ‘singers’ were sent to a penal colony for two years’ hard labour, one aged twenty-two and the other twenty-four, both mothers of toddlers. Sending half-children with children of their own to places where beating and rapes are routine – as punishment for a silly song – was unspeakably cruel. Nevertheless around that time in Moscow, you could almost hear Surkov’s laughter in the dark that a ‘punk prayer’ they thought was feminism in action, had been inverted into a Putinist dagger to chop up the country.
This sentence was a small part of the wider crackdown. OMON in tundra camouflage and crash helmets burst into opposition bars and grabbed men with white ribbons and T-shirts, others were beaten by them at rallies and detained pending imprisonment. They were more vicious than usual; their salaries had been doubled. Disloyal members of the establishment were more discreetly punished. The dissenting deputy Gennady Gudkov was expelled from the Duma, then forced to fire-sell his business. As he was a former KGB general, the deputies from United Russia shouted ‘Judas! Judas!’ over his final speech. The minor oligarch Alexander Lebedev, who had donated money to opposition causes, was charged with ‘hooliganism’ – the same crime as Pussy Riot, for assaulting someone on TV.
As Putinism by consent eroded, the legal infrastructure for authoritarian rule was put into place. A law passed under Medvedev that had decriminalized libel was reversed, the legal definition for treason was ominously widened to include threatening Russia’s ‘constitutional order’, a list of harmful websites drawn up, huge fines passed for ‘illegal protests’ and any NGO that received funding from abroad was forced to carry the label of ‘foreign agent’. Navalny was charged with embezzling on a timber transaction and confined to the capital. He was stunned; if found guilty he could be jailed for ten years. Historians were speechless – crimes with lumber were amongst those Stalin chose with which to prosecute Bukharin in 1932. It was as if the Medvedev years had never occurred. Now prime minister, even Medvedev himself talked like his presidency had been an illusion. ‘They often tell me you’re a liberal,’ he said to a United Russia audience, ‘I can tell you frankly: I have never had liberal convictions.’18
Russia seemed to be going backwards. Slowly, repression grew darker. ‘The good news is – I don’t have a sister,’ wrote Navalny when the police searched his parents’ business for the first time, then opened a criminal investigation into his younger brother.19 Internet surveillance systems and a new law that effectively allowed the FSB to spy on Russian citizens without restrictions were put in place. Out in the open, ‘Cossack brigades’ were put on patrol in Moscow and a ‘purge of the elite’ endlessly discussed on state TV. Starting with Anatoly Sverdyukov, the defence minister, dismissals swept throughout the bureaucracy. Their crime: ‘corruption’. Sounding ever more conservative, Putin started to say that Russia would resist ‘any outside interference in our affairs’.20 Russia, he expounded, was ‘a unique civilisation’ – different from Europe.21 He was on the offensive again. On the streets, protestors were outnumbered by thousands of OMON. He was winning again. ‘The opposition,’ Putin scoffed, ‘they ask for the impossible and then never do anything.’22
Moscow had come full circle. The ‘creative classes’ sunk into the anguish they had felt when Putin announced his return. It had really happened. Even the apparent concession that Khodorkovsky would be freed two years early in 2014 was only interpreted as a way to divide the opposition, by throwing in a new, divisive leader to undermine Navalny. The gigantic expectations of the protest movement had crashed against the old repressive routine. The opposition busied itself electing a coordination council to represent itself, but even in its own bars and hangouts, hope had given way to disappointment, even disorientation as it sank in the system had not changed. The polls made dreary reading: a majority of Russians were both unhappy with the Putin regime and felt the protest movement had failed.23 Amongst those elected to a new coordination council was Navalny’s deputy Vladimir Ashurkov, the man organizing all his initiatives. We met for breakfast in a cheapish coffee chain and ate burnt eggs and chewy salmon. ‘What did people expect?’ he sighed. ‘The expectations were just enormous. But we have come so far. When I met Alexey he was just one man on his own. First we turned him into a public figure. Then we created a team. Then we led a movement. Then we created this coordination council. This will take time.’ He picked at the salmon, imagining his future. ‘There are two fixed trends here. The declining popularity of those that hold power and our rising popularity.’ He then asked for my pen and, in my notebook, drew a biro line going exponentially up and another crashing down. Neither of us had any idea if those lines were years, or even decades long, ‘but sooner or later, they cross.’ Six weeks later his apartment was raided. They even searched his vitamins. Ashurkov could only tweet, nervously.