ii. White Paint
On February 19th I received an email from the adjudicator of the competition I had submitted my poems to in January. Of the six poems I had entered, four of them had been selected for publication in June. These were ‘After the Cold War’, a poem written during my first visit to Russia detailing my frustration with the relationship between Britain and Russia; ‘There are no problems in Russia’, a poem that lists every problem in Russia I could think of, including the trial of Khodorkovsky; ‘Red’, a poem about my encounter with the Topol-M missiles in Moscow; and ‘Anthropogenic’, a self-critical poem, but one that lists certain atrocities by humans I have never fought or protested against, including a controversial factory being built near Krasnoyarsk. I had been awarded second prize. While this was good news, it also meant that certain poems that were openly critical of aspects of Russian politics and leadership would be in the public domain. Damage control was needed.
Just three days before, I had secured publication of an anti-English monarchy poem in an anthology titled Poems for a Welsh Republic, scheduled for release in June also. I had toyed with the idea of writing a sister poem to ‘There are no problems in Russia’ but had not done so because I had been so busy travelling back and forth to Siberia and working as much as possible in between. I quickly drafted ‘There are no problems in the United Kingdom’ and sent it to many friends, including the editor of Poems for a Welsh Republic, disguised as a work in progress I could use some help with. It was accepted the same day. I wasn’t too concerned about my Russia-themed poems being out there – I was a little-known Welsh poet with a small readership, and as such I was sure that nobody had heard of me in Russia. I could safely assume that the Kremlin would never be aware that these poems existed, but if they did read them and took a dislike to them I could then point them in the direction of the sister poem that criticised the political system and monarchy of the UK.
I was probably being a bit paranoid but so much depended on me being granted Russian residency that I could leave nothing to chance. I was caught between writing and publishing exactly what I felt I needed to, and the idea that I should suppress my writing until I had everything sorted. Unfortunately, I’ve never been good at thinking things through before I do them, and if I’m advised not to do something, it makes me want to do it even more. Although those poems never caused me any problems, with hindsight I can see that I should have put my ego in a box, thrown all my poems on the fire and concentrated on what I should have been doing with regard to residency papers. Or as Nastya might say: ‘only a fool and a complete arsehole puts publishing before the needs of his wife.’
Just two days after I received the acceptance email, five members of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot performed a 40-second anti-Kremlin song in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. This cathedral was destroyed under Soviet rule and rebuilt in the 1990s; which made it a very significant place for people to say their prayers. Within the next few weeks, three of the group were arrested for ‘hooliganism motivated by religious hatred’ while two others fled Russia. The detention and trial of the arrested trio became a source of controversy causing worldwide public outcry. The Russian reaction was quite the opposite of that in the West. Russian people, for the most part, take their religion and associated places of worships very seriously. It came as no surprise to me that while the West was outraged by the arrest of the three punk poppers, the majority of Russians were outraged by the punk prayer actions of Pussy Riot, and subsequently annoyed by the hysteria in the West. The problem was that while the protest was clearly political, the fact that they made their protest in a church opened them up to being viewed as anti-religious. The majority of Russians I spoke to after said they weren’t offended by the protest itself, but by the fact the singers showed a complete disregard for the regular, everyday folk who attended that particular church. Their actions were seen as a show of hostility, not against the government, but against the Orthodox community. Had they protested in Red Square, or sang their song in a club or protest rally, it’s likely they would never have been arrested and we might never have heard of them. But then the whole point of their protest was to highlight Putin’s relationship with the Orthodox Church. In recent years the Kremlin and the Church seem to have become so entangled that Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Orthodox Church in Russia, has claimed that Putin’s government had performed a ‘miracle of God’, by stabilising the country after the economic struggles during the 1990s. He later openly supported Putin before the 2012 elections, which would definitely have influenced the vote seeing as three-quarters of the Russian population register as being Orthodox Christians. Besides this, the Orthodox Church has publicly supported the Kremlin so often and in so many ways that they have even been recorded blessing Russian rockets.
Choosing Moscow’s Christ the Saviour as their protest point worked both for and against Pussy Riot. The Kremlin and the media they controlled were able to spin the event to make it seem as if the band were anti-Orthodox, not anti-Kremlin. Putin later accused the group of threatening ‘the moral foundations of Russia’, while others accused them of ‘blasphemy’, ‘being in league with Satan’ and/or ‘some Americans’. This led to a popular view that if you were a supporter of Pussy Riot you must therefore be an enemy of the church; consequently the focus shifted away from the actual message Pussy Riot members were trying to convey. However, the way the people saw ‘Putin’ and ‘the church’ as the same entity perfectly exemplified the dangerous relationship Pussy Riot had sought to highlight.
When I first heard of their arrest I shared the same view as those in the West; I couldn’t see that Pussy Riot had committed an actual crime. No one was hurt and their song had lasted less than a minute. As a counter PR stunt, I thought it would have looked good for Putin if the trio were set free; however he would then have had to face a backlash of criticism and outrage from his own people. It was a political catch-22. I also wondered about Pussy Riot themselves. While their punk pop song had achieved the desired effect in the West, successfully promoting a hatred of Putin, they must have known they would be arrested and sent to prison. Even I knew how sacred the church is to Russia, having been turned away following an attempt to take photographs inside one of our local churches in Krasnoyarsk. If I had waltzed in with my guitar and sung something as harmless even as the SpongeBob SquarePants theme tune, I would have been arrested and would probably have ended up doing some time in prison. I also knew that if someone wanted to effect a change in Russian politics, singing punk pop probably wouldn’t have any lasting effect, and yet their forty-second song was much more effective in turning the world’s gaze towards Russia than any poem could ever be. In the age of the pop song and the soundbite, I realise that music was probably their best vehicle of communication, though I can’t help but be cautious of pop-star revolutionaries; everyone thought the Sex Pistols were the antidote to the capitalist model of art, right up until one of them started making adverts for Country Life Butter.