Comradely Greetings

At around 11 a.m. on February 21, 2012, an event unheard of in contemporary Russia played out in the country's largest and most famous Orthodox church. The monumental Cathedral of Christ the Savior stands out in the skyline not far from the Kremlin, on the bank of the river Moskva. Constructed in the nineteenth century to commemorate the victory over Napoleon, the ultimate symbol of Tsarist power and seat of the Moscow Patriarchate, it was destroyed by the Soviet authorities and then rebuilt in the 1990s to mark the rebirth of Christianity in Russia after decades of official atheism. It was consecrated in 2000, at the very moment of Vladimir Putin's accession to the presidency. But for many intellectuals it is a place which equally symbolizes the ostentatious pomp of an ecclesiastical hierarchy sporting expensive watches and luxury cars, who support the Kremlin leadership without fail while providing it with an ideological basis founded on “traditional values” and the boundless exaltation of “Holy Russia.” To launch an attack here is to hit at the very heart—metaphorical, but also very real—of contemporary Russian power.

There is no service, this particular Tuesday morning. The immense space is very calm. Five young women pass the security checks without hindrance. They rapidly head over to the raised platform in front of the altar, reserved for the reading of sacred texts by the clergy. They slip on red, blue, orange, yellow, and violet balaclavas. They take off their coats, revealing their brightly colored dresses and tights. The female maintenance staff start to panic and call security. One security guard hurries across, tackles a young woman holding a guitar and pulls her away. He returns to grab hold of a loudspeaker. Church employees attempt to intercept the other four. But they have already begun their twenty-verse “punk prayer,” whose refrain is “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, Banish Putin.” Their song robustly denounces the corruption of today's Russian Church, its ultra-conservative ideology (“Don't upset His Saintship ladies / Stick to making love and babies”), the KGB past of Moscow's Patriarch Cyril and his unconditional support for Vladimir Putin's repressive policies (“Patriarch Gundyaev believes in Putin / Better believe in God, you vermin!”). The punks, kneeling and crossing themselves dramatically, conclude with the plea: “Join our protest, Holy Virgin.” The whole performance lasts a few dozen seconds at most, before the women file out of the church, accompanied by the ten people who had come to film and assist them.

As the first photos and videos circulated and began to spread around the world, three members of the group were arrested, placed under provisional detention, and charged with hooliganism (Article 213 of the penal code). Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (born in 1989), Maria Alyokhina (born in
1988), and Yekaterina Samutsevich (born in 1982) each faced up to seven years in prison.

This was not their first provocation. The hooded female punk group had emerged out of a radical contemporary art collective set up a few years earlier, in 2007, under the name Voina (War), initiated by Oleg Vorotnikov and Natalia Sokol. Nadya Tolokonnikova and her husband Piotr Verzilov were also members. Vorotnikov, Sokol, Tolokonnikova and Verzilov were students at the philosophy faculty of the prestigious Moscow State University, and were joined in the collective by other young people from St. Petersburg. Inspired by the actions staged by Russian artists like Alexander Brener and Oleg Kulik, the group began to organize provocative performances in public places. In February 2008, several couples, including the then-pregnant Nadya and Piotr, were photographed having sex in a hall of the Moscow Biological Museum. In June 2010, a giant painted phallus appeared on a bridge facing the FSB building in St. Petersburg, to the astonishment of passers-by. Combining contemporary art with political action, the collective quickly became one of the spearheads of artistic opposition to the Putin regime. In 2011, a number of its members, including Nadya Tolokonnikova and Katya Samutsevich, formed Pussy Riot.

At the end of that same year, the situation became increasingly troubling for the Russian leadership. On September 26, 2011, Dmitry Medvedev—then president and nearing the end of his term—announced that he would be handing power back to Vladimir Putin. Having been president from 2000 to 2008, Putin had had to, in effect, “lend” his protégé the presidency for four years. He could now return as the
head of the country for two six-year terms—until 2024. All Vladimir Putin now had to do was make sure he won the election. Parts of Russian society were shocked by these far-from-democratic shenanigans, and had little love for a regime that appears to be lasting longer than did that of Leonid Brezhnev. The anger exploded after December 4, 2011, following parliamentary elections that handed victory to the Kremlin-controlled United Russia Party as a result of massive, and crude, electoral fraud. Street demonstrations in the larger towns and cities rallied tens, even hundreds of thousands of people. There had been no equivalent protests since the era of Perestroika. Pussy Riot participated enthusiastically, taking all sorts of risks. On January 20, 2012, eight group members performed a song mocking candidate Putin in the middle of Red Square, facing the Kremlin, the sacred site of political power. On February 21 they broke new ground by targeting the absolute taboo: the Russian Church hierarchy's support for Kremlin policy.

This time, it was too much. Three young women were arrested. After a hard-fought presidential campaign, in the end Putin was elected on March 4, 2012. Now came the systematic, brutal retaliation against those who had led the protests of the preceding winter, under various different pretexts. On August 17, at the end of a trial packed with solidarity demonstrations, and the arrest of sympathizers, the three members of Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in a penal colony for “vandalism” and “incitement to religious hatred.” The prosecutor's argument hinged on the blasphemous aspect of their action, even though such a notion was at that time absent from the Russian penal code. They
appealed. Katya was released on October 10, but Nadya and Masha were sent to separate penal colonies—the former to Mordovia, the traditional home of the Soviet Gulags, and the latter to the Perm region.

While they were still in provisional detention in Moscow, the independent Russian weekly the
New Times
published an interview with the prisoners. Nadya explained the essentially political aspect of her action, begged pardon of any believers whom she might have offended. She resolutely took to the philosophical terrain, quoting Socrates and Diogenes. She confessed: “I am currently reading an essay by Slavoj Žižek, ‘Violence' … What Žižek writes is very important to us. According to him, the fundamentalist believers of each different religion emerge on account of their lack of true faith, not because of deep faith. I would really love to meet Žižek!”

Struck by this declaration of philosophical love, I wrote at once to Slavoj Žižek and proposed that he come to Moscow to meet Nadya. She was then still in the capital, awaiting the result of the appeal hearing. My plan was to publish their discussion in
Philosophie Magazine
, and Žižek quickly replied: “YES, of course!” I requested the help of Zoya Svetova, the
New Times
journalist who had published the interview in which Nadya voiced her admiration for Žižek and had access to detainees on account of her status as a prison visitor. While we were waiting for authorization, however, Tolokonnikova was sent from the detention center where she had been held throughout the trial to camp PC-14 in Mordovia, thousands of miles from Moscow. It was unrealistic to imagine going there with Žižek: no one would ever have given him authorization to visit. So in December 2012 I proposed to Slavoj
that he begin a correspondence with Nadya. He accepted enthusiastically, emailing me his first letter.

The exchange of letters took place as follows: We had Žižek's letters translated from English into Russian, then sent them to Zoya Svetova. The Federal Penitentiary Service has an internal electronic messaging system, but Zoya, thanks to her prison visitor status, was able to send the texts to Nadya via a special access code. After being read and verified by prison officials, the messages were forwarded to the prisoner. Nadya responded, writing by hand on special forms. Her letters were then transcribed for the messaging system by the prison administration and sent to the correspondent—who pays for the cost of this service. The responses were also clearly subjected to censorship at the hands of the penal colony. Once Zoya received them and transmitted them to us, all that was left to do was translate them into English and forward them to Slavoj.

As an inevitable consequence of these various filters, the rhythm of the correspondence was very slow. Aware that prison authorities were reading her letters, Nadya avoided detailing her daily life in prison. In any case, she preferred to remain—as did her interlocutor—on the intellectual terrain. The result of their correspondence is in the image of these two personalities. A disjointed mélange of poetry, rage, and fine neo-Marxist dialectics, evidencing their extraordinary temperaments. But beyond this exceptional human encounter between a ringleader of global contestation and a symbol of its persecution, something more profound emerged. At the beginning, the dialogue was in part an expression of mutual admiration: Žižek saw the adventures
of Pussy Riot as a manifestation of the “World Spirit,” just as Hegel had seen Napoleon's cavalcade conquering Europe as the incarnation of a more general historical lesson. In his view, the members of the group were challenging both Putin's authoritarianism
and
the “Stalinization” of contemporary capitalism. Tolokonnikova, after recounting that she had recently dreamt of the philosopher, responded with a Nietzschean rallying-cry: “We are the children of Dionysus,” she proclaimed, those sowing chaos among the established order. She also explicitly situated herself in the lineage of the great Russian thinker Nikolai Berdyaev, apostle of a spiritual liberty for the contemporary age and of a renewal of the religious as a revolt against worldly law. Considering her detention the logical outcome of her action, she courageously concluded—we later learned the terrible conditions she was imprisoned and working in at the time she wrote these lines—“When the World Spirit touches you, don't think you can walk away unscathed.”