Words Will Break Cement (16 page)

Their aquarium was an airless stall; it had been built in retaliation after Khodorkovsky’s lawyers secured a European Court of Human Rights ruling that deemed holding defendants in steel cages inside courtrooms inhumane. For their second trial, Khodorkovsky and his codefendant got a shiny new unventilated Plexiglas cube. This was the very enclosure in which Pussy Riot sat now. It engulfed them like a nightmare; now the picture was clear and now it was obscured by the fogged-up walls of the aquarium, the heavy air inside, the haze of hunger and sleep deprivation, and the general sense that none of this could be real.

The judge denied their request for a break. “We’ll stay here until morning if we need to,” she declared. She called Denis Istomin to the stand. He was a tall handsome blond young man with a gym body. An activist of a Russian Orthodox nationalist movement, he had testified a couple of years earlier at the trial of a curator accused of organizing a show that offended the believers; Istomin had seen Nadya protesting during that trial, and his testimony had been essential to the women’s arrest. Now he testified that what he saw on February 21 had hurt his feelings so much that he cried. He said he had come to the cathedral that morning to buy a ring at the gift shop, but, happening upon the kerfuffle, had helped remove Maria from the cathedral.

“You said you were in a state of shock as a result of our performance. Tell me, what did you do after you handed me over to the police?” Maria said, likely meaning security.

“I went back inside the cathedral. I wanted to leave, because I had done a good deed, I’d helped clean up the cathedral, so I could leave, but there was a force holding me back. So I went inside and into the shop.”

“You were in a state of shock and you went into the shop. I see, thank you. One more question. Did you hear that after lunch today I apologized for our ethical violation?”

“Yes, I heard.” Istomin sighed. “But all things should be done in their time. As Stanislavsky used to say, I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you have repented.”

“Let’s discuss their apologies later,” said the judge. “Maybe they’ll find a more repentant way of saying them.”

After Istomin testified that he had found the words
holy shit
offensive and sacrilegious, Volkova asked him what else struck him the same way.

“The phrase ‘Mother of God, become a feminist.’ I believe this is unacceptable disparagement.”

“Disparagement of Jesus Christ?”

“Disparagement of Jesus Christ.”

It was after eight when Istomin finished testifying. The judge called a ten-minute break, enough to go to the bathroom but not enough to get anything to eat.

A
T HALF-PAST EIGHT,
the judge was livid. “I called a ten-minute break! Ten minutes! Why is everyone here except for the defense attorneys? What do they need, a special invitation?”

“Your honor, this kind of attitude is called contempt of court,” the prosecutor suggested helpfully.

“Let’s not talk about attitude,” said Volkova, the only defense attorney in the room. “We see who’s got attitude.”

“Where are your colleagues?” the judge demanded to know.

“And so we return to the scene of our disgrace,” said Polozov to Feigin as they walked in.

“I am reprimanding the defense,” said the judge. “Whom are you going to cross-examine now?”

“We are not going to cross-examine anyone,” said Volkova. “We are demanding that the judge recuse herself. The judge is clearly prejudiced against the defendants.”

An hour later, after everyone had weighed in on Volkova’s motion, the judge refused to recuse herself and called the next victim, Vasily Tsyganyuk, an altar man. He was wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with a large Dolce & Gabbana logo. He also testified that he had been deeply hurt by the performance and that he had heard no political statements, only sacrilegious and hateful ones. He stopped testifying at ten, the hour past which Russian law forbids conducting court hearings.

With the waiting in the basement isolation rooms, the requisite searches, and the circuitous routes prisoner transports always seemed to take, Nadya, Maria, and Kat would be back in their cells at two in the morning. Three hours later, they would need to be ready to begin a new day of their trial.

All the days would be similar to the first one. They would be interminable. The lawyers would veer from fumbling to speechifying, and there would be no time or opportunity to discuss, much less change, their defense strategy. Feigin, Polozov, and Volkova had decided they would focus their efforts only on drawing attention to the outrages of the trial and would not speak to the court on the court’s terms. Indeed, they would sometimes act in ways that exacerbated the travesty to make it that much more obvious. Months later, after things had gone wrong and then very wrong, they still believed they had chosen the right approach; there was, after all, no waging battle against a judge who clearly relished running a witch trial. The lawyers believed their public statements, endless Tweets, and tireless media work had mobilized unparalleled support for the women on trial, and this, in turn, gave them the best chance they had of going free.

“But what made you think the Russian authorities would listen to these people?” I asked them much later. “You’d seen them put Khodorkovsky away for ten years—and there had been a major international campaign to support him.”

“This was different,” said Polozov. “These were the very people they invite to sing at their parties!”

This was not entirely illogical; at least the Russian elite listened to these people when they sang.

Faith No More had invited Pussy Riot members to join them onstage during a July concert in Moscow—and five women in balaclavas did and lit sparklers and chanted that “Putin pissed himself.” The Red Hot Chili Peppers spoke out when they came to town three weeks later. Franz Ferdinand and Sting issued statements of support. Then came Radiohead, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, U2, Arcade Fire, Portishead, Björk, and hundreds of others. Never had the worldwide music industry mobilized on this scale and at this speed to support a colleague—especially colleagues who were not, in fact, musicians in any traditional sense.

Judge Syrova’s court plowed on. A small crowd continued to keep vigil in front of the courthouse. A middle-aged man in glasses stood at the entrance with a sign that read
YOUR HONOR, WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR HONOR?
Whenever Nadya, Maria, and Kat were delivered to the courthouse, the crowd managed to let them know they were there. When the victims walked in and out of the building, the crowd shouted, “Shame!” Some of the victims responded by making the sign of the cross toward the crowd.

On Day Two, altar man Tsyganyuk testified that Pussy Riot had acted as though they were possessed.

“Those who are possessed can act in a variety of ways,” he explained. “They can scream, thrash around on the floor, sometimes they jump.”

“Do they dance?” asked Polozov.

“Well, no.”

“That’s enough of this talk about who is possessed,” said the judge. “Tsyganyuk is not a medical doctor and is not qualified to render a diagnosis.”

Security guard Sergei Beloglazov testified he had been so traumatized by the performance that he had been unable to work for the last two months (almost six months had passed since the performance).

“But as far as myself, I forgive them,” he said. “I do not hold grudges. But as for God, the sanctuary, and other believers, I can’t decide that—that would be God’s will and the court’s decision.”

The court managed to fit all the victims into the first two days of hearings. Day Two even ended by nine, which meant Nadya, Maria, and Kat might be in their cells by midnight.

D
AY
T
HREE BEGAN
with an ambulance. The hearing was scheduled to start at one, but Nadya, Maria, and Kat were installed in their basement rooms in the morning; such was the way of prison transports, which functioned a bit like buses, delivering inmates from various jails to different courts in the morning and taking them back in the evening. By midday, all three were close to fainting. Nadya was in her third day of debilitating headaches. Underweight Maria was simply depleted, as was Kat. They demanded a doctor repeatedly, until an ambulance was finally called. The doctors examined them and said they were fit to stand trial. Two hours later, Nadya moved for a continuance because she felt too ill to go on. The judge banged her gavel furiously and said the ambulance doctors had cleared them. It was so hot and stifling in the courtroom that day that at one point Volkova left the courtroom to get some air. In the late afternoon, ambulances were called again, this time for Volkova and the three defendants. In between, several witnesses for the prosecution testified that they had seen the defendants jumping, jerking, and insulting the Orthodox faith.

On Day Four, there was a bomb threat. The building was evacuated while the mine squad swept it, but Nadya, Maria, and Kat spent that time in the isolation rooms in the basement. Once the building was declared bomb-free, the court heard from the cathedral’s cleaning lady, who testified that Pussy Riot had danced to music that was “neither classical nor Orthodox.” Pressed by the defense, the cleaning lady admitted that she cleaned the soleas despite being female. The prosecutor grabbed his head with his hands. The judge directed the court marshals to remove anyone who laughed.

For its last witness, the prosecution called Stanislav Samutsevich. “I refuse to answer questions about my daughter,” he said immediately, but the judge did not let him leave the stand. The prosecutor badgered him. “Did she go to the Rodchenko School? Did she meet contemporary artists there? Did she share their views? Did Tolokonnikova get her involved in various groups?” Stanislav looked pained and refused to answer. The prosecutor read aloud the testimony Stanislav had given back in March: “Tolokonnikova got her involved in the feminist movement. I told Katya that women already had all the rights, but she would not listen to me . . . I have banned Tolokonnikova from our home. I believed it’s Tolokonnikova’s fault that Katya took part in the action at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior . . . Sometimes I felt like she was under a spell. She did not want to listen to logic, she lived in a made-up world. But I am sure my daughter did not use drugs or alcohol; she was under the influence of Tolokonnikova.”

“I was upset,” said Stanislav. “I wanted to make things better for my daughter . . . I said many things that aren’t true. Please don’t take my testimony into account.”

That evening the judge read aloud the conclusions of a committee of psychiatrists and psychologists who had examined the defendants. They had found them sane and fit for trial but had nonetheless diagnosed each with a personality disorder. Maria, they said, suffered from emotional distress brought on by her desire to protest. Nadya and Kat were both labeled with something called “mixed personality disorder.” Nadya’s symptoms were her “active position in life” and “heightened ambitions,” while Kat exhibited an abnormal “insistence on her own point of view.”

They left the courthouse at ten.

President Putin spent that day in London, meeting with the British prime minister and confronting questions, protests, and letters in support of Pussy Riot everywhere he went. He finally made a statement: “If those girls had defiled something in Israel, they’d have to deal with burly guys over there,” he said wistfully. “They wouldn’t have gotten out of there alive. Or if they’d gone to the Caucasus, even closer to home. We wouldn’t have even had time to arrest them. But I still don’t think they should be judged too harshly. I hope that they draw their own conclusions.” The more optimistic among Putin’s listeners concluded that Pussy Riot would get a suspended sentence; the more realistic thought this meant they might get less than the possible maximum of seven years.

O
N
D
AY
F
IVE,
the prosecutor began opening evidence boxes. He pulled out a yellow dress and a blue balaclava and then a black one. To show the court that the masks had slits, he pulled one of them onto his rubber-gloved hand. A journalist was removed from the courtroom for smiling.

That afternoon three men in balaclavas showed up on the roof of a storefront across the street, level with the courtroom window. They chanted, “Free Pussy Riot!” Three policemen climbed up there, but the roof was too small for them to risk a scuffle in trying to force the men down. While the policemen huddled at one end of the roof, trying to figure out what to do, the masked men began singing “Mother of God, chase Putin out.” Everyone in the courtroom was transfixed on the roof across the street. “If you want to look, leave the courtroom,” a marshal barked. But Nadya, Maria, and Kat stretched to get a better look; no one was going to kick them out of the courtroom for rubbernecking. They were smiling, too.

An hour and a half later, a crane finally took the men down.

That day, the defense called Maria and Kat’s professors to testify to their character. Both said they were wonderful young women who harbored no hatred toward the Russian Orthodox religion. The defense called Olya Vinogradova to the stand.

“We were going to school together,” said Olya. “We have been together for three years.” She smiled at her friend behind the Plexiglas.

“You’ll do your laughing when you leave here!” the judge shouted. “This is not a circus or a movie theater.”

“Don’t pressure the witness,” said Volkova.

“I am giving you a reprimand,” said the judge.

“I want one too!” said Feigin.

“Reprimands for all the defense lawyers,” said the judge. “Enter it into the record.”

Maria asked her friend to describe her political views: “What is my attitude toward the Putin regime?”

“I am disallowing the question,” said the judge.

“Why?” asked Maria.

“We are examining your character.”

“And my character can’t have an attitude toward Putin?”

“It can, but . . . ” said the judge and trailed off.