Political Girl
Life and Fate in Russia
Translated by Emily Eccles
ALLEN LANE an imprint of
Maria Alyokhina
with Olga Borisova
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It is inevitable: one day, the prison gates will open, and you will walk through them. However, this does not mean you have truly left the category ‘prison’ and entered the category ‘freedom’. The true gates – the ones in your mind – can only be unlocked by you.
1.
Putin Will Teach You to Love the Motherland
‘I don’t want to leave because of Putin’s amnesty!’ I scream at the whole of the North.
The North – the smoking area of penal colony no. 2 Amnesty – an act of charity Putin – a Russian dictator Me – a girl in a green coat with the tag still on – a political.
political girl
21 February 2012. We performed the punk prayer ‘Virgin Mary, Banish Putin’ in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Protesting against Putin’s dictatorship and against using the Church to sanctify it.
They jailed us, Pussy Riot, for two years for a desperate scream on the eve of the ‘election’ for the President of Russia.
Convicted – Alyokhina Maria Vladimirovna
Born 1988
Article 213, Part 2
Sentence – 2 years
Start of sentence 04.03.2012
End of sentence 04.03.2014
The black Volga arrives at the train station. I get out. Three
large, chequered bags, a red pigtail and my green coat is all that is physically left from prison.
The loudest criminal case in Russia has spread across the news. The whole world has learned about Pussy Riot.
the loudest ones
‘So, what is the first taste of freedom like? Come on, we want to know how it feels? What are you going to do? What plans? Tell us! Tell us what your plans are?’ I need to come up with a plan. To visit the human rights defenders who came to see me in the penal colony. To tell them that I haven’t forgotten about what I saw behind bars, that I won’t abandon the people who remain there and will tell everyone about them. I need to buy a phone.
I set off fireworks near the colony. I promised the girls a display to celebrate. Red splashes against a night sky.
red splashes
The crowd that’s excited to meet you at the Moscow railway station today will tear you apart online tomorrow. You are a bad mother. After two years in the penal colony, you haven’t gone straight home to see your son.
Would they judge me if I were a man?
The first time I go home, I’m with a cameraman. Just for an hour. I need to go to a press conference. I need to say that we are going to fight for the rights of prisoners. The first time I take my son Filipp into my arms. He is six years old. A photo is
taken. A video is being recorded. Mum is nearby, she’s anxious. Everyone is worried. Me too.
Meetings, cells, halls, tables with microphones, cops, bars, planes, arguments, new people, papers are all mixed up together with little Filipp. There he is by the Christmas tree. There he is with a sparkler. In a café. In the kitchen.
bad mother
The trial against Pussy Riot ‘witches’ became a convenient launchpad for a wider witch hunt that propelled the country onto its traditional path. If you are against the political authorities, then you are against everything Russian, against the family and against everything sacred. ‘Feminism is a mortal sin,’ argued a lawyer speaking for the victims, the cathedral security guards, at our trial. During the two years of my imprisonment, the views of our courtroom have expanded to encompass all of Russia.
you’re the headline
It is our first interview after two years serving in the penal colony. It’s night. Nadya and I are lying on a bed in a hotel in a Siberian city, a telephone lies next to us. The voice on the other end belongs to a presenter from a prominent liberal radio station who asks, ‘How are you doing, girls?’ We tell him at length about how we and the hundreds of prisoners we have met have fought for our rights. All around us is quiet, there is only icy winter outside, it is a little like a fairy tale until the host says, ‘Stay with us for a commercial break!’
We stay on the line. Almost a second later, the presenter has started talking again: ‘Pussy Riot have been released, but the heated debate surrounding their provocative action has not calmed down over the last two years, and now, dear listeners, we invite you to vote – who do you think Pussy Riot really are: blasphemers or martyrs?’
‘If you think they are blasphemers, dial 1, ‘If you think they are martyrs, dial 2.’
And I think to myself: ‘Is this really the freedom we wanted?’
stay with us
I regained my so-called ‘freedom’ at the end of December. The amnesty to save face in front of the West – a VIP amnesty – cuts our sentence by two months. The reason is the 2014 Winter Olympics. Putin has grown tired of answering questions from foreign statesmen about Pussy Riot. The issue of us ‘hooligans’ needs a solution, so as not to spoil the celebrations.
And still we spoil the celebrations. We go to the Olympics to perform a protest action. It’s then that I understand and feel that everything has changed, that we have left prison and arrived in a different country. There is no way back. Putin’s third presidential term, which is now six years, and the year 2014, become a point of no return. For everyone.
point of no return
For Putin, the Olympics is the latest operation to return Russia to greatness. Russia must win. So ‘Operation Result’ is
Putin Will Teach You to Love the Motherland
conceived, a joint effort between the FSB and the Ministry of Sport.
‘People are celebrating Olympic champion winners, but we are sitting crazy and replacing their urine.’
– Grigory Rodchenkov
Grigory Rodchenkov, the director of the national anti-doping laboratory, named in an international investigation for concealing positive drugs tests of Russian athletes and destroying urine samples, developed his own signature cocktail in honour of the Olympics. He was given a laboratory and fifty people for the task. The cocktail ‘Duchess’, a mix of three forbidden substances, was given to athletes in an alcohol tincture. Whisky for the men and Martini for the women. The secret services were left to deal with the urine. Each sample bottle was numbered and designed so the cap would break if the bottle was opened illicitly. The Anti-Doping Commission in Sochi consisted of a hundred international experts who strictly controlled the process and guarded their facilities 24/7.
operation result
The Russian FSB found a way out: a small hole in the wall, covered by a piece of furniture. Each night Rodchenkov and his entire team of Russian experts would pass the sample bottles through the hole to the neighbouring room with FSB officers standing by to take them. Later the same bottles would be returned, looking untampered with, with clean urine. Putin will give Rodchenkov the Order of Friendship.
winter olympics in the subtropics
Putin wants to demonstrate ‘Russian greatness’, so the Sochi Olympics are the most expensive Olympics in the history of mankind.
Twelve billion dollars was the amount Putin pledged to spend on the Olympics and this figure already exceeded all previous Olympic budgets. In the process 12 billion becomes 50 billion, a sum that Russian hospitals and orphanages can only dream of.
construction of death
Migrant workers are brought in to build the Olympics. They are promised good wages, are given fake registrations, and when the time comes to pay them, a cop turns up and they are deported. Then a bus arrives and unloads a new batch.
Groups of police, the migration service and the administration are operating in the city. Cossack units are helping them too. The Cossacks mock the visiting construction workers. The police organize extrajudicial violence, detainees are held in inhuman conditions, beaten and locked in garages. Human rights defenders are forcibly removed from police stations.
A group of workers threatened to strike – they were told they were fired. Two were immediately arrested. The electrician Mardiros Demerchyan was first beaten for several hours in the police station and then raped with a metal crowbar. After that, he admitted to the theft of an electric cable. There was no theft. After the torture, Mardiros lost his mind.
putin will teach you to love the motherland
A week before the games close, we fly to Olympic Sochi to make our action. We are sure we’ll all be detained en route. We fly out of Moscow, a large team of twelve people on four different flights. They might detain some of us at the airport, but there is a chance that a few of us may make it as far as Sochi.
It seems there are more FSB officers than residents in the Olympic town. The sellers at the official hot-dog stalls are no lower in rank than a junior lieutenant in the security services.
At the airport’s exit I smoke a cigarette with Nadya. Immediately we are surrounded by uniformed policemen. They demand our documents.
– What’re you doing here?
– We haven’t done anything wrong. – You’re not allowed to smoke here. You’ll have to come with us.
If you are an activist, then most likely you are put under ‘surveillance control’. The special services will have eyes on any ticket you buy within an hour or two of purchase. They will receive an auto-alert from the ‘Wanted Route’ database, created in the early 2000s . We are expected. We do not hand over our documents. We argue. We’re leaving.
surveillance control
We rent a car. We’re going to check out the first location for the Pussy Riot video. On an empty road at night, our car is stopped by a special forces soldier in camouflage. The usual AK-47 on
the shoulder and the routine statement: ‘There is an All-Points Bulletin out on you.’ In less than half an hour, a police squad of two puffy men in acid-green reflective uniforms appears on the road. They claim the car is stolen and the Pussy Riot activist who is driving it holds a fake licence.
– Are we free to go or are we detained?
– No, you can’t leave, but you aren’t detained!
We are detained. We are released at 4 a.m., and they take the legitimate driving licence away without any explanation.
welcome to sochi
We stay in Hotel Malachite. Thirty metres from the sea. We sleep a couple of hours. Soviet-style furniture, swirling patterned blankets, the windows are covered with a green reflective film. As soon as you connect to the Wi-Fi, your email is hacked. At 8 a.m. we swim in the icy Black Sea of February. It’s our first shoot for the Olympic music video. We don’t know if we will be able to film anything in the city. So we start here. A police car pulls up to the empty beach. Operatives get out of it. For twenty minutes, they silently film us on several cameras. Girls in balaclavas squealing from the cold and diving in and out of the waves.
icy black sea
At noon, on the way to the next location, we are stopped by an FSB border detachment. They take us in for interrogation. Our cars are escorted by the political police, Centre E cops – a real motorcade of cars from different special services.
We’re detained for not having permission to be in the ‘special border zone’. The officers can’t tell us the parameters of this special zone. And this is not surprising, because almost all the Olympic facilities are located within it. So anyone exiting the main stadium could be detained for trespassing in the ‘special zone’. They detain us. For the next twelve hours, we are under arrest in a military unit near Abkhazia, former Georgia. They lie to our lawyer that we are not here.
border zone
After twelve hours of being interrogated by the FSB border guards, we are walking to supper. A night café with leather sofas. Kharcho soup and Olympic ice hockey on TV. We are the only diners on the second floor. A guy in a dirty T-shirt with black greasy hair and a bottle of vodka sits down next to us. He starts to drink it with an obvious swagger. He already knows our names.
– Girls, let’s have a drink together! the guy says by way of introduction.
– Yes, let’s! we cheerfully agree.
– What shall we drink to?
– To the Russian revolution, of course, I answer.
I would love for the thinly disguised agent to drink to the revolution. A second man appears at the next table. No less greasy. He begins to bully ‘our guy’, and as ‘our guy’ is ‘with us’ he asks for our protection. Police agents are trying to drag us into a fake fight, desperately pretending to be café visitors. We pack up and leave, they try to catch us up. There are no less strange types hanging around the crossroads near the café. Everyone is looking at us. ‘Well, go on then, hit me! Hit me!’
one of the greasy ones yells at us, but we’re already jumping onto the next bus.
There are security cops everywhere. Unmarked cars are following us, suspicious men are at every junction, in uniform and in plain clothes. Anyone who gets on our bus at the next stop could be a security operative. cop town
Two a.m. We are filming on the outskirts of Sochi near the Olympic mascots: Leopard, Bunny and White Bear.
We are very lucky that the smiling man posing between the Leopard and the Bear turns out to be a tourist and not a grinning cop.
Under an atmosphere of total control, the resort town which I used to know has turned into a secret facility that is divided into sectors and squares. I only want one thing: not to spend the rest of the night in a police station. I quickly take off my coat and start jumping, boxing in the air, shouting the words to the song.
below the church
In the morning, we board a city bus and get off in the centre of Sochi. We can’t go by car because it has a flat tyre. ‘We’ll get them at the port,’ a ‘passer-by’ mutters near us. Fifteen minutes later, a bald cop in a leather jacket runs up to us.
– You must come with us to the station.
– What for?
– Your hotel has been robbed. You’re all suspects.
The security cop has a typical donut face, he gets constant calls from his colleagues while we stand there. He repeats, ‘Yes, I understand, but I’m alone here. Yes, yes, I understand. But I’m alone here. On my own! I’m standing below the church.’ We are on the steps that run from a white church to a garden. Pedestrians pass by indifferently. Cypress trees stand calmly by.
theft of the century
– What theft?
– A theft in the hotel. You are suspects.
– Who?
– You.
– Do you have any orders?
– No, no orders, but you are all under suspicion.
– This looks like a provocation.
– What kind of provocation?
– An obvious one.
– An obvious provocation???
– What rights do we have as detainees?
– Why do you ask? You know this is Russia? torture without meaning
What can the operative-donut really be thinking as he makes meaningless comments one after the other? It is obvious that he does not know who we are. He is surprised that after a couple of minutes we call our lawyer and hand him the phone to find out the ‘circumstances of the theft’. ‘Are you from an NGO ?’ the donut face asks. A rank-and-file cop from the Criminal
Investigation Department who was sent to detain ‘suspicious persons’ does not even reflect on what he is doing. He is ‘just doing his job’ and is ‘fulfilling his boss’s orders’, the fuss around the Olympics is an extra stress for him, unpaid overtime. And then there are lawyers and cameras in his face, and all he wants is to get these girls to the station as quickly as possible and go home to his wife. In this situation he is not a sadist, not an ideological warrior against evil, he has not done anything wrong, he is simply working.
‘What kind of rights do you think you have? After all, this is Russia,’ he said. This should be a headline in all the Western newspapers. For many months, the international media has bought the story that Russia is a loyal defender of human rights, but this is so far from the truth. The West pretends to believe Putin’s hype, and that what is happening to us is nothing more than a minor event.
what rights?
– If you refuse to do what I ask and leave, I’ll be forced to call for backup, according to the law. And then we’ll all be delayed, I’m sorry, girls.
His backup eventually finds him, and we are surrounded by twenty people with phones, black jackets, pointy boots, of varying heights, different faces, different hair, but somehow they still all look the same.
‘We’re not detaining you, we’ll just have a chat.’ They twist our arms, forcefully throw us into avtozaks* and take us to the
* Paddy wagons.
Putin Will Teach You to Love the Motherland police station. They break Nastya’s camera, she bites one of the cops. No one can explain to us what room the theft took place in or how they found out exactly where we’ve been staying, given that they’ve detained us on the street. we’ll just chat
They’ve locked us in the police assembly hall and then dragged us out roughly one by one for questioning. Everyone’s screaming. Nadya is trying to prevent a local activist from being hauled away, Nastya is trying to stop me from being dragged to interrogation. No one wants to go in without a lawyer. They grab my hands, shove me along the corridor, push me down the stairs.
The cops in Sochi need us to stay quiet, or better still for us to leave altogether.
After five hours, we leave the police station. It’s raining. At the entrance there is a huge crowd of journalists with umbrellas. We put on balaclavas and break through the ring of press, chanting lines from the song ‘Putin Will Teach You To Love Your Motherland’. A pack of journalists runs after us down the alley. People fall, cameras fall.
We go to the Emergency Room for them to check our injuries. The doctor and nurse say they know exactly who we are. They refuse to give Nastya an X-ray, and Nadya is told that her ‘scratches’ are from a cat. manus manum lavat
Three Cossacks are waiting for us at the Malachite Hotel. They won’t let us pass. Cossack patrols were used over a century ago
by the tsars to suppress popular discontent. Their return seems symbolic.
– Why did you even come here, sluts? You’re not wanted here!
Our lawyers Popkov and Peter manage to get inside the hotel and retrieve our belongings. David, a local eco-activist from Sochi who fought illegal construction for the Olympics, suggests we move in with him. So we do.
His house on Sochi’s outskirts, which looks like an unfinished holiday cottage, turns into a squat. We take turns sleeping on a bed with a broken leg.
yellow mimosa
The cops from Centre E pop up here as well. In black suits carrying shopping bags. Cops go back and forth on the street outside and pretend that they are just out for a stroll. Our car’s tyres are let down again. We think about how to leave without being detained.
We go out the back way, through gardens, past garages, over fences. We jump over mimosa bushes. It is February, but yellow mimosa is blossoming everywhere.
blue wall
We are travelling to the blue wall, with ‘Sochi-2014’ painted on it, near the port. Here we will shoot the key moments of the video. We are in a Russian café hut on the embankment, Centre E cops sit at neighbouring tables. More and more of
them arrive. If we do not leave now, we will be detained again. We get going.
Between the hut and the promenade is a red carpet. You could imagine that you are at a film festival, only that bearded Cossacks, not paparazzi, line up either side of the carpet. They shout ‘Fuck off to America’ at us, they carry whips. They’re clearly not going to hand over any kind of film award to us. The Cossacks follow us along the embankment to the blue wall. Sochi-2014 – an inscription several metres high. We throw off our jackets and begin to sing.
– GAS ! GAS !
red carpet
I can’t work out who is shouting.
The Cossacks spray us with tear gas. They beat us with whips and twist our arms. They pull off our balaclavas. Nastya’s hair is torn right out. The metal tip of the whip hits her along the spine. Nadya is pushed to the ground, and with a guitar neck they smash the face of Lyosha in a yellow dress. They beat even those who are lying down. The bearded Cossack who didn’t let us get past into the hotel yesterday takes Peter aside and sprays him at point-blank range with pepper spray.
The police, smiling, watch the bloody carnage. We scream in pain, but we keep on singing. In a matter of minutes, the huge advertising hoarding for the Olympics has become the background for public punishment.
public punishment
‘We didn’t beat them, we taught them,’ the Cossack who beat us will say. Instead of jail time, he’ll get the Governor’s public protection. The crime, which has three main protagonists – the victim, the criminal and witness-cops – will never be investigated.
And where’re the others? The Cossacks are beating us, the cops are watching, the cameras are filming – but where’s everyone else? People are walking past. What do they think? ‘It’s not my business’? But they’re beating women. Screams can be heard throughout the street. ‘Maybe this is a movie?’ ‘What if it’s not a movie?’ ‘Then I will get it too.’
There’s always a choice: to intervene or to pass by. Most people pass by.
sochi-2014
‘We should take off our Kubankas and hats, as Cossacks did in the old days in honour of heroes, for the authors and performers of the song “Putin Will Teach You To Love The Motherland”. Young people, unlike most of us, have the courage to point out to the President of Russia the shortcomings in his work and the toothlessness of his local officials’
– Grigory Uchkurov, Cossack
The only Cossack who publicly supported us and identified those who had attacked us, Uchkurov, will be excluded from his Cossack host.
wipe away the blood
We wipe away the blood, apply bandages and wash away the pepper spray. Nadya pulls the guitar out of the rubbish bin. One ambulance takes Peter to the hospital for his burnt eyes. No one makes a record of the chemical burns. FSB vehicles are parked near the hospital.
David goes shopping for new hats. Dima buys scissors. I sit opposite Nadya in a café and try to understand what has happened. The balaclavas are lost. One was snatched by a Cossack, it stuck out of his pocket. I just sit and stare at my phone or at the wall. If someone asks, ‘Is everything okay?’ I quickly answer, ‘Yes, everything’s okay.’ I have never been beaten by bearded men. I don’t know what else to answer. Nothing is okay. But we have to carry on. Because we care.
carrying on
We are going to shoot the last episode. The five Olympic rings on the central square. The surveillance stands, without shame, by the rings. But it doesn’t matter. They’re not hitting us – that’s already a bonus. We shout out the words and dance. The Leopard mascot notices us and spontaneously joins in. We are dancing together.
At night, we edit our Olympic video. We all have bruises, swellings, cuts, torn-out hair, we are knackered, but we keep editing until the morning. Early next morning, we have the premiere and a Pussy Riot press conference. I don’t have a second to think about what’s going on. I have to edit the footage. Splice the bloody heads next to the grinning
cops. My face and my friends’ faces contorted in pain. Our first protest after two years in prison. I don’t have a second to think about how this protest looks. I don’t feel frightened. I don’t feel anything at all. I’m not even sure whether the screaming girl in the video is my friend, and the other girl with terrified eyes is me.
do it yourself
Half an hour before the press conference, the hotel refuses to provide the room we booked and gives us an idiotic reason: that a pipe has burst and they cannot turn off the fire alarm. The meeting with journalists spontaneously moves outside to the entrance of the frightened hotel. There will be no big screen, so we put the laptop on a chair and the words of the song come out of the speakers.
Putin will teach you to love the Motherland
Motherland
Motherland
Motherland
life is so good
A pro-Kremlin chicken squad appears in the crowd. One pink cockerel and several gopniks* are waving raw chicken carcasses in the air. ‘We like sex with chicken!’ they shout referring to us. One of the guys tells a CNN journalist, ‘Life is so good in Sochi that there is no need to protest.’
* Gopnik derives from GOP, literal translation: Urban Contempt Society, made up of aggressive young men.
When the guy dressed as a cockerel is asked why he doesn’t also like to have sex with a hen, after all he is also a chicken, he proudly replies, ‘But I am a cockerel!’
We do not know where the young gopniks with chicken legs came from. They probably don’t know anything about Pussy Riot. They were hired to break up our presentation with a guarantee that they wouldn’t be detained by the police for it. A city operating as a ‘special facility’ does not permit random provocations.
a keepsake
We are on our way to the airport – time to return to Moscow. The taxi driver recognizes us and takes a photo as a keepsake. We stop for lunch. We leave the café and find out that, while we were having lunch, two FSB officers approached the taxi driver, forced him to delete the photo and asked him to come with them for a conversation.
faithful dog
The doping scandal with the Olympic urine tests will be exposed in two years’ time. Athletes will be banned from performing at the next games under the Russian flag.
‘I was a faithful dog. I was needed in Sochi. Everything was reported to Putin. To believe that he didn’t know is stupid.’
– Grigori Rodchenkov
The head of the laboratory, Rodchenkov, will request political asylum in America. Two of his colleagues will be found dead under unusual circumstances. Rodchenkov will be part of the American Witness Protection Program. For several years, Russian propaganda will expose him as a swindler and a liar who sold his homeland for thirty pieces of silver.
‘Everybody with an open mind could see the face of a new Russia: efficient and friendly, patriotic and open to the world ’
– President of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach
new face
21 February. Two years ago we were on our way to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, for which they sentenced us. Now it’s to another Moscow court to support people who were sentenced after us, the defendants in the Bolotnaya Case, who held the largest protest against Putin. Seven people will receive prison terms of two to four years.
People of all ages gather near the court to support the political prisoners. One can’t hold back the tears, another argues with the stone-faced cops; they come in groups and on their own, politicians and ordinary people. And yet Western correspondents are nowhere to be seen. These people who sacrifice themselves to get to the truth are not visible through the kilometres of Western media newsprint about the Russian Olympics.
‘We are not being tried so that we can be judged fairly. They’ve made us protagonists in a spectacle of punishment.’
– Aleksei Polikhovich, sentenced to 3.5 years’ imprisonment.
spectacle of punishment
The police push people away from the court, divide the crowd into sections, extracting the most active and throwing them into avtozaks. People bunch together in clusters – if you’re in a group, it’s more difficult to pull you out and detain you.
When the 2nd Riot Police Unit starts coming for Nadya and me, our cluster instantly forms a ring around us and does not let the cops near. People stand with their backs to the police, exposing themselves to blows, just so we are not detained.
glory to the heroes
The next day, 22 February, the revolution in Ukraine triumphs. Deposed President Yanukovych flees to Russia.
Immediately after the closing of the Olympics in Sochi and the victory of the revolution in Ukraine, the ‘Russian Spring’ kicks off. In a few days the annexation of Crimea will begin.
The New Face of the Country
– Bon appétit, you bitches!
March. Nizhny Novgorod, 6 a.m. We get off the train and go for coffee. Immediately a group of young twenty-year-old gopniks flies into McDonald’s and surrounds us. They are wearing down jackets and St George’s ribbons. They are holding chicken legs and a jar of glue. One of them is holding a sign: ‘Dirty whores, get out of town.’
– Get the hell out of here, bitches!
– Get out of town, whores!
– Get the fuck out of our town, fuckers!
Ten people are standing over our table. They are yelling at us to go ‘back’:
– To America, bitch!
They also have syringes in their hands, and in the syringes there’s Zelenka, green ethyl alcohol, used as an antiseptic in Soviet days. It should not get into the eyes. One of them runs up and spurts a syringe. Aiming at the eyes.
happy meal
A large iron glue can flies towards me. It hits my head. Painful. And very noisy. I didn’t even have time to wake up. I touch my
The New Face of the Country
forehead, look at my palm and see blood. The can pierced my head. There’s blood on my hair too. Blood and Zelenka.
I don’t think about the blood, I tell the camera why we came.
‘We came to Nizhny Novgorod to visit the penal colony. Prisoners there receive just 200 roubles a month. We are here to support them.’
Tasya is holding the camera, she has an ocular burn that will lead to complete loss of vision. And Nadya has a burn too. I have concussion. The police, whose station is around the corner, take forty minutes to get to us. The ambulance travels at the same speed.
The attack will not be investigated by the cops, because they have masterminded it. Nizhny Novgorod Centre E Colonel Trifonov ‘Trishka’ announced it on his Twitter the evening before our arrival. The attack, ten men beating up several women, he called ‘disinfection’.
Immediately after the attack, he posts photos of our faces covered in Zelenka and blood – it is his man who was filming at McDonald’s.
green light
While Russia invades Ukraine, the authorities give the green light to create violence within our own country. The number of Nazi groups increases. Gopniks with St George’s ribbons calling themselves patriots attack and beat up anyone who disagrees with the new ‘patriotism’.
What are you going to do if someone hits you in the head in a café in broad daylight? Will you complain to the police? Not an option – the police are responsible for it. Will you fight back within the limits of ‘permissible self-defence’? Not an option – you will be put in jail and the attackers will be ignored.
mama with a bandage
My son Filya is six years old and at kindergarten they’re celebrating International Women’s Day on 8 March. Boys in white shirts read poetry to their mothers and grandmothers.
I am the only mother who attends wearing a strange bandage in my green hair.
We may be small in stature, But brave as soldiers.
Our beloved homeland We’ll defend To guard the sunshine of happiness.
I don’t think about the fact that children learn poems where boys are soldiers and girls are princesses who need to be protected, which is wildly absurd on 8 March– a day celebrating the struggle for women’s independence. I just listen. I’m just glad to see Filya whenever I want, and not once every three months in the penal colony’s room for three-day family visits.
I think about the young men who beat us up in Nizhny Novgorod, who also went to kindergarten and told their mothers that they would defend their motherland.
revolution on television
In the penal colony, scraps of real news would reach us, but we had to fight for it. The censor wouldn’t let a newspaper through, the guards would take away a magazine, they would burn letters.
Once the Head of the Culture Department handed me a
The New Face of the Country
magazine with a review of the newly released film Nymphomaniac. All the pictures neatly cut out from the text. The prison authorities considered the photos of Charlotte Gainsbourg with two black men to be indecent.
November 2013. When the revolution in Ukraine starts, I am still inside. There is a TV in every barracks. Russian propaganda turns the unrest in central Kyiv into a reality show. The goal is to portray the protesters as marginal. To show that this protest is an insignificant story that would lead nowhere.
The civil protest turns into a revolution. Ukraine’s proRussian president, Yanukovych, despite talks with Europe, signs agreements with Putin to join the Eurasian Customs Union.*
Putin lowers the price of Russian gas for Ukraine – a small price to have ‘his man’ in the neighbouring country. People feel cheated and march to Kyiv’s Independence Square – the Maidan. Ukrainian flags are raised next to EU flags. The Maidan is becoming crowded with barricades. The main square of the capital turned into a tent camp. There are so many people that it is impossible to ignore them. Ukraine is choosing to abandon its Soviet legacy in favour of a European path. Ukraine refuses to follow Russia into the past.
And that is exactly what Putin cannot forgive.
operation gifts of the magi
The Gifts of the Magi are sacred relics. Gold, frankincense and myrrh. It’s said they were presents for newborn Jesus.
* Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych has allegedly signed an agreement with Russia including Ukraine’s commitment to join the Customs Union in the near future, the Voice of Russia reported, citing British journalist Edward Lucas, international editor of The Economist.
For the first time in 500 years, the relics leave Mount Athos in Greece.
January 2014. ‘Orthodox’ oligarch Konstantin Malofeev pays for the voyage. With Greek church elders, he loads the relics onto a private jet. The Gifts make a tour of the capitals of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. The tour enjoys the blessing of the Russian Orthodox Church. The consignment flies to Moscow for Christmas, to be displayed in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.
gold as a gift to the king
Initially, Crimea is not included in the relics’ route, but by order of the Patriarch, the plan changes in a day. At the end of January, the Gifts arrive on Malofeev’s plane to the Ukrainian peninsula.
The Crimeans come to pray, unaware that they are participating in the Russian intelligence operation ‘Gifts of the Magi’. FSB pensioner Igor ‘Strelkov’ Girkin is responsible for the security of the relics.
incense as a gift to the high priest
Recruited priests conduct church services ‘for peace’. They are collecting mattresses so they can later house the Russian military in the church grounds.
While people queue to see the relics, the delegation that has arrived with the Gifts is discussing the annexation: they plan to lower the Ukrainian flag and to raise the flag of ‘independent Crimea’ in its place.
myrrh as a gift to a mortal
A boat with the Holy Gifts and icons then motors alongside ships in the Black Sea Fleet. The Gifts are brought on-board the Russian warship Moskva, where the missile cruiser has a ‘private chapel’. Under the cover of the relics, the Orthodox Chekists are testing the ground and gathering intelligence so they can present Putin with an entire peninsula.
gifts of death
February 2014. The Ukrainian revolution is winning, Yanukovych gives the order to shoot at protesters. Special police force Berkut opens fire. Hundreds are wounded, 107 people are killed. But the protest doesn’t stop.
Putin orders Russian troops to block military bases in Crimea.
Russian military block entry points to the city.
The head of the Crimean Tatars says that the Crimeans will not allow a split Ukraine and announces a protest. Separatists and the Cossacks come to the protest, with tear-gas canisters and iron spikes. On their jackets are St George’s ribbons – emblems of imperial loyalty. So that pro-Russians can recognize ‘their own’.
st george’s ribbons
Like the British red poppy, in Russia they came up with an emblem to mark the end of the Second World War. St George’s ribbon is a symbol of victory. Putin loves to talk about victory:
‘We are a great nation, we defeated the fascists.’ He doesn’t like to talk about the American tanks on loan, or about Western allies. No mention of the Soviet Union being an aggressor and ally of Hitler at the start of the war. In Russia the slogan ‘Never again’ becomes ‘We can do it again!’
never again we can do it again
In 1944, Stalin mounted a genocide of the Crimean Tatars. Tens of thousands were put into wooden wagons and forcibly evicted from Crimea. Thousands died on the road from starvation and typhus. The Tatars have been fighting for the right to return to their native land for decades.
Russia where, according to a 2015 opinion poll, more than half of the population approves of Stalin, will never become a motherland for a people who survived genocide.
Putin will not forgive the Crimean Tatars for resisting annexation. They will be given immense prison sentences, they will be kidnapped, tortured and killed.
polite people
Following Putin’s order, a Russian Navy boat with 200 gunmen in green uniform, without insignia, arrives in Sevastopol. They seize state property.
A pro-Russian government is formed in the captured parliament building.
Russian flags fly on edifices.
At night, Russian gunmen seize airports.
The head of security at the airport says his men were ‘politely
The New Face of the Country
asked to leave’. The quote ends up in the media, pro-Kremlin bloggers are busy – photos of Russian military men with flowers and kittens with the hashtag ‘polite people’ go viral. Propaganda shifts up a gear; the winners of the revolution on the Maidan are called Nazis, ‘polite people’ are called liberators.
polite fascism
Troops march across Crimea on Forgiveness Sunday to the words of the Patriarch: ‘I hope that Ukraine will not resist.’ The police march along Manezhnaya Square in the centre of Moscow, to throw into avtozaks people who say out loud ‘No to war.’
State employees are urgently rounded up. Teachers are ordered to the central square to support the troops. To support the war.
At anti-war demonstrations, words fly out of police loud hailers that reveal a hidden division in society that could be worse than a civil war.
‘Citizens, do not obstruct the passage of other citizens.’ There are those who have an opinion but do not have the right to walk through their city, and those who have the right to walk thanks to their political silence.
divide and conquer
–
Don’t tell the media what’s happened! We’ll be victims for ever.
March 2014. Mordovia. A land of penal colonies. A land of watchtowers and fences, where the regional emblem could be
a barbed-wire fence, where half of the population wear prison uniform and the other half wear epaulettes. And everyone votes for Putin – 92 per cent.
The border zone between night and day. The night train left us on the strip of asphalt and turned its wheels onward. An empty platform. They’ve attacked us again.
They ran up to the steps of our train. Cut to: our faces, hair and clothes are covered in a stinking mess. Nearby – on the platform – empty plastic bottles. I don’t want to tell the media about this. We don’t want to become public punchbags.
We shake ourselves off, move on.
an argument
This is where Nadya served her sentence for ‘Punk Prayer’, and we’ve both come to support the prisoners of her former penal colony. We sit in the visiting room for seven hours to hand over food for the prisoners. The guards look at us as if we’re not here.
Guards for generations: wearing their blotchy blue uniforms, they torture behind the walls; in the same uniform they go to get sausages. Their uniform sticks to the skin. They recruit children straight out of school, these children also put on uniforms. Maybe exactly the same ones.
Behind the fence, in the office, there hangs a stick with an iron knob, the stick is called an argument. They beat female prisoners with it. They beat them if they don’t sew ‘the norm’. The prisoners must sew police and army uniforms. Twelve hours a day, six days a week. For a few dollars a month.
barbed-wire region
A Lada car the colour of an aubergine driven by chubby Centre E cops is following us. We film them, they film us.
We laugh. We drive along the barbed-wire fences. The wire fences stretch and stretch and stretch. There are forests upon forests. Fences and more fences.
Mordovia is all forests, tears and prison zones. And barbed wire.
what’s so funny?
We sit in a half-empty café. New gopniks in leather jackets and black hats run in. They’re holding green syringes. Nadya leaps under the table. Two thugs with drunken faces grab me by the hair, turn me around and squeeze the syringe onto my face. Zelenka flies into my eyes.
‘SO HOLLYWOOD !’ yells Peter, seeing my green face. And I want to cry for the first time. Not because I’m in pain – it was much more painful in Nizhny Novgorod.
I feel like crying because I couldn’t fight back. I didn’t even try.
hollywood
The summoned cops arrive in droves. We go outside. I hold out my hand to one of them. He’s embarrassed.
– It’s not polite to shake hands with a girl.
– Why not?
Pink walls, small light bulbs, bright artificial lettuce leaves. A syringe with Zelenka left on the table.
They take our fingerprints. For what? It is a meaningless and insincere process. Our honest accounts of assault will become dead letters on that explanation form, it will sit on the dusty shelf of a police major. And you, a uniformed cop, the major’s subordinate, are filling the form in and you know it. When you are writing these dead letters, is there any guarantee that you are actually alive?
march for peace
15 March 2014. Moscow. A protest rally against the annexation – March for Peace. The organizer is Boris Nemtsov – a tall, charismatic man with black curls. A politician from Nizhny Novgorod who knows how to speak and make people fall in love with him, one of the leaders of the Russian protest. He takes the stage:
‘I’m a patriot. I don’t want this war. I don’t want to see Cargo 200* arriving in Moscow, Yaroslavl, Nizhny Novgorod. Our mothers, wives and children crying – I don’t want that. I don’t believe we have the right to behave this way towards a friendly country. It’s impudent, it’s vile and most of all, it will hurt Russia.’
Thousands of Ukrainian flags wave in the centre of Moscow. Hands off Ukraine!
The Crimean occupation – shame on Russia! Russia and Ukraine without Putin!
* Body bags.
forgive us, ukraine
Nadya and I walk on to the stage. A green strand of my hair flutters in the wind. I speak into the microphone.
‘We get beaten up all the time. We are constantly being doused with Zelenka. Russian citizens are being chased out of the squares, people are being detained for ‘No to War’ slogans, people are being detained for holding peace signs. How can a referendum at gunpoint be fair and legitimate?’
referendum at gunpoint
A ‘Russian election’ is held in occupied Crimea. They need to legalize the seizure – have a ‘referendum’ in which Crimea will ‘declare its independence’ and be annexed to Russia as an ‘independent territory’.
Armed checkpoints, no observers. Ballot boxes are handed out in halls packed with people in camouflage. Even before the polling stations close, Russian flags are already hanging on the buildings.
The muzzles of Russian machine guns, Russian Cossacks’ horses, the concocted results. They called it a referendum. A day later there is a ceremony in the Kremlin. They called it accession.
shot in the heart
In the Kremlin, champagne is being poured, while in Crimea, Russian special forces fire at an observation tower. The tower
turns into a sieve. A Ukrainian lieutenant in the tower falls down dead. The bullets have hit him in the heart.
Igor Girkin commands the raid.
The lieutenant-cartographer, who remained to defend the unit, was Serhiy Kokurin. He was the first to die during the Russian annexation. He was thirty-six years old. He left behind a pregnant wife and a child.
medal to grow into
The Defence Minister awards medals ‘for the return of Crimea’ to Russian military personnel.
On the medals, a map of the peninsula and the start date of the operation – 20 February 2014. On that day, the Berkut riot police shot protesters on the Maidan and Yanukovych was still a legitimate president. The military occupied the peninsula a week later, and the ‘referendum’ would be held a month after that.
The occupation of Crimea was being prepared since the Maidan revolution began.
fifth-column cult of victory
Those who disagree with the annexation will be declared national traitors.
A fifth column.
Putin and his propaganda are switching to the language of war. And it doesn’t matter that it was used over half a century ago. It’s necessary to convince people that the Nazis are back, and we are about to defeat them again. The cult of victory is becoming the new consensus.
enemies are everywhere
‘Russia is the only country capable of turning the US into radioactive ash.’
– propagandist Dmitri Kiselev
Cold War rhetoric is coming to life on Russian TV screens. Propaganda repeats on the hour: enemies are everywhere – external, internal, various! And they all want to destroy Russia. They are among us – they must be denounced, they must be forbidden to assemble on the squares, they must be mentioned regularly on television, and if they don’t understand – they must be beaten.
radioactive ashes
Putin needs war as an idea, because people don’t really live during war – they survive. He needs to force them to survive. So that people do not resent their situation too much, Putin claims they are essential for the great victory.
Many Russians are caught up in the imperial euphoria of the ‘return of Crimea to its native harbour’. Putin’s popularity rating is rising. Propaganda tells the nation every day that Putin has ‘restored historical justice’. Dissenters begin to leave Russia. Food prices soar. The West imposes the first sanctions against Russian officials, against those who participated in the annexation. No sanctions against Putin himself.
our country’s tanks
– Why are your country’s tanks in our country and no one protests about it?
All of a sudden, you take hold of a microphone after two years in prison and the only thing you want is to be the voice of those who have no voice.
The end of March. Tallinn. A panel. We talk about political prisoners. A boy, very young, about nineteen, takes the microphone and asks: ‘Why are your country’s tanks in our country and no one protests about it?’ The boy turns out to be a journalist from Ukraine. It makes me feel terribly ashamed. Ashamed of my helplessness, of the helplessness of everyone around me. And I say, ‘The couch the Russians are sitting on has become too comfortable, that’s why no one is getting off it.’
heavenly hundred
We fly to Ukraine. To the city of victorious revolution, Kyiv. To see everything with our own eyes.
The Heavenly Hundred – that’s what they’ll call the 107 demonstrators shot by the Berkut riot police. On the fortieth day after the shooting, people are bringing flowers. We also bring some – red carnations. Along the roadside, thousands of lamps with lights inside.
Flowers, posters, barricades of tyres, tents and fires alight in barrels. How to convey this sense of deep respect to the strangers around us, our kindred spirits, to those who actually succeeded?
Anyone who found themselves on the Maidan falls in love with this honesty. A huge banner hangs on the Christmas tree:
We love the Russians – we hate Putin the european union is concerned
April 2014. The European Parliament, Brussels. We are in formal blouses. Around us are politicians in suits.
We demand sanctions for the Kremlin thieves responsible for political repression and aggression in Ukraine. We call for the blocking of the Western assets of hypocrites who have been robbing the country for years and putting the money in Swiss banks. Here they buy yachts and villas, here they give birth to children and here their children study – and at the same time they call on their TV propaganda channels for missiles to be aimed at – here.
The politicians in suits listen to us and nod. But they’re not the ones who invited us to the parliament. It was Werner Schulz, a German dissident, who invited us. He did not wear a suit – he walked around in jeans.
‘Thank you for your fight,’ you will say, you will shake our hands and smile compassionately. Today you listen to us, and tomorrow you will talk to the Kremlin that imprisoned us. You will talk as if they are not thieves and murderers but the Russian State. Maybe an unpleasant one but still legitimate. Businesslike, serious Brussels. On Monday – an audience with disabled activists; on Tuesday – a conference on climate change; on Wednesday – negotiations with dictators.
deeply concerned
We are here to show that Russia is not Putin, Russia is us too. We want to have fair elections, we want to be friends with Europe and we do not want to live behind the Iron Curtain. The less Europe knows about how Russians live and the more Russians are left alone with propaganda, the worse it will be for everyone. We need to talk about crimes so that they do not remain in the dark. The more torture and atrocities happen in the dark, the more terrible the people coming out of this darkness will be. People who have lived in a dictatorship for years, who have been exposed to the poison of propaganda for years, will show you hell on earth when they get their hands on weapons.
iron curtain
‘Believe in a free future,’ says Paul McCartney, and asks us to pass these words on to the young people in Russia. We promise to do so.
When Sir Paul’s handwritten letter landed on the judge’s desk in Berezniki calling for my release from prison, I liked the look on her face. ‘File it,’ she said, as if nothing had happened. As we stand in Sir Paul’s studio, ‘boards of shame’ are being erected in occupied Crimea. They are stands with photos of traitors of the homeland. ‘Agents of Western influence’ says one of them. Our photos are in the bottom right corner. Eight years later, at the start of the full-scale war, all the people in the pictures will be pushed out of the country, thrown behind bars, or killed.
a free future?
Putin does not stop at Crimea. Taking advantage of the fact that a new government has yet to be elected in Kyiv, Putin hastily tries to tear Ukraine apart, to take away the entire eastern region – Luhansk and Donetsk in the Donbass.
The same Igor ‘Strelkov’ Girkin commands a pro-Russian parade.
‘The question is to secure the rights and interests of Russian and Russian-speaking citizens in south-eastern Ukraine. I would like to remind you, using the terminology of tsarist days, that this is Novorossiya.’
– Vladimir Putin, 17 April 2014
On the same day that Putin is playing Tsar, Donetsk residents come out to a protest rally – ‘Prayer for Ukraine’.
On the same day, the West seats Russian and Ukrainian representatives down at the negotiating table in Geneva.
Foreign Minister Lavrov doesn’t want to go but agrees after the West threatens to impose an oil embargo on Russia.
don’t mention the war
‘Victory for Russian diplomacy’, they call the agreement made in Geneva.
No mention of the annexation. No word on the withdrawal of the Russian FSB , army intelligence and the special forces.
Seven hours later, the parties sign a resolution that doesn’t guarantee the return of Crimea or peace in Donbass. In a week, Russia will send troops to ‘exercise’ on the Russian-Ukrainian border.
We fly to Washington, DC. Downtown is filled with people in evening dress. There are lunches and brunches everywhere, sunshine, American aristocracy, officers, CNN hosts walking around the garden and eating little burgers, a red carpet in a hotel, long dresses we call curtains, a glass of champagne in every hand. The essence of luxury. Passport checks at the entrance.
We will meet senators the next day. Our meeting is organized by Bill Browder, the billionaire who traded his business for a war with Putin when a Russian prison killed his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky.
magnitsky’s list
Magnitsky uncovered the biggest theft from the Russian budget, a criminal case was opened against him, they tortured him to death in a prison.
After his death, the criminal trial continued. Against the will of the relatives and common sense. A man in a robe read the verdict to an empty cage. A cage in which a living person had recently stood.
empty cage
Neither Magnitsky’s death nor the fraud will be investigated. But Browder achieves sanctions. ‘The Magnitsky List’ is the first sanctions list against Russian officials and judges. And it’s an example for us.
The New Face of the Country
We spend half the night making a list of people to sanction. Peter runs around the hotel at night looking for a printer. The meeting with US senators and congressmen is in the morning. I am desperate for sleep. On the way there’s a Ukrainian demonstration. Capitol Hill. A reception for us in an office and posing for a picture. Senators say the word ‘pussy’ in a meeting room called ‘international relations’. To us, ‘hill’ sounds like ‘hell’.
capital hell
Today is the 6th of May. On this day, back in 2012, people marched at the biggest anti-Putin demonstration ever. Senators study the faces of the Russian judges, on our list, who sent protesters behind bars. I want them to know – millions of people across Russia did not choose this power. We demand sanctions. A serious room with a round table. Massive red curtains. Red carpet. Red armchairs. My eyes catch sight of a huge mirror in a giant gold frame. I look at myself in it and think about my life in Russia. Beatings, Cossacks, Zelenka, cops – what a huge difference between all that and the girl in the suit and glasses looking back at me.
girl in the reflection
We have lunch with some Chinese dissidents. The restaurant is full of politicians and lobbyists in suits. The dissidents show us their multi-page report on Chinese prisons. They tell us: ‘We have many cases where prisoners are killed