Colin Jager in The Immanent Frame:
Aided by social networking sites, blogs, and popular YouTube videos (found here and here), Pussy Riot’s plight became something of an international media sensation. Amnesty International and Madonna took up the cause, and British Prime Minister David Cameron questioned Putin about it in a face-to-face meeting. Indeed, as some commentators noted there did seem something almost pre-packaged about the whole event, as though it were designed for western consumption.
Fascinatingly, however, religion played a central role within this media event. Many orthodox clergy were quick to label the performance blasphemous, noting its “sacrilegious humiliation of the age-old principles aimed at inflicting even deeper wounds to Orthodox Christians”; claiming that the women’s “chaotically waving arms and legs, dancing and hopping…cause[ed] a negative, even more insulting resonance in the feelings and souls of the believers”; and describing the performance as “desecrating the cathedral, and offending the feelings of believers.”
The Orthodox Church occupies an odd space in relationship to the secular power of the state. Historically aligned with the czars, it was driven largely underground during the Soviet era, thus becoming one site of opposition to politics as usual. In recent years it has emerged as a potent political force in Russia, one largely aligned with Putin’s hold on power. In her closing statement, Yekaterina Samutsevich, one of the members of Pussy Riot, positioned their performance in precisely this way. The cozy relationship between church and state in contemporary Russia, she claimed, “has required considerable quantities of professional lighting and video equipment, air time on national television for hours-long live broadcasts, and numerous background shoots for morally and ethically edifying news stories, where the Patriarch’s well-constructed speeches would…help the faithful make the correct political choice during a difficult time for Putin preceding the election….Our sudden musical appearance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior with the song “Mother of God, Drive Putin Out” violated the integrity of the media image that the authorities had spent such a long time generating and maintaining, and revealed its falsity.”