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Orthodox Riot Over Pussy Riot

I had so much fun typing the subject line of this post. You may commence with your “whorehouse in Byzantium” jokes. But seriously, the Pussy Riot trial in Moscow has become a real embarrassment to the Orthodox Church, if you ask me. From Julia Ioffe’s dispatch: [Petr] Verzilov and [Pussy Riot member Nadezhda] Tolokonnikova had […]

I had so much fun typing the subject line of this post. You may commence with your “whorehouse in Byzantium” jokes.

But seriously, the Pussy Riot trial in Moscow has become a real embarrassment to the Orthodox Church, if you ask me. From Julia Ioffe’s dispatch:

[Petr] Verzilov and [Pussy Riot member Nadezhda] Tolokonnikova had met as students in the philosophy department of Moscow State University, and had been doing shocking performance art for years, first with a group called Voina, after which they founded Pussy Riot. (One of their first performance pieces, for Voina, involved having sex, together with a large group, in Moscow’s Biological Museum on the eve of Medvedev’s inauguration. Tolokonnikova was heavily pregnant at the time.) “Punk Prayer” was part of a series of performances that took aim at symbols of the regime, past and present: the Place of the Skulls, the execution spot on Red Square; luxury shopping malls, the Moscow metro. The Catherdal was chosen because it had, in Pussy Riot’s view, become a commercial center and because the patriarch had just told believers to vote for Putin in the upcoming presidential election.

Disgusting people, these Pussy Rioters, and they ought to face some kind of sanction for their blasphemous display in the Moscow cathedral. But Putin and the Church have managed to make them martyrs with this asinine pseudo-legal proceeding. From Ioffe’s dispatch:

But how could one not laugh? How else could one react to a tall, greasy man who was called as an expert witness for the prosecution because he had seen the YouTube video and read an interview with PussyRiot? Sweating through his testimony, he described for the court how the girls had “pushed themselves into hell,” and that “to the Christian faithful, Orthodox or not, hell is as real as the Moscow metro.”

How else could one interpret a witness, a church treasurer, who walked into the courtroom with a frilly parasol, which she then lovingly hung off the edge of the witness stand before giving her testimony? “Excuse me,” she said when it clattered to the floor as she discussed how much offense she had taken at Pussy Riot’s performance.

How else could one react to a victim weeping through her testimony and, describing how one of the girls prostrated herself on the altar on February 21, uttered the nearly Biblical phrase, “and her butt was raised high and this butt was facing the altar”? To an altar boy who looked like he spent more time at the gym than in church? (“Do you think they could have been possessed?” Feygin asked the altar boy. “The question is struck!” said the judge. “He is not a medical expert!”) To the candle woman, the first victim, watching the proceedings from the gallery, angrily muttering her bewilderment, and repeatedly crossing herself?

How else to respond to the fact that the nine victims, all security guards and attendants of the Cathedral, felt confident in opining on theological, psychological, and jurisprudential matters, and in delivering their verdict on when the punk prayer crossed over from art to blasphemy? To the fact that all of them described in soaring words the depth of the Christian faith but that all but one could not find it in their hearts to accept the girls’ apologies?

Spiegel writes:

But it has slowly begun to dawn on both the Russian Orthodox community and the Kremlin that they may have done themselves a disservice with this ruthless and bizarre prosecution of the anti-Putin band members. A tough verdict won’t have the effect of a deterrent, warns Orthodox intellectual and clergyman Andrei Kurayev. On the contrary, the church is provoking copycat crimes and encouraging a radicalization of the opposition, he says. There has “never been a shortage of young extremists” in Russia, Kurayev adds.

Konstantin Sonin, a columnist for the business newspaper Vedomosti, even spoke of the “worst mistake by the Church since 1901.” That year the Orthodox Church had the elderly writer Leo Tolstoy excommunicated.

How is it that Putin and the Patriarch have managed to make people feel great sympathy for a group of loony feminist slatterns heretofore known for staging an orgy in a museum? There’s a “holy fool” moral to this tale somewhere.

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