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The article addresses uses of revolutionary history in the Russian protest art created during Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency (2008–2012) and reception of these uses. Since the protest art is considered by many as an arena where dissatisfaction with the ruling regime, expressed in the mass protests of the winter 2011–2012, was fueled, the article seeks to define whether the uses of revolutionary history have played a role in consolidation of those dissatisfied with the regime. Focusing on the protest artworks created by collectives Vojna and Pussy Riot, the article answers the question by using and developing Klas-Göran Karlsson’s ideas on functionality of the uses of history. The results show that although many recipients understood the meaning conveyed by the artists, the uses of revolutionary history were most of the time dysfunctional due to the existence of “antirevolutionary consensus” in the Russian society. The article offers new answers to the question as to why the protest art failed to engage the Russian society.

In this provocation, I grapple with questions concerning the legacy and impact of radical feminist performance in Russia's repressive political climate and the possibility of collective resistance through performance. I address the devastating effects of the increasingly totalitarian regime on the work of radical feminist performers such as Pussy Riot, Darya Apakhonchich, and Katrin Nenasheva. The likelihood of surviving as a politically engaged performer-activist – as an outsider inside Russia – has been completely obliterated by the Kremlin but solidarity and collective resistance within and across national borders generate the sites of possibility to dream, imagine, and create together which, as Sara Ahmed (2014 [2004]: 181) reminds us, 'energises the hope of transformation.' In tracing the trajectory of precarity and hope in Russia's current feminist artistic practices rooted in collective resistance, I employ the politics of relation as a framework that places the bodies of performers in relation to 'others to whom [they] belong as inseparable, not separate' thus creating 'affective ties' with others (Aimee Carrillo Rowe 2005, 27). This is an expanded version of a provocation prepared for the 'Collective Resistance' roundtable at the Borderlines IX: Seeking Solidarity and Wonder Through Performance conference at De Montfort University in 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the development of Russian actionism through a biopolitical lens. Emerging in the 1990s as a public enactment of post-Soviet society's regression from bios to zoē , actionism became more consciously biopolitical in the twenty-first century as a succession of artists sought to challenge the biopoliticization of life under Vladimir Putin. Focusing on the actions and statements of Voina, Pussy Riot, Pyotr Pavlensky, and Katrin Nenasheva, the author identifies four main tactics of resistance, gradually leading actionism away from its roots in aestheticized violence toward the cultivation of practices of radical care. The article concludes with a brief overview of actions performed in the wake of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Arte y Políticas de Identidad is the property of Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Murcia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The officially sanctioned popular music genre of Soviet estrada has traditionally been an industry where both male and female performers have been able to achieve high levels of success and public exposure. Meanwhile, within the genres of underground and unofficial popular music – rock, punk, and rap – the male-dominated gender disparity has been much more pronounced. This article investigates the reasons behind this dynamic within a Russo-Soviet context. In dialogue with Judith Butler's notion of gender performativity as well as recent scholarship on gender in Western rock and punk movements, the present essay considers the evolution of performative strategies of female artists in Russo-Soviet popular culture. The discussion spans the Soviet, late-Soviet, and post-Soviet historical periods, focusing on the gendered performative dimensions in the musical careers of Alla Pugacheva, Yanka Diagileva, and the art-punk collective Pussy Riot, in an effort to account for the glaring dearth of female performers in traditionally "transgressive" popular genres. I present the argument that Russian and Soviet women performers working in rock, punk, and rap, or when forging new directions in estrada , have evolved to mitigate the genres' prescriptive masculinity by relying on performing "otherness" as a conduit to mass appeal, celebrity status, and acclaim for artistic individuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I compare two female-only feminist groups from the Soviet Union and Russia: one of them, the Leningrad feminists, were active in the Soviet Union in the late 1970's and the other, Pussy Riot, appeared in the 2010's. By placing Pussy Riot in the (post-)Soviet context and comparing them with the Leningrad feminists, I arrive at a novel reading of both. The similarities between both their structures and messaging are striking: both groups initially split off from larger, male-dominated dissident collectives; both faced challenges as mothers; and both groups appealed to the Virgin Mary as their guardian. These similarities are often obscured in readings that compare Pussy Riot with the Russian male actionists or Western riot grrrl feminists. By forging a different genealogy and comparing these two constellations of women, this article highlights both activist potentials and feminist genealogies in the (post-) Soviet space that have remained largely invisible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how feminist protest, specifically in the case of Pussy Riot, contests the power structures that sustain the authority of Vladimir Putin in Russia. I investigate how Pussy Riot engages in revolutionary activity, oftentimes unaccepted in Russia, to expose and subvert the gender dynamics that are foundational to formal and informal institutions in the country. I present a typology, designed to facilitate an understanding of the strategies Pussy Riot utilise to disrupt public life in Russia. This paper addresses how power, and the structures that generate and then sustain it, is contested and re-negotiated, even in oppressive and homogenizing societies. More specifically, I address the androcentric bias of power that is emblematic of Putin's Russia. Doing so requires beginning from a position that necessarily accepts what Oleg Riabov and Tatiana Riabova termed the 'remasculinization' of Russia, a renewed focus on the production of 'social borders and hierarchies,' based on conceptualisations of masculinity and femininity. Constructions of gender, in which femininity is subordinate to masculinity, have become essential to the legitimisation of Putin's position at the apex of the power vertical and the promulgation of images of Russia as sovereign and powerful. The aim of this paper is not to judge the success of the Pussy Riot collective, but rather, to offer insight into the potential for feminist protest, and protest more generally, in the future in Putin's Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the trajectories of Nadya Tolokonnikova and Maria Alekhina in the years since their performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. This study, however, does not simply focus on their activities as individuals, but seeks to contextualize their work over the last decade in terms of capitalism, neoliberalism, and collective struggle. Planting the history of Pussy Riot within the context of historic and contemporary tensions within intersectional feminisms in Russia, the "West", and transnationally, this paper will map divergences and convergences that render transnational feminist collaboration both troubled and uniquely productive. Global neoliberalism has challenged nation-states to develop hybridized and dynamic tactics of control that function both locally and in terms of transnational relations, and feminist movement therefore faces the same challenge; this paper participates in that struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the short but remarkable sociopolitical life of the Russian rock group Pussy Riot. The group became famous in 2012 not only for the political content of its performances but for its transgressive performativity: its violation of established public settings and its creation of disturbing anti-authoritarianism images of today's official Russia. The analysis aims to establish Pussy Riot as part of an avant-garde movement and as a radicalization of the very idea of the avant-garde against the familiarity of the public aspect of everyday life. Public 'normalcy' reveals itself to be complicit in that what should be criticized is instead taken for granted, and legitimized. Pussy Riot is a new art avant-garde in terms of both how it relates to activism, social justice, feminism, and art, and to the general public, not only to the art world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My aim is to consider how anarchy reads and resists punitive regimes in performance, particularly in 'immersive performance'. Punk troupe Pussy Riot forms a starting point, via Riot Days in 2017–18, with a sustained consideration on Inside Pussy Riot at the Saatchi Gallery in 2017, produced by Les Enfants Terrible. I concentrate on claims for authenticity that seem to lend theatre and performance legitimacy in relation to social change, to critique theatrical work with claims to producing agency, legitimizing hope for social transformation that is predicated on an 'empowered' spectator-participant. In the wake of these concerns, questions that bleed through this material relate to the limits of participation in performance and how and whether representations serve to dismantle state institutions. I consider whether the force of replications of cells, yards or gulags enables or disintegrates any activist, anarchist potential in performance. I take a wide-ranging view of anarchism beyond political theory to consider anarchism modelled in performance terms. Building from the example of Pussy Riot, the article defines performance critique through desire and anarchism, 'manifesting desire' or 'anarchy as method'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the configurations of belief, critique, and religious freedom in Russia since the performance of the Russian group Pussy Riot in 2012. The 'punk prayer' and its legal and political aftermath are interpreted as an incidence of the contestation of the boundary between the secular and the religious in the Russian legal and social sphere. The authors show that the outcome of this contestation has had a decisive impact on the way in which religion, critique, and the human right of religious freedom have been defined in the present Russian context. In response to Pussy Riot, the Russian legislator turned offending religious feelings into a crime. The article investigates two more recent cases where offended feelings of believers were involved, the opera "Tannhäuser" in Ekaterinburg in 2015 and the movie Matilda in 2017, and analyses how the initial power-conforming configuration that emerged as a reply to the 'punk prayer' has revealed a 'power-disturbing' potential as conservative Orthodox groups have started to challenge the authority of the State and the Church leadership. The article is based on primary sources from Russian debates surrounding Pussy Riot, Matilda, and "Tannhäuser" and on theoretical literature on the religious–secular boundary and human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various scholars have studied the relationship between music and politics. Most, however, focus on how governments and political parties on the one hand and movements and activists on the other use music for political outcomes and in doing so they often ignore the more latent forms of political participation music can lead to. This article, therefore, focuses on how people give meaning to political music in informal conversational settings by exploring the reception of Pussy Riot on YouTube. New media platforms like YouTube are ubiquitous in the West and as 'third spaces' they allow audiences to publicly reflect on everyday newsworthy events and activism. We combine the computerized methods of topic modelling and semantic network analysis to study both quantitatively and qualitatively how Pussy Riot's punk protests afford political participation by (Western) YouTube users. Results show that the comments mostly address (1) the geopolitical boundaries of activism, (2) the legitimacy and commitment of the activists, (3) the political content of the protests and (4) the relationship between the protests and religion. For the YouTube users in our study, the political music of Pussy Riot thereby serves as a vehicle to discuss politics beyond the protests themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neste trabalho, observamos a utilização da imagem do corpo feminino como uma estratégia recorrente em ações ativistas em diferentes partes do mundo. Os elementos estéticopolíticos do corpo, historicamente utilizados pelas artes, tais como o nu, a dor, o erotismo e a identidade (ou o anonimato) são reconduzidos para um projeto de cultura ativa e participativa dentro das redes de comunicação digital. Nossa análise insere-se no campo da biopolítica e faz uso de três exemplos recentes: os autorretratos da egípcia Aliaa Magda Elmahdy e as ações dos coletivos Pussy Riot (Rússia) e Femen (Ucrânia)

Modern feminist movements run the risk of being appropriated by capitalist agenda and commodified for mass appeal, thus stripping them of their revolutionary potential. I would propose that in order for feminism to challenge this, movements may want to consider the subversion of subjectivity. Deleuze and Guattari's notions of becoming-animal and becoming-woman emphasise a subjectivity not confined by rigid identity, such as man/woman. However, feminists have challenged this theory, suggesting it is difficult to both fight for and dispel the very same notion, that is, woman. I argue that in first considering the feminine subject via the Lacanian understanding of 'Woman', it can be argued that feminine subjects can engage with becoming-animal to destabilise the notion of 'Woman'. Riot Grrls, FEMEN and Pussy Riot all demonstrate tactics which could be said to utilise becoming-animal and have had varying success in avoiding commodification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pussy Riot's 2011 protest performance emerged as a (inter) (trans)national polysemic memory event. Remembered differently by news and digitally networked medias, the memory event illustrates the role of translation strategies on the global memoryscape, especially domestication and foreignization. Translation is broadly understood as an exercise where discourses, symbols, and cultural vocabularies work to render phenomena intelligible to a target audience. This paper argues that Pussy Riot's memory event translated differently between a variety of Russian and United States memory communities via the global memoryscape. I argue that the global memoryscape was a site international and transnational domesticating and foreignizing translation strategies. Understanding that not all memories reach communities universally, I suggest that domestication, foreignization, and transnational translation are three ways to characterize the complex polysemy that emerged out of the Pussy Riot's protest performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes to engage Pussy Riot's Punk Prayer in light of Marcella Althaus-Reid's Indecent Theology and in dialogue with Orthodox theology and the prison letters exchanged by Nadhezhda Tolokonnikova, and Slavoj Zizek. First, there is a discussion of aspects of AlthausReid's theology: caminata, libertinaje, and la vida loca. Second, the Punk Prayer -what I will call an Indecent Prayer -is presented in dialogue with Althaus-Reid's theology and Orthodox theology. Third, the prison letters between Nadya and Slavoj are discussed in light of Althaus-Reid's Indecent theology and Nadya Tolokonnikova's Sly Christianity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After Petr Pavlenskii performed the action Otdelenie in 2014, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova compared Pavlenskii’s work to that of Pussy Riot, and argued that the carefree, carnivalesque spirit that had characterized their punk rock performances was no longer suitable for the political reality of Putin’s Russia. This article takes Tolokonnikova’s statement as a starting point and explores the ways in which Pavlenskii’s artistic practice both conforms with, and deviates from the model for art activism employed by Voina, Pussy Riot, and other political art collectives in contemporary Russia, including Kollektivnye deistviia, Ekspropriatsiia territorii iskusstva, Oleg Kulik, and Chto delat’, among others. The author finds that Pavlenskii’s work largely conforms to the style of his predecessors in terms of locale, political sentiment and reasoning, but diverges from these models in its tone, brutality, and premeditated use of state power as an artistic medium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geopolitics in post-Soviet Russia has become not only a respected scientific field, but also a tool of practical policy and to a certain degree a new ideology, which in the 1990s helped to fill the normative vacuum that arose due to the collapse of communism. Aleksandr G. Dugin holds an exclusive position among modern Russian geopoliticians. He is the author of a wide range of geopolitical publications and is a publicly influential intellectual who has long been a figure among the elite of Russian politics. At the centre of Dugin's work stands the notion of a bipolar structure of the world, which is divided into competing blocs of "Atlantic" and "Eurasian" power, which contradict one another in a civilizational sense. In Dugin's perspective, Russia as the core of Eurasian space must stand up to the efforts of the Atlantic blocs, headed by the USA, which (through globalization and international conspiracy) is attempting to rule the entire world by forcing its culture upon it. This paper will focus not only on this conflictive relationship, but also on the general portrayal of Russia's civilizational enemies in Dugin's work. An independent section of the paper is devoted to the Pussy Riot "scandal" in 2012, which Dugin describes in great detail as proof of an international conspiracy aiming to humiliate Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The punk feminist collective Pussy Riot translate new ideas by embedding them in the visual symbols of the target culture. With their short bright-colored dresses and tights they tap into the stylistics of the Russian female performance as non-threatening ambiance to take the stage and protest against misogyny and authoritarianism. In 2012 they performed at Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral and asked the Virgin Mary to put an end to Vladimir Putin’s rule. They were captured and sentenced to two years in prison for instigating religious hatred. Welcomed in the West, they made a music video “I Can’t Breathe” (2015) using the case of Eric Garner to explain the tolerance for authority in Russia. We look at the eclectic mix of thinkers and artists Pussy Riot named as their inspirers, and use the collective’s work to examine the changing attitude to the translatability of cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author tries to provide a basic outline of the forms and metamorphoses of mutual relations between the Russian orthodox church and the state in the period from the collapse of the USSR to the present day. At the latest since the mid-nineties began to realize the interactions between the two actors and the church has become (co-) creator of the new national/state ideology, which is typical for the current authoritarian regime V. Putin. The text shall be measured on the selected topics and events, on the basis of which it is possible to relationship illustrate. Among these selected examples will have a dominant position case Pussy Riot, which well shows the real interconnection and the creation of discourse, which this link legitimizes.

This paper seeks to demonstrate that both the media impact and political success of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot rest on their use of new media, on the one hand, and on an aesthetic principle of humour, on the other, or, more specifically, on a kind of humour that is both self-reflexive and subversive. Pussy Riot operate through a style of guerrilla communication that re-signifies signs and symbols for their own purpose in a self-ironical, comical manner. I will indicate the contradictions and ambiguities of various interpretive frameworks – which not only create humour but are particularly motivating factors in the (personal) decision to become politically active. The speed with which one can communicate within social networks made it possible that infectious laughter about the absurdity of the events in Moscow was able to spread so rapidly. Reassurance and the community’s solidarity were closely connected to the fun and joy of the individual internet user.

This article ties together two different sources related to the Trial of Pussy Riot in Russia in 2012. On the one hand, I consider legal documents, such as court proceedings, police reports, and the sentence. On the other, I analyse a life-history interview with one of the accused, thus giving her a voice that is not mediated by juridical institutions within criminal law procedure. This allows an analysis of two different subject positions produced by these texts: a conformist citizen and a feminist activist-citizen. I pay more attention to the latter. I conclude that in order to retain an activist position, the feminist subject has no option but to resist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the portrayal of social critique in Andrei Zviagintsev's film "Leviathan" and its significance to the contemporary social and political climate in Russia. Topics include an argument on the challenge of the social critique for the ideals of post-Soviet Russia synonymous with the Russian presidency of Vladimir Putin, the role of the film's setting and landscape in its theme, and the treatment of the church and authorities in the film.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the “Pussy riot” case and the peculiarities of Russian postsecularism. Special emphasis is placed on the phenomenon of post-secular hybrids, i.e. the overcoming of the situation of social differentiation between religion and other social subsystems (one of the main distinctive features of secularization). It is claimed that the materials of the trial against “Pussy riot” make evident the appearance in Russia of at least three post-secular hybrids: 1) the blending of religion and politics; 2) installation of religious norms into the public order of the secular state; 3) significance of confessional legal experts as part of the new “ideological state apparatus”.

Does women's work in British public collections receive curatorial care and scholarly attention? And if or when it does not—when it lingers on the darkest racks of museums stores, collected for a posterity it will never achieve—how has this happened, and why? Or should we be especially concerned about the display of women’s work in public collections, in an age of digital images and online archives?

The link between Moscow art-group “Voina” and the movement of Moscow Conceptualism was clear when, in 2007, it planned a performance with the artist Dmitrii Prigov, called “Voina/War does only unskilled jobs”. Prigov died before he could take part in the performance but the group “Voina” has since carried out an ever more spectacular series of projects, bordering on pornography, as in the notorious performance "Fuck for the Heir Puppy Bear!", staged in February 2008, when five couples had public sex in Moscow’s Museum of Biology. This and other actions were filmed and posted on YouTube and other social networks, immediately going viral. The same M.O. was adopted in the actions of the group “Pussy Riot”, and in Ukraine by “Femen”.While more traditional media such as TV and radio are government monopolies, access to internet and social media is still free and provides a powerful means for these dissident groups to publicize their performances against the restoration of neo-Soviet ideology and to assert their non-conformist identity.

In his article, Mark Lipovetsky analyses Pussy Riot’s punk-prayer and the public discussion following the event. The author situates Pussy Riot’s performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour as the cultural return to and rebirth of the trickster trope – which was extremely powerful in the Soviet period but visibly declined in its cultural significance in post-Soviet times. At the background of this tradition, Pussy Riot represents a rare case of the trickstar (Marylyn Jurich), a female trickster, undermining not only socio-political but first and foremost the gender regime of the society, challenging sexism and gender repression. Analyzing Pussy Riot’s performance and its perception, Lipovetsky’s article argues that the Pussy Riot debate has revealed such flaws in the liberal discourse as the silent equation of moral values with religious doctrines; hierarchical, essentialist and, basically, pre-modern, understanding of culture (rejecting contemporary art for the lack of “harmony”); and, most importantly, the allegiance to patriarchal stereotypes. The shared values that are responsible for these flaws, appear not so different from the conservatives’ rage against “blasphemy” and the assault on the national “spiritual ties” (“dukhovnye skrepy”, to use Putin’s words); aggressive “defence” of “eternal” moral/religious values epitomized by the disgust towards contemporary art. The discourse triggered by Pussy Riot within the liberal intelligentsia reveal the hypocrisy of the liberal opposition, which supported “girls” only as the irritant to their enemies, while not so secretly despising them as silly manipulated puppets who should be physically punished for their shameful transgression. Furthermore, this debate laid bare the responsibility of neo-traditionalist ideology, shared by many representatives of liberal intelligentsia, for the Putin regime’s ideology.

Žižek and Tolokonnikova’s exchange letters provides the reader with the suggestive image and evocative words of two intellectuals speaking from very different contexts. This article discusses the relevance of this volume in the context of localized global capitalism and an equally localized global struggle against it.

The exposed members of Pussy Riot became symbols of the disruptive power of revolutionary art in a climate of repression upon their arrests following their performance at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, yet the controversy of their conviction and imprisonment overshadowed the very message for which they were sentenced. Close inspection of their lyrics and court statements reveals Pussy Riot's deliberate, consistent, and sophisticated engagement with feminist hermeneutics in their public opposition to the leadership and policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill I. In addition to protesting Putin, Pussy Riot's performances, court statements, and letters from prison critique the entanglement of church and state and their sexist, hierarchical structures by employing an egalitarian praxis of scriptural interpretation and feminist theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Estudos Feministas is the property of Revista Estudos Feministas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Russian art collective Pussy Riot gained worldwide attention in 2012 for its guerilla public performances and the subsequent imprisonment of three group members on charges of criminal hooliganism. While the group’s actions (and especially the response that they provoked) have been widely examined, Pussy Riot has not been considered within the context of Russia’s long tradition of political art. In particular, the group’s use of aesthetic disobedience – an avant-garde strategy originally championed by Russia’s Futurists 100 years earlier – provides a useful vantage point from which to reconsider the actions of Pussy Riot, and to re-evaluate the role of avant-garde ideas in contemporary society. This article has been peer reviewed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

On 21 February 2012, five young women clothed in brightly coloured short skirts, knit tights and rudely made balaclavas ruptured the silence of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, Russia, with an obscenity-laced song asking the Virgin Mary to deliver Russia from the impending re-election of its former president Vladimir Putin. The Russian Government responded to this provocative but non-violent act with unexpected and unprecedented coercive force against the small group of activists. In this article, we argue that Pussy Riot's ‘Punk Prayer’ and its aftermath demonstrate that the volatility of the conflict arises from a socio-historically specific form of the tension between a political citizenship and an embodied social agency. The Pussy Riot phenomenon was particularly explosive because it exposed the unstable coexistence of authoritarianism with a liberal constitutional state whose legitimacy depends upon the exclusion of arbitrary authority from the political field. Pussy Riot's ‘Punk Prayer’ and its aftermath demonstrate the subversive potential of even the most local, sporadic and symbolic feminist and queer challenges to the established order. The response of the Russian State exposed its dependence upon and investment in patriarchal and heteronormative power structures often rendered politically invisible through relegation to ‘private life’. The value of Pussy Riot's performance lies in its making visible, and thus available for public debate, the ways in which authoritarianism legitimates its exercise of power by exploiting social divisions through a network of institutionalized forces which civil society had come to take for granted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship in the new interdisciplinary field of law and music has done much to explore the relationship between these two cultural forms, in terms of force and meaning, history and structure. More must now be done to show how they matter to one another, how music can charge a social conflict with political urgency and color it with a distinct emotional timbre. The future lies in developing these research trajectories still more intently: towards the embodied and sonic dimensions of music on the one hand, and towards its contemporary relevance on the other. Such a discussion would have to be alert to the places and times in which music inserts a kind of pressing aesthetic note into the political and juridical process. And it would have to think the aesthetic, the legal, and the political in connection with one another. These propositions are explored through a case study of the trial of Pussy Riot in Moscow during 2012. While the prosecution chose to present the group’s actions as a species of ‘religious hatred,’ the defense characterized them as engaging in ‘political dissent.’ But neither adequately capture the role and meaning of the music and aesthetic elements of the performance of the three women. Yet these were integral to Pussy Riot’s actions. While the trial achieved some recognition as a political trial it deserves recognition rather as one of the great trials of modern art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author tries to provide a basic outline of the forms and metamorphoses of mutual relations between the Russian orthodox church and the state in the period from the collapse of the USSR to the present day. At the latest since the mid-nineties began to realize the interactions between the two actors and the church has become (co-) creator of the new national/state ideology, which is typical for the current authoritarian regime V. Putin. The text shall be measured on the selected topics and events, on the basis of which it is possible to relationship illustrate. Among these selected examples will have a dominant position case Pussy Riot, which well shows the real interconnection and the creation of discourse, which this link legitimizes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a gap between the academic discourse’s acknowledgement of the importance of the question of diverging values in the relations between Russia and the European Union (EU), especially in the light of recent human rights cases, and the ongoing tendency of recent analyses of EU-Russia human rights relations to focus on rationalist cost-benefit accounts which leave out value interpretation issues. I seek to fill this gap by genealogically analyzing the origin of different human rights understandings of Europe and Russia and their constitution of the scope of foreign policy action. The results point to a high divergence of the meaning of human rights between the European Union and Russia as well as a high relevance of this divergence for both parties’ foreign action and identity formation.

On Friday 17 August 2012, members of the feminist collective Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in jail after their staging of a musical protest in a Russian Orthodox church. This article analyses Western news media responses to the Pussy Riot affair. It first examines how the event has resonated across various news media, activist, and social media networks. Focusing on the phrase, ‘We are all Pussy Riot’, which became a Twitter hashtag following the incarceration of Pussy Riot members, I argue that narratives of feminist return (Hemmings, 2011) and of US exceptionalism have shaped the eventfulness of the Pussy Riot affair in the West. While not dismissing the activism of Pussy Riot, this article asserts that the discourses of transnational solidarity and feminist renewal that the arrests engendered rely on the perceived whiteness and non-Western identities of the members who were incarcerated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In thinking through two ideologically charged moments in history, Russian art collectives Inspection Medical Hermeneutics and Chto Delat undermine the ‘facts’ espoused under their respective regimes – the hollow truths of the Soviet Union and the lies of Putin's Russia. It will be argued that these radically different collectives dissolve the distinction between ideology and mythology as well as undermining the ‘empirical’ nature of history. Adopting Brechtian theatrical conventions, Chto Delat aim to bring out the absurdity of Russia's contemporary reality, creating art in response to the 2011–2012 protests which took place in Moscow and St Petersburg. From 1987 to 2001, Inspection Medical Hermeneutics have sought out relics of power, infusing them with alternative – if ambiguous – significance. This article also suggests that their refusal to form consistent or recognisable forms of political subjectivity resonates with the anarchic disobedience of the global Occupy movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to explain the widespread attention to contemporary protesting artists among Western audiences by focusing on the case of Pussy Riot. Social movement scholarship provides a first step into understanding how Pussy Riot legitimately protests Russian politics through its punk performances. It then turns to the concept of cosmopolitanism as a performance in everyday life to explain Pussy Riot's appeal among Western audiences. By collecting and analyzing 9001 tweets through a thematic hashtag analysis and topic modeling, this article analyzes how audiences talk about Pussy Riot and shows how Twitter affords users to perform cosmopolitan selves by sharing their ideas and experiences on Pussy Riot with others. Although we distinguish between four types of cosmopolitan selves, the results clearly show Pussy Riot is mainly reflected upon in a media context: Twitter users predominantly talk about Pussy Riot's media appearances rather than readily engage with its explicit political advocacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 21 February 2012, a female Russian punk collective ‘Pussy Riot’ performed a ‘Punk Prayer Against Putin’ on the soleas of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. The ensuing controversy over the performance, as well as criminal charges brought against three members of the group, made explicit the contentious nature of the place of Pussy Riot’s ‘punk prayer’. The author examines place in its dual identity as an event and as an actor, one affected, the other affecting. As an actor, a place becomes capable of enacting change, and as an event, it takes on the qualities of its occupants. While the rebuilt Christ the Saviour Cathedral was once a women’s convent, a monument to Russian victory over Napoleon, a never-completed Palace of Soviets and a giant outdoor swimming pool, the author examines how this place oscillates between resonance and irrelevance, disenchantment and re-enchantment, deterritorialization and reterritorialization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This research analyzes news stories of the American New York Times, theWashington Post, and the RussianIzvestiyaandArgumenty i Faktytoward the Russian punk group Pussy Riot. The study used qualitative framing analysis to (1) extract the frames and framing devices employed by the newspapers in their coverage of the Russian group, and (2) to identify if the coverage aligned with the official positions of the corresponding governments. The time frame was when Pussy Riot performed inside a Moscow cathedral in February 2012 until a week after the court's decision to jail three members in August of the same year. The findings show the American newspapers aligned with the official stand of the US government toward Pussy Riot. Each American newspaper employed two frames with their framing devices emphasizing solidarity with the group and opposition toward the Russian handling of the case. Each Russian newspaper also employed two frames but they did not align with the official stand of their corresponding government. The frames and their devices emphasized on the argument whether the church performance was an act of hooliganism or of free expression. Heavy celebrity endorsements supporting Pussy Riot were included in the American news stories while the Russian stories were more focused on the latest developments of events. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

August 17, 2012 was a “Global Day of Action” in support of Pussy Riot, a radical feminist performance group from Russia who had been incarcerated for their “Punk Prayer” at the altar of the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow in February 2012. This paper reads the “Punk Prayer” as an image event with an extensive afterlife, mobilized through the transnational icon of the balaclava. By reading its production (socially and spatially) along with its circulation, evident in solidarity protest images, it argues that transnational iconicity enables transnational solidarity, an affective sense of connection and responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]