Pussy Riot's reception in the West

Formed in late 2011, Pussy Riot was initially conceived, according to a recent interview with Nadezhda Tolokonnikova's husband, in direct response to national politics in Russia. To the founding members, Dmitry Medvedev's September decision to not stand for re-election, which cleared a path for Vladimir Putin to consolidate power over the national government as president, had signalled that ‘the regime has no interest in change and only knows one direction: more authoritarian control. For 15 women, including Nadezhda, it was a wakeup call to do something and plan direct campaigns’.Footnote ⁴ Several members of the collective had previously participated in Voina (Russian: Война, or ‘War’), a radical street-art group that staged a number of shocking public performances beginning in 2006.Footnote ⁵ Dressed in brightly coloured tights, dresses and balaclavas, Pussy Riot continued in this tradition of public provocation, filming abrasive, irreverent punk songs at major landmarks around Moscow. On 21 February 2012, members of the collective entered the 19th-century Russian Orthodox Cathedral of Christ the Saviour and, pantomiming a ‘punk rock prayer’ in front of the altar, collected footage for a short clip uploaded that night, entitled ‘Punk Prayer: Holy Mother, Redeem Us of Putin!’Footnote ⁶ Staged just two weeks before Russia's national elections, and intended to draw attention to the close ties between President Putin's government and the Russian Orthodox Church, the video went viral. Police arrested three alleged participants the following week.

In choosing an English-language name, referencing the 1990s US-based riot grrrl feminist punk movement and creating their distinctive visual image, the members of Pussy Riot rendered a visual, ideological and sonic ‘brand’, able to be understood by both Western audiences and Russia's small urban middle class.Footnote ⁷ As members stated in a May 2012 interview, ‘We expect people to at least look through Wikipedia after watching us on YouTube’ (Vlasenko Reference Vlasenko2012). Calibrated to the tastes of local and foreign constituencies, Pussy Riot's image and politics were framed for maximum appeal. And appeal they did, with the buzz reaching full force as their trial commenced in July. Officials at the White House and Downing Street, and international organisations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, released statements condemning Russian authorities' heavy-handed ‘overreaction’ to artistic expression. Major Western news outlets, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The Guardian, dedicated continuing coverage. Musicians raised awareness (and money) in diverse ways. Anthony Kiedis, frontman for the American band Red Hot Chili Peppers, performed in Russia wearing a green Pussy Riot t-shirt, and Icelandic singer Björk sold t-shirts on her website. Canadian-born singer and provocateur Peaches posted a petition on http://www.change.org, which over 143,000 online users had signed as of 10 September 2012, while American punk group Anti-Flag covered ‘Virgin Mary, Redeem Us of Putin’. Long-time singer-activists Sting, Peter Gabriel and Madonna released statements and, at her August concert in Moscow, the Material Girl disrobed to reveal the words ‘Pussy Riot’ scrawled across her shoulders in black marker.

Yet while the Western response catapulted the trial into Western public discourse, representations of the women and their politics often stripped them of their own voices, fitting their political expression into pre-existing narratives and ascribing to them a range of political positions. Most obviously, commentators framed the group in gendered terms, as either a Russian expression of ‘girl power’ for the 2010s or as an extension of 1990s American riot grrrl punk activism. Sexualised and infantilised as, in the perceptive coinage of anthropologist Sarah Kendzior, ‘manic pixie dream dissidents’, the women were cast in contrasting roles: the ‘sultry’ one, the ‘sweet’ one and the ‘brain’ (see Kendzior Reference Kendzior2012).Footnote ⁸ More discerning commentators construed the women as participants in a global feminist politics. Former Bikini Kill bandmates and founders of the riot grrrl movement Tobi Vail and Kathleen Hanna advocated Pussy Riot's future transnational potential. ‘They have created a method of protest that is full of possibility and can be used globally, across international borders’, Vail said in a 2 August interview to the online magazine Dazed Digital. ‘Putin can jail individual members of the collective, but how can he stop the potential for new members to join or keep the movement from spreading beyond Russia?’ (Vail and Cook Reference Vail and Cook2012). Hanna envisioned global renewal for the feminist punk movement: ‘It would be really cool if this reinvigorated feminists from all over the world – taking on the appearance of Pussy Riot, but not in a cutesy way. […] There could be “We are Pussy Riot Olympia”, “We are Pussy Riot Tennessee”, “We are Pussy Riot Warsaw”’ (Hanna Reference Hanna2012).

The ascription to Pussy Riot of membership in a supra- or post-national cosmopolitan community based on a perceived political and aesthetic kinship signalled by shared musical styles and an imagined stance toward authority suffused other musicians' support. In a statement posted to their website, punk rockers Anti-Flag attributed to the women a kind of ‘punk rock citizenship’:

Pop musicians also framed the group as members of a global ‘community of artists’ bearing universal artistic rights and obligations that, presumably, the supporters also deemed themselves to hold and exercise. ‘Dissent is a right in any democracy’, wrote Jarvis Cocker of Pulp in an open letter to The Times (London), published 2 August and co-signed by Pete Townsend, Kate Nash, and others. ‘We believe firmly that it is the role of the artist to make legitimate political protest and fight for freedom of speech’ (Cocker Reference Cocker2012). A figure endowed with not only natural rights, but social obligations, ‘the artist’ as defined here approached the classic liberal conception of the free-floating ‘intellectual-as-watchman [sic] in pitch-black night’ (King and Szelényi Reference King and Szelényi2004, pp. 43–4).

While the imagined solidarities Western artists constructed for Pussy Riot often dismissed or ignored the nation-states in which each were located, the trial's coverage nevertheless obliged commentary on both Russia and a sphere commentators termed ‘free society’. For some, the case provided evidence of 21st-century Russia's position within a historical trajectory originating in Stalin's 1930s Soviet Union.Footnote ⁹ ‘It is wrong that three women in colorful costumes should be severely punished for a moment of expression’, asserted the Washington Post's editorial page on 17 August 2012 (Editorial Board 2012). ‘It is doubly wrong that they should be punished in the new Russia, where Stalin's terrible legacy of pain is well known and should have been long ago abandoned.’ The notion of ‘free expression’ forming a core pillar of modern democracies, and Russia's lack of this freedom, was taken to provide further evidence about the nature of the global order itself. As Peaches posed in her petition, ‘If Russia wishes to be a part of the modern globalised world it must adhere to the standards and principles of a free nation where its people have the right to have a free and open dialogue about all subjects. Discussion, debate, and action are the basic building blocks of a free society’ (Peaches et al. Reference Jones and Renaud2012). The 20-odd North American indie rock acts who co-signed further emphasised the distinction between Russia and ‘free society’, describing themselves as ‘We, the citizens of the world’ (Peaches et al. Reference Jones and Renaud2012).

Freedom of expression, Russia and Cold War ideology

Embedded within the Western reception of Pussy Riot was an understanding of the punk collective and its political statements as exemplary of supranational forms of solidarity and a politics of free expression. Yet despite claims about the universality of the Russian women's rights, Western accounts framed Pussy Riot's aesthetic style as linking the group's politics to a ‘free society’ constructed as strictly coterminous with the English-speaking West. Punk style here provided a key point articulating the women to an imagined post-national community characterised by its freedom. The aesthetic link between ‘free expression’ and ‘free society’ remained even when commentators explicitly questioned the political utility of musical protest in ‘the Anglo-American world’. ‘What does [Pussy Riot's example] tell us?’, asked John Harris in an 18 August 2012 article entitled ‘The Power of Punk’, published in The Guardian:

Aspirations for Pussy Riot to suggest an ‘example’ of dissent for Los Angeles and London understood dissident punk rockers as viscerally and musically embodying political ‘truths’ against authority. Punk's truth, however, was constructed as a Western phenomenon, even if it had to be acknowledged that ‘the U.S. has successfully neutralised the protest possibilities of punk rock through a careful combination of commodification and fashionable cynicism’ (Read Reference Read2012).Footnote ¹⁰

Two domains of knowledge underpinned commentators' strategies for representing and explaining the aesthetic and political significance of Pussy Riot. One domain assumed a global order organised into distinct and mutually antagonistic spheres: a Western one, defined by its freedoms; and a non-Western one, characterised by a deficit of freedom, whether construed as freedom of expression, debate, consciousness, speech or thought. ‘Free society’ here emerged as a cultural space defined primarily in opposition to a ‘new Russia’ that, many argued, looked a lot like the old one. A second domain of knowledge, closely related to this first one, further posited a normative understanding of the popular musician as a rights-bearing expressive agent, and of the utility of pop music – especially the abrasive, explicitly political variety – in speaking ‘truth to power’. Commentators thus attributed a form of aesthetic, social and political agency, even an artistic obligation to disrupt and subvert society, to the Russian activists.

Each redolent of an American Cold War ideology, narratives on the relationship between ‘the West’ and ‘the East’ and on popular musicians and their political agency should be considered together. On the one hand, Russia and ‘the West’ have shared a historical path of mutual ‘invention’ extending into the 19th century.Footnote ¹¹ The Cold War intensified and transformed this relationship, as the ‘free’ capitalist First World of Western Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States both came to depend on and to be defined in opposition to the ‘captive nations’ of a Soviet-led communist Second World. A ‘free market’ economy, ‘universal’ freedoms, and definitions of inalienable human rights thus evolved in part against what First World-produced accounts held up as the dystopian parallels found in the Second World's centralised planning, show trials and gulags. In this sense, the Cold War obligated the mutual construction of political and economic difference, a difference that, some 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, resurfaced in the accounts outlined above. On the other hand, the Cold War also shaped orders of value and truth, aesthetic regimes of meaning, beauty and agency. Understandings about what Western popular music is and does, how it accomplishes cultural work in the name of the political, and musicians' political agency, should thus be understood as having been shaped by, even imbued with, a Cold War ideology that posited an essentialist distinction between ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ geopolitical spheres.

The ‘freedom’ and political potentials of punk uncovered in the English-speaking reception of Pussy Riot were beholden to this pre-1989 legacy. In assuming liberal democratic rights to self-expression, or in positing transnational solidarities around what seemed to be shared identity politics or commitments to musical resistance, Western musicians and journalists located Pussy Riot's statements within a political-economic regime the collective's members themselves would not necessarily recognise.Footnote ¹² The attribution of a ‘freedom of expression’ to the women exemplified commentators' insistence on situating the collective within a particular regime of ‘natural’ rights and artistic subjectivities. However attractive the idea of the universality of individuals' rights to ‘artistic expression’ may be, the notion remains imbricated in the post-Cold War hegemony of a liberal democratic ideology. In creating a vacuum where once stood the primary alternative to capitalist modernity, the 1989 ‘extinction’ of Eastern European socialisms (Jowitt Reference Jowitt1992) encouraged the proliferation of teleological claims about the common destiny of a global order. ‘What we may be witnessing’, neoconservative American thinker Frances Fukuyama famously (and triumphantly) put it, ‘is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’ (Fukuyama Reference Fukuyama1989, p. 4). In ascribing to the women of Pussy Riot the grounding ideals, motivations and aspirations of liberal democratic thought, did commentators not also assume the mantle of this end-of-history triumphalism, however muted? In this way, the women and their compatriots were stripped of their own voice, and in its place was substituted a caricatured one comprising liberal values initially forged in reference to a Communist Other.

Popular music studies after the Cold War

In providing justifications for academic funding, shaping scholarly research agendas or even bringing into being entire fields of inquiry, the Cold War disciplined the English-speaking academy in far-reaching ways (see Pletsch Reference Pletsch1981).Footnote ¹³ By encouraging the reassessment and revision of core analytical concepts or re-examinations of particular histories and areas, the Cold War's end proved no less significant across the humanities and social sciences.Footnote ¹⁴ What might music scholars gain by examining how the Cold War inflected the study of popular music? What questions might a ‘post-Cold War’ popular music studies raise? The term ‘post’ here indicates both a recognition and a refusal of an ideology that partitioned the world into a ‘free’ First World, an ‘unfree’ Second World and a ‘traditional’ Third World (Chari and Verdery Reference Chari and Verdery2009; cf. Juraga and Booker Reference Juraga and Booker2002). Moreover, the ‘post’ signals an explicit concern with examining scholarship produced both before and after 1989 for elements of Cold War-era discourses, assumptions and truths.

Most directly, the Cold War coloured early research on popular music and Eastern European state socialisms, which often focused on how musicians ‘rocked the state’ or ‘rocked the bloc’ (e.g. Ryback Reference Ryback1990; Ramet Reference Ramet1994). Historian Jolanta Pekacz (Reference Pekacz1994) succinctly critiqued this paradigm for simplifying actually existing socialisms as identical with ‘totalitarianism’, which Western-style music was assumed to be fundamentally incompatible with.Footnote ¹⁵ In Martin Cloonan's recent call for a theorisation of the nation-state, he proposed a possible ‘authoritarian’ category of nation-states, ‘exemplified by those of the former Soviet bloc’, which are fundamentally ‘censorial’ and characterised by their ‘strict control’ over popular music (Cloonan Reference Cloonan1999, pp. 203–4). Access to previously inaccessible archives today enables the writing of critical historical studies of popular music-making in the pre-1989 Second World, just as a growing cohort of popular culture scholars in Eastern Europe increasingly provide challenging local perspectives (cf. Stanković Reference Stanković2010). A post-Cold War research frame, however, would challenge and refine the assumptions immanent to a strictly censorial model, perhaps replacing it with one focused equally on the modes by which state-socialist orders obligated the composition, performance and mediation of popular music. Further, such a model would provide a key counterexample with which to compare capitalist modes of popular music production, as well as an impetus to test and refine longstanding disciplinary paradigms developed primarily in reference to the capitalist First World, whether on commodification, culture industries or intellectual property.

My reading of Pussy Riot's reception sought to draw out and highlight what I termed the ‘vestigial’ elements of a Cold War ideology on the universality of Western freedoms as well as the subversive political potentials of pop music. A post-Cold War popular music studies, however, would not simply identify and register these elements, but would also push scholars to more reflexively examine the ways in which popular musicological discourses, analytical categories and research agendas have been shaped and organised by global regimes of knowledge and truth both before and after 1989. In part, effects of liberal ideology, constructions of aesthetic-political value, protest and dissent should be historicised as imbricated in a particular worldview that represents itself as humankind's ‘natural’ condition. A post-Cold War approach would thus contribute to the decentring and denaturalisation of ‘universal’ knowledge claims about popular music and musicians. Even more fundamentally, ‘popular music’ and the ‘popular musician’ as research objects each might be re-examined as products of the Cold War. From whence does the ‘popular’ in popular music derive? To what extent is the individual performer, a key unit of analysis in popular music studies, constructed as a rights-bearing agent with a particular artistic subjectivity? The Cold War's role in shaping popular music studies has yet to be analysed. This lack might be understood as symptomatic of how significant – if hitherto unexamined – the notions of freedom, individual expression and political agency have been to popular musicology's emergence and consolidation in the pre-1989 First World.