Russian punk band Pussy Riot branded as ‘sinners’ by Orthodox church

Miriam Elder in Moscow
12/3/2012

Church spokesman attacks group as activists mount campaign to free two band members arrested after protest at cathedral.

The Russian Orthodox church has called feminist punk band Pussy Riot “sinners”, their concerts a “boorish, arrogant and aggressive” challenge to Christians.

Now activists in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk have hung up billboards of the band’s detained members, stylised as church icons, in the latest attempt to boost public pressure to set the women free.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina were arrested on the eve of Russia’s presidential vote last weekend, days after an impromptu performance of an anti-Putin song in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. They face up to seven years in prison on charges of hooliganism.

“They have been detained on pressure from the church,” said Artyom Loskutov, a Novosibirsk-based artist, explaining why he and his girlfriend, Maria Kiselyova, put the posters up around the Siberian city. The drawings feature a large female icon, her face replaced with the neon balaclavas that Pussy Riot use to mask their identity.

“One of the church’s main symbols is Mary with child – and now they’re trying to jail two women with small children, without really looking into what they did,” he said.

While many liberal Russians have denounced Pussy Riot’s church performance as tasteless, the harsh sentence hanging over the anti-Putin group has drawn widespread condemnation.

Church spokesman Vsevolod Chaplin issued a long response to the performance at the weekend, saying he did not agree that the duo should be jailed. Yet, writing in his blog, he added that the church would not be pressured by calls for leniency and that God often “chooses different tests, including jail”.

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