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She drafted her letter on scraps of paper she would pass to Petya when he came to see her; she also dictated passages to him. Although there are hygiene rooms in the dorm units, a 'general hygiene room' has been set up for corrective and punitive purposes. This room can accommodate five people, but all prisoners are sent there to wash up. We must not wash ourselves in the hygiene rooms in our barracks: that would be too easy. There is always a stampede in the 'general hygiene room' as women with little tubs try and wash their 'breadwinners' as they are called in Mordovia as fast as they can, clambering on top of each other.
We are allowed to wash our hair once a week. However, even this bathing day gets cancelled. A pump will break or the plumbing will be stopped up. At times, my dorm unit has been unable to bathe for two or three weeks. We've learned to unclog the pipes ourselves, but it doesn't last long: they soon get stopped up again. The prison does not have a plumber's snake for cleaning out the pipes.
We get to do laundry once a week. The laundry is a small room with three faucets from which a thin trickle of cold water flows. After months of sleep deprivation and malnourishment, Nadya was in no shape to maintain a hunger strike. She was hospitalised within a few days.
In the prison hospital that serves the entire Dubrovlag, the many-branched Mordovian gulag, she met women whose stories made the torture she had seen seem like a dress rehearsal. These women came from a penal colony for repeat offenders. Nadya's second open letter mentioned them. A newfound confidence was evident in this letter, as though Nadya were aware she had found her voice for addressing the Russian public and its officials.
There was another new element as well: a number of references to the cases of Soviet dissidents described in Kaminskaya's book, the one she had won by throwing a fit at the beginning of her hunger strike.
She had read it and discovered she had a legacy: she was following in the footsteps of people who had fought the same battle and slept on the same bunks. If Nadya had been aware of any legacy before, it would have been that of the Moscow Conceptualists , a group of contemporary performance and visual artists and writers who, in the late s and throughout the s, had reappropriated the language and rituals of Soviet officialdom for the purposes of disarming it.
Punk Prayer had been designed and performed very much in the Moscow Conceptualist mould: it was a brilliant prank of an artwork , and no one had planned to go to prison over it. Indeed, several participants in Pussy Riot's previous actions backed out precisely because they thought the group was pushing its luck and might get into serious trouble. Pussy Riot was an open-membership collective in which every participant performed anonymously. You take it off — and you are no longer Pussy Riot.
It could be any colour as long as it was bright and one wore tights to not match it. There were five women at the cathedral that day wearing balaclavas one more appears in the resulting video clip because some of the footage was shot the day before — in the intervening sleepless night this woman had changed her mind about participating.
Three of them — Nadya, Kat, and Maria — were ultimately arrested and therefore unmasked, and stood trial as Pussy Riot. All had travelled very different roads to Pussy Riot, the cathedral and jail. Kat was a disillusioned software engineer who had worked on nuclear submarine missile systems before becoming a photographer and attaching herself to Nadya on one art project after another. Nadya was a philosophy student who had been part of the radical art collective Voina and then, as she read more and more feminist theory, invented Pussy Riot.
Maria had come by way of environmental activism and a love of writing and film. Still, with the exception of Maria, none of the women thought of herself primarily as an activist: some were artists, one was a musician, but all of them wanted to scream about different things that made them mad about Putin's Russia. Together they created a great work of art, a distillation of tensions that made people intensely uncomfortable, challenged their assumptions, and provided them with images and concepts for describing their reality.
The trial, an undrafted piece of absurdist theatre that played for nine stifling days in August , became a part of the performance. The prosecution played the inquisition; the judge played its enthusiastic helper; the defence attorneys played the fool; and only the defendants themselves played it straight, giving pointed political speeches at the end of their ridiculous ordeal.
And more than a year later, Nadya read Kaminskaya's book and recognised whole chunks of her own witch trial in the Soviet dissident lawyer's descriptions. Perhaps because Maria had long regarded herself as an activist, she found her feet in prison fairly fast and with seeming ease. Soon after she arrived she was threatened by a group of inmates, and felt compelled to ask for "protective solitary", which is exactly the same cold and dark place as punitive solitary except one goes there voluntarily, to the extent that anything in prison is done voluntarily.
There is nothing obvious about the conclusion she drew: a more reasonable — and certainly a more common one — would be "then I may as well give up".
But Maria became a jailhouse lawyer. She collected documentation and filed endless complaints, on her own behalf and on behalf of other inmates. Within months, she had the prison administration scared of her — to the point that she was never actually allowed to enter the sewing factory, where she surely would have discovered numerous violations of labour and safety codes. As it was, Maria spent many days in court fighting the penal colony — and, miraculously, even winning a few victories.
Nadya had a few hearings as well, though while Maria focused on law and procedure, Nadya used the public forum — and, especially, the media, whose interest in the Pussy Riot inmates dwindled but never entirely disappeared — to speak publicly. It was a performance that grew increasingly political as time went on.
Assisted by Mr. Another challenge came in after 14 anarchists wearing black bandannas across their faces were arrested in Union Square on May Day. A State Supreme Court justice declined to dismiss charges against the defendants, saying they had not shown that the masks were necessary to protect them from harassment by the authorities.
But the justice, Gregory Carro, also concluded that the United States Constitution protects the right to wear a mask during a peaceful political demonstration. Siegel said he thought his argument that the balaclavas themselves were a form of protected speech would be bolstered by the previous court decisions. If successful, he said, the argument could provide a way for other groups to wear masks without being subject to arrest.
Afterward, they discussed their reasons for opposing the mask law. Migration figures lies Wasted Years Quangoland and Big government.
Squandering taxpayer's billions. Stuffing quangos with lackeys. Common Purpose. Rise of consultants and wonks. Ripping the public to pay for Olympics.
Privatisation and NHS cuts. Home Truths Bigotgate. Home office 'not fit for purpose'. A tick-box PC culture. Binge drinking, licensing laws.
Big Brother surveillance. Unchecked immigration. ID cards. Encouraging gullible to gamble. Prescott and the super casino. Dome fiasco. Greengate scandal. Blunkett's fall from grace. False 'Britishness'. Blair's dodgy finance dealings. Cash for Honours. Ministers' second homes scam. Erminegate Sleaze. New Labour croneyism. Ex-ministers pimping for lobby firms. Levy pimping peerages to slushfund.
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