Reuters reports that Russian police is not done with punk rock band Pussy Riot, but are rather hunting for more members. I guess the international outraged in response to the 2-year jail sentence didn’t impress them. Instead, they are pursuing their despotic measures and are searching for the other members of the band who protested against Putin inside Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral last February.
The search had even begun before Friday’s verdict, and this shows how much the government is determined to remind us that Russia hasn’t evolved since the Soviet era. A lawyer for Pussy Riot said the police had video surveillance footage of the girls walking in the church, and probably knows the identity of the other two women.
Last Friday, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, Maria Alyokhina, 24, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30, were convicted of ‘hooliganism motivated by religious hatred over their performance of a ‘punk prayer’ urging the Virgin Mary to rid Russia of Putin’, but the band actually consists of 10 members. This insane determination of the police definitively puts a lot of pressure on the other members, who nevertheless declared in a recent interview that the trial had only strengthened their resolve to stage new protests.
Either these women are totally insane or very brave, and I tend to think they are incredibly brave! You have probably noticed, their conviction based on ‘religious hatred’ is complete bullshit, as their song was certainly not directed at church but rather a prayer (as they called it) directed against Putin.
But if these women were arrested for the February protest in the church, I wonder what would be the police’s case for arresting the ones who were not participating? I bet they will find something else…
Tolokonnikova’s husband declared to Reuters that this is ‘part of a wider Kremlin crackdown on opponents who hope to stage mass street protests in the autumn’ and that ‘Putin likes the taste of repression’.
One thing is sure, this trial has put an international spotlight on Putin, totally damaging his reputation, and it was about time! Russia looks like a going-backwards mess, and now the world attention is on the repression of the regime. As Nadezhda Tolokonnikova said it herself, ‘This is a trial of the whole government system of Russia, which so likes to show its harshness toward the individual, its indifference to his honor and dignity. If this political system throws itself against three girls . . . it shows this political system is afraid of truth.’
These punk girls have become a symbol of freedom, now, if more Russians protest against Putin, this will be a good example of insurrection driven by music.
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