Yesterday Mosha Gessen, a New York Times journalist and Russian refugee, spoke at Cornell about Putin, the new Russian state, and Pussy Riot.
Members of the activist group Pussy Riot were arrested in August 2012 for a 40-second piece of political theater that occurred in the central orthodox cathedral. The arrest distinguished the members of the all-female political group by making them the first people to be sentenced to jail for peaceful protest in the new Russian state. While Gessen interprets their activity as peaceful protest, and I believe many in the West would agree with her assessment, they weren’t actually tried for political protest. The group was found guilty of committing a hate crime—against the church.
Gessen argues that in order to counter mass political protests, Putin sought to identify a threat to the Russian state that only he could protect the country from. He created a “civilization” state rather than a nationalist state—one that based its legitimacy on a traditional lifestyle, under attack from Western Europe, the United States, and foreign enemies at home who embody non-traditional lifestyles.
With this logic, Putin was then able to find guilty all Russian citizens who opposed the state, as they would have to be foreigners trying to destroy the foundation of Russia.
In Putin’s new regime, which derives legitimacy from the myth of a traditional Russian orthodox that must be protected from the foreign enemy, law serves as a tangible manifestation of the state’s ability to define threats to society.
Pussy Riot, as a political group, was tried not for political protest, but for blasphemy. Their official charge was committing a hate crime against the Russian Orthodox Church. By framing the trial in terms of moral character rather than political action or expression, Putin’s new war against the non-traditional was brought to law.
The right of citizenship, to not being excluded through imprisonment, became contingent on how well identity fits to the traditional character imagined by the state. Pussy Riot’s sentencing is an excellent example of the impossibility of being found innocent when protesting state power, if a corrupt and non-transparent state gets to define the moral characteristics of said innocence.
Dissidents, those who challenge Putin’s invention of a nation founded on a traditional lifestyle, are forced outside of the state. Putin’s state has identified people whom the state’s laws are designed to protect and to whom rights are extended through a definition of exclusion, by targeting those who are not part of Russia. I believe there is an implicit threat in this definition of citizenship. People are encouraged to be obedient, as Foucault’s “governmentality” is leveraged against members who have rights but could lose them if they fail to act in the way the state defines them. The state writes the people as it would like them to be and then punishes or expels challenges to their definition.
As gay bashing has been an enormous threat to Russians who identify as or are perceived as queer in recent months, it is obvious that Putin has the power to censor lifestyles in Russia. The enormous number of young Russians filing for asylum due to threats of safety based on sexual identity shows the way queer bodies are physically forced out of the state. Arrests at the June international pride parade or the mayor of Sochi’s claim that no gay people live in “his” city demonstrate the state’s ability to force its population to fit its imagined character.
By defining queerness as foreign and anti-Russian, Putin has used state power to make the queer lifestyle incompatible with Russian citizenship and protection.
diplomacist.com 