Patriarch Kirill was the first to fulminate against Pussy Riot’s lese- majesty. ‘The Devil has laughed at all of us,’ he thundered. ‘We have no future if we allow such mockery … if people think this is acceptable as some sort of political expression.’ In response to calls for mercy to be shown to the women, Kirill refused, saying that hearing Orthodox believers ask for such indulgence made his ‘heart break with bitterness’. Putin followed up with more outrage, planting the thought that Pussy Riot were the agents of hostile foreign powers sent to undermine Russia’s moral fibre. Russia, he said, must look to its traditional spiritual values, ‘to the power of the Russian people with Russian traditions … and absolutely not the realisation of standards imposed on us from outside’. A couple of months later, he signed a new law that made it a criminal offence to ‘insult the feelings of religious believers’, punishable by fines and up to three years in prison. The three Pussy Riot women could count themselves lucky that they ‘only’ got two years in jail for ‘hooliganism motivated by religious hatred’.
Pussy Riot’s cathedral performance came at a difficult time for Putin. Allegations of fraud in the legislative elections of 2011 had sparked large street protests opposing his return to the presidency, which was scheduled for May 2012. Demonstrations in Moscow, St Petersburg and other cities had coalesced into a self-named Bolotnaya or ‘Snow’ Revolution, conjuring memories of the successful Orange Revolution against Ukraine’s pro-Moscow government. Crowds chanting ‘Russia without Putin!’ were an ominous signal of discontent. The Kremlin declared the protesters traitors to the motherland and bussed in pro-government supporters to mount counter rallies. Fast-track legislation was introduced to increase penalties for unsanctioned demonstrations and other infringements of public assembly regulations. Putin’s response to the protests was a sharp turn to the conservative right.
The cultivation of the Orthodox Church allowed him to appeal to the anti-liberal values of many believers, while ‘Western immorality’ was loudly denounced. He pandered to traditional Russian homophobia by passing laws criminalising ‘gay propaganda’ and to male chauvinism by decriminalising domestic violence. The Orthodox hierarchy – which has no opinion on domestic violence, but considers homosexuality a sign of the Apocalypse – gave him their enthusiastic backing.
Putin framed the measures as a campaign to protect Russia’s purity against outside efforts to corrupt her. ‘The West knows no difference between good and evil,’ he told the Valdai International Discussion Forum. ‘They have rejected the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilisation. They deny moral principles and traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual … They are implementing policies that put normal families on a par with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with belief in Satan. The excesses of political correctness have reached the point where people are seriously talking about registering political parties whose aim is to promote paedophilia … And they are aggressively trying to export this model [to Russia]! This would open a direct path to degradation and primitivism, resulting in a profound moral crisis.’
