Tolokonnikova - Read & riot: a Pussy Riot guide to revolution

Contents

When I was fourteen, I showed up at a local newspapers office with a piece I had written on pollution and climate change. They told me I was a really nice little girl and not a bad writer, but wouldnt I rather write about the zoo? The piece on catastrophic pollution in my hometown was not published. Oh well.

Many things have happened in my life since then, including my arrest and the two years I spent in prison, but in fact nothing has seriously changed. I keep asking uncomfortable questions. Here, there, and everywhere.

These questions, while not always accompanied by answers, have always led me to action. It seems to me that I have been doing actions all my life. My friends and I began reclaiming public space and engaging in political protest long ago, in 2007, when all of us were a laughable seventeen or eighteen years old. Pussy Riot was founded in October 2011, but it was preceded by five years that were chockablock with formal and substantive research into the genre of actionismfive years of schooling in how to escape from cops, make art without money, hop over a fence, and mix Molotov cocktails.

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I was born a few days before the fall of the Berlin Wall. One might have thought at the time that after the assumed elimination of the Cold War paradigm, we were going to live in peace. Hmm... what weve seen, in fact, is a cosmic rise in inequality, the global empowerment of oligarchs, threats to public education and health care, plus a potentially fatal environmental crisis.

When Trump won the US presidential election, people were deeply shocked. What was in fact blown up on the 8th of November 2016 was the social contract, the paradigm that says you can live comfortably without getting your hands dirty with politics. The belief that it only takes your one vote every four years (or no vote at all: youre above politics) to have your freedoms protected. This belief was torn to pieces. The belief that institutions are here to protect us and take care of us, and we dont need to bother ourselves with protecting these institutions from being eroded by corruption, lobbyists, monopolies, corporate and government control over our personal data. We were outsourcing political struggle like we outsourced low-wage labor and wars.

The current systems have failed to provide answers for citizens, and people are looking outside of the mainstream political spectrum. These dissatisfactions are now being used by right-wing, nativist, opportunist, corrupted, cynical political players. The same ones who helped create and stoke all of this now offer salvation. Thats their game. Its the same strategy as defunding a program or regulatory agency they want to get rid of, then holding up its resulting ineffectiveness as evidence that it needs to be folded.

If nationalist aggression, closed borders, exceptionalism of any kind really worked for society, North Korea would be the most prosperous country on earth. They have never really worked, but we keep buying it. Thats how we got Trump, Brexit, Le Pen, Orbn, etc. In Russia, President Putin is playing these games too: he exploits the complex of rage, pain, and impoverishment of the Russian people caused by the shock economy and the Machiavellian privatization and deregulation that took place in the 1990s.

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I may not be a president or congressman. I dont have a lot of money or power. But I will use my voice to humbly say that looking back on the twentieth century, I find nationalism and exceptionalism really creepy.

Now more than ever we need to take back power from the politicians, oligarchs, and vested interests that have put us in this position. Its about time we quit behaving like were supposed to be the last species on earth.

The future has never promised to be bright, or progressive, or whatever. Things may get worse. They have been getting worse in my country since 2012, the year Pussy Riot was put behind bars and Putin became president for the third time.

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No doubt Pussy Riot was very lucky that we were not forsaken and forgotten when we were silenced by prison walls.

Every single interrogator who talked to us after our arrest recommended we (a) give up, (b) shut up, and (c) admit that we love Vladimir Putin. Nobody cares about your fate; youll die here in prison and no one will even know about it. Dont be stupidsay that you love Putin. However, we insisted that we dont love him. And many supported us in our stubbornness.

I often feel guilty about the amount of support people gave Pussy Riot. We had too much of it. There are many political prisoners in our country, and unfortunately, the situation is getting worse. Their cases dont attract the attention they surely deserve. Unfortunately, prison terms for political activists are seen as normal in public consciousness. When nightmares happen every day, people stop reacting to them. Apathy and indifference win.

The struggles, the failures, are not a good enough reason for me to stop our activism. Yes, social and political shifts dont work in linear ways. Sometimes you have to work for years for the smallest result. But sometimes, on the contrary, mountains can be turned upside down in a second. You never really know. I prefer to keep trying to achieve progressive changes humbly but persistently.

In the United States, there is a lot of talk about Russia nowadays. But not many know what Russia really looks and feels like. Whats the difference between a dangerously beautiful country full of mind-blowing, creative, and dedicated people and its kleptocratic government? Many wonder what thats liketo live under the rule of a misogynist authoritarian man with almost absolute power. I can give a little glimpse into that world.

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The Russian-American relationship is a real piece of work. With a strange quasi-masochistic twitch, I enjoy the journey Im making in the shadows of these two empires. My existence twinkles somewhere between these giant imperialist machines.

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I dont care about borders (though borders do care about me). I know there is power in an intersectional, inclusive, international union of those who care about people more than money or status.

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Were more than atoms, separated and frightened by TV and mutual distrust, hidden in the cells of our houses and iPhones, venting anger and resentment at ourselves and others. We dont want to live in a world where everyone is for sale and nothing is for the public good. We despise this cynical approach, and were ready to fight back. More than that, we are not just resisting, were proactive. We live according to our values right now.

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When I try to find words to talk about a more holistic approach to world politics, when I suggest thinking about the future of the whole planet rather than the ambitions and wealth of nations, I inevitably start to sound naive and utopian to many people. I thought for a while that it was because of my poor personal communication skills, and maybe that is part of the problem. But I see this failure of words as a symptom of something larger. We never developed the language to discuss the well-being of the earth as a whole system. We identify people by where they are from, while never learning how to talk about people as part of a larger human species.

Weve survived the Cuban missile crisis, etc., etc. And now, were happily falling back into the ancient Cold War paradigm. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists