Last month I wrote about how the Russian Orthodox Church joined forces with the Kremlin in supporting Bashar al-Assad’s regime in the Syrian civil war. The Russian Orthodox Church, I suggested, was pursuing this course not because of their commitment to any sort of religious values, but out of a sense of clan loyalty to the minority Christian community in Syria, who some say will be in danger if the Assad regime falls. Furthermore, the Russian Orthodox Church’s attention to Syria emerges in part out of its partnership with the state machine of President Vladimir Putin. The Russian Orthodox Church is calibrating its interests to align with those of the Kremlin.
This synchronization of interests continues with the conviction last week of the punk band/feminist art collective Pussy Riot. In February, members of the band staged a performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, singing a profanity-laced song in which they called on Mary, mother of Jesus, to “save Russia from Putin.” The protest was a reaction to the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill’s support for Putin during his campaign for a third presidential term. Three members, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Maria Alyokhina, all between the ages of 23 and 30, were arrested and charged with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred and enmity,” a crime with a maximum sentence of 7 years. Notwithstanding the global outcry against Russian censorship prompted by their case, the defendants were sentenced on Friday, August 17, to two years in medium security prison less time served in custody. In her ruling, Judge Marina Syrova (who has allegedly received threats over her role in the trial and was assigned protection by the Russian authorities) said that “[b]y their actions, Samutsevich, Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina seriously disrupted public order and the day-to-day running of the Cathedral. They showed blatant disrespect to church-goers and workers, and in doing so gravely offended their religious sensibilities.”
Yet it is clear from the initial Pussy Riot performance that although the incident was designed to be shocking, it was an anti-Putin protest, not a focused act of blasphemy. The members of Pussy Riot even went so far as to apologize during their trial to offended members of the church–hardly the actions of the hardcore “satanists” they were branded as by their accusers. Furthermore, critical reactions to the trial in acts of civil disobedience and public protest have frequently drawn on a lexicon of religious concepts and imagery. On August 15th, two days before the verdict, a group of protesters convened on the steps of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior holding letters spelling out, in Russian, part of the text of Matthew 5:7, “Blessed are the merciful.” Other images show the transformation of a religious statue with the addition of a colored balaclava (above). Far from a defacement, the image suggests a subterranean line of solidarity between an alternative vision of Christianity and the protest movement. The mask is a territorialization of religious iconography within a new political formation, not a repudiation.
The cooperation between the institutional Russian Orthodox Church and Putin’s authoritarian Kremlin serves a variety of purposes. It weaves together two different strategies of power into a cohesively functioning unit. The nation as political entity and the nation as a religious identity platform are synthesized; when Putin is attacked in a church, the authority of the church–the constructed aura of religion as hallowed space seated outside of the political sphere–is used as a cloak to protect Putin. Even some commenters on this New York Times article can be found accepting and endorsing the narrative manufactured by the Kremlin in conjunction with the Russian Orthodox Church–that this is a crime of blasphemy and thus has no status as protected free speech. “[M]onks, nuns, bishops, religious people were slaughtered by the godless Communists,” writes a commenter using the nom de plume Common Sense Woman, “They did not die so that the this [sic] music group could perform sacrilegious acts inside the church.” Simultaneously, the Russian Orthodox Church finds itself elevated to the status of the mantle of the nation by Putin, the charismatic commander in chief, an appointment that regrafts it onto ethnic Russian identity and entrenches its market share.
But religion is too complex to be easily assimilable to a mechanism of state domination without remainder. The hallowing effect that religion exerts on the state–that mobilizes the judicial apparatus and the currents of popular opinion against dissent–can also be attached to critical efforts that marshal a corresponding suite of political affects useful for anti-state dissidents. This is part of the tactical repertoire of Pussy Riot and their supporters: the prayer for intercession, the Bible quotation, and the co-optation of religious imagery all implicate religion inside an agenda of resistance. In this sense, the conflict between Putin and the anti-Putin protest movements resembles the conflict in Iran between the military regime and the Green movement: both weave religion into their rival political agendas. No coincidence, then, that Russia was one of the first countries to recognize the government of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad after the stolen 2009 Iranian elections, and that Green movement protesters worked the phrase “Marg bar Rusiye” (“Down with Russia”) into their chants.
In all of these cases, religion has no essentially dominating or liberating function; rather, it is best understood as a technology, a power source that will be picked up and rewired for politics–politics that are shaped by the desires of the historically embedded bodies that by accident stumble upon it.
