Three members of the anti-Putin Russian group Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in prison yesterday on charges of “hooliganism” for this act of defiance:
There’s not much to add that hasn’t already been said. But I’ll add to the growing number of voices who are calling it shameful that anyone could be arrested for what basically amounts to “blasphemy” and dissent.
Mother Jones has an excellent summary of what this story is all about from start to finish.
One of the group members, Yekaterina Samutsevich, also issued this statement that speaks truth to power:
… we still have a secular state, and shouldn’t any intersection of the religious and political spheres be dealt with severely by our vigilant and critically minded society? Here, apparently, the authorities took advantage of a certain deficit of Orthodox aesthetics in Soviet times, when the Orthodox religion had the aura of a lost history, of something crushed and damaged by the Soviet totalitarian regime, and was thus an opposition culture. The authorities decided to appropriate this historical effect of loss and present their new political project to restore Russia’s lost spiritual values, a project which has little to do with a genuine concern for preservation of Russian Orthodoxy’s history and culture.
We often complain about a growing theocracy in America. It’s easy to forget how much worse the problem is in other countries.
