Punk Rockers in the Cathedral: Another View 

Lawrence Uzzell

Political Protest or Religious Sacrilege? 

Eliot Borenstein’s article, “The Cathedral of Christ the Savior as Scandal and Haunted House,” East-West Church and Ministry Report 22 (Spring 2014), perversely misses the most important point in the 2012 controversy with Moscow’s punk rockers insulting Orthodox Christians. The punk militants are conducting a “long march” against civilization. P**** Riot, or PR (I refuse to echo their obscene language), and its many allies are celebrating forms of behavior until recently considered unacceptable. PR claims the right to confront and insult Christians attempting to exercise their religious freedom. Both PR and Vladimir Putin love coercion. 

My words must seem excessive if one is dependent upon Western media, which have downplayed key points. PR is not just a rock band that happens to have strong opinions about politics and occasionally stages demonstrations. PR has never performed for a willing audience in a concert hall—at least before 2014.1 It has never produced a CD for voluntary listeners. At least before 2014 its performances always were as offensive as possible in both the secular and religious spaces that they coopted without permission.2 PR defies the formal and informal rules of any civilized society, rejecting dialogue or compromise.3 

Imagine raiding someone’s private shop, insulting the shop’s owner, employees, and customers. Imagine an invasion of a biology museum designed for all ages with the end result of children observing nude couples engaging in intercourse.4 Again, the audiences were entirely involuntary, just as older Russians recall being forced to listen to Soviet tirades via loudspeakers. PR’s so-called “punk prayer” in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior in 2012 parodied Christian worship, combining Orthodoxstyle prostrations with high kicks and boxing gestures. Its text explicitly linked the Lord’s name with an obscenity.5 Grotesquely, those who performed the “punk prayer” were soon idolized as “prisoners of conscience,” as if they were on the level of Solzhenitsyn or Sakharov. Mainstream media ignore PR’s systemic shoplifting that was employed to finance one rocker’s Ralph Lauren wardrobe.6 Thanks to PR and its allies, sacrilegious acts inside a church are considered justifiable behavior by its Western apologists. 

Points of Agreement 

My position, however, is not the opposite of Professor Borenstein’s. Actually, I agree with many of his points. I especially applaud his observation that “The Cathedral of Christ the Savior is tantamount to taking an Indian burial ground, building a shopping mall on top of it, and then knocking down the shopping mall in order to replace it with a sparkling new Indian burial ground—with a casino attached to it.” Many object to the cathedral’s square footage given over to commercial operations. Even without this conflating of retail and spiritual space, the building should not have been reconstructed in the 1990s. Many experts on church architecture, both Orthodox and non-Orthodox, protested Moscow’s pseudo-reconstruction of the mammoth cathedral. “Why rebuild it when thousands of historically important churches and monasteries all over the country were crumbling (and are still crumbling). Aleksei Komech, director of the Research Institute of Art History, calculated that the cathedral reconstruction cost would be equivalent to the federal budget for restoration of architectural monuments for a hundred years.”7 I explicitly voiced my opposition to the project when I was living in Moscow. By the mid-1990s Moscow had more than enough functioning Orthodox Church buildings in downtown Moscow, while many rural and suburban areas in Russia had far too few parishes. When I lived in Moscow I physically walked from the cathedral’s construction site to an existing working church, a distance of less than 1,000 steps, much less than a mile.

The Epiphany Cathedral Attack

Returning to the rock exhibitionists, Professor Boernstein’s article omits a key point. The Cathedral of Christ the Savior was not the only church invaded by PR in 2012. That same year this punk rock group targeted another church with no scandalous history of hyper-expensive construction. PR attacked Epiphany Cathedral just a few days before its antics in Christ the Savior, ignoring everyone’s rights except what it considered its own.8

Western media have depicted the rockers merely as anti-Putin political demonstrators. But this interpretation requires the omission of facts.9 PR never uttered the words “Vladimir Putin” inside either cathedral. Rather, PR, after the fact, inserted Putin’s name in the You Tube video it edited. Moreover, PR’s January 2012 demonstration in Red Square included obscenities specifically targeting both Putin and the Orthodox Church.10 

Was the Punishment Excessive? 

Was the Russian court’s punishment of its punk rockers excessive? In fact, Russian law safeguarding religious observance is not radically different from similar laws in the U.S. and Britain. California’s penal code states: “Every person who intentionally disturbs or disquiets any assemblage of people met for religious worship at a tax-exempt place of worship, by profane discourse, rude or indecent behavior, or by any unnecessary noise, either within the place where the meeting is held, or so near it as to disturb the order and solemnity of the meeting, is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by imprisonment in a county jail for a period not exceeding one year, or by both that fine and imprisonment.” Similarly, the United Kingdom provides imprisonment for up to two years for “racially or religiously aggravated offences.”11 Nevertheless, a key word for Christian believers should be “forgiveness.” Strikingly, the staff of both Moscow cathedrals did not punish PR. The cathedrals’ response to the rockers’ invasions was simply to release them.12 

Only later did Russia’s highest decision-makers choose to inflict cruel pain—handing down multi-year sentences in a country famous for its brutal prisons. The conversations behind closed doors among Putin, Patriarch Kyrill, and their staffs relating to the disposition of the three arrested PR performers would have been interesting to overhear. Did Kyrill simply obey as a KGB colleague,13 or did he actively lobby for harsh punishment? Either scenario is quite plausible. We cannot expect those conversations to be made public anytime soon. Meanwhile, PR’s allies, trashing piety, are rewriting the West’s old rules. So far, most Russians, both pro-Putin and anti-Putin, are refusing to join in that “long march” against civility. We need more such refusals.♦ 

Notes: 

1. Two members of PR appeared at an Amnesty International concert in February 2014. Other members of PR objected stating that this appearance was “highly contradictory to the principles of Pussy Riot…. We never accept money for our performances….We only stage illegal performances in unexpected public places.” For more details see http:// www.theguardian.com/music/2014/feb/06/pussy-riotmadonna-amnesty-concert.
2. Masha Gessen, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot (New York: Riverhead Books, 2014): 73-76.
3. See the interview with anonymous, masked PR members in the documentary film, “Pussy Riot: a Punk Prayer,” by Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin, 2013.
4.  The group Voina (“War” in Russian), a precursor of PR, performed this stunt in a museum in 2008. At least one participant in the 2008 museum performance participated in the so-called “punk prayers” inside the two cathedrals. Gessen, Words Will Break, 40. See also http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/ style/russian-art-group-voina-uses-often-illegalmeans-to-spread-anti-state-message/2011/03/30/ AF6dtfLC_story.html; and http://www.colgate.edu/ docs/default-source/d_academics_departments-andprograms_russian-and-eurasian-studies_studenttheses/pussy-riot-and-its-aftershocks-politics-andperformances-in-putins-russia.pdf?sfvrsn=0.
5. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/ archive/2012/11/what-pussy-riots-punk-prayer-reallysaid/264562/.
6. Gessen, Words Will Break, 6, 42, and 53.
7.  For a wealth of details see Konstantin Akinsha, Grigorij Kozlov, and Sylvia Hochfield, The Holy Place: Architecture, Ideology, and History in Russia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 154.
8. http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/sites/eng/pages/search. aspx?i=001-139863#{“itemid”:[“001-139863”]}.
9.  Gessen, Words Will Break, 193. See also http:www. digitalicons.org/issue09/files/2013/06/D1_9_6_ McMichael.pdf.
10. For that song’s unprintable words see Gessen, Words Will Break, 104-05.
11. The Crime and Disorder Act of 1998; http://www. leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=pen& group=00001-01000&file=302-310.5.
12.  Gessen, Words Will Break, 117-22. See also http:// hudoc.echr.coe.int/sites/eng/pages/search.aspx?i=001- 139863#{“itemid”:[“001-139863”]} and http://www. interfax-religion.com/?act=news&div=9161.
13.  “Materials unearthed from the KGB archives indicate that four of the six current permanent members of the Moscow Patriarchate Holy Synod are, or at least until recently were, KGB agents: Patriarch Aleksii II (agent code name “Drozdov”); Metropolitan Iuvenalii of Krutitsy (“Adamant”); Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk (“Mikhailov”)…. It should be stressed that an ‘agent’ of the former KGB was considerably more than an informer; he or she was an active operative of the Committee for State Security, in effect a non-uniformed officer of that organization.” John B. Dunlop, “The Russian Orthodox Church as an ‘Empire-Saving’ Institution,” 30, in Michael Bourdeaux, ed., The Politics of Religion in Russia and the New States of Eurasia (London: Armonk, 1995).

Lawrence A. Uzzell is the retired president of International Religious Freedom Watch, Fishersville, Virginia.