The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

From this point on, Seryozha was driven by rage. His rage focused on producing as many white ribbons as possible. There was a shortage. Retail shops all over Moscow had run out of white ribbons. People were wearing ribbons not just to protests but every day, to work and in the streets. They pinned them to their coats, tied them to their bags and to the antennae of their cars. Seryozha found wholesalers and bought large heavy rolls of ribbon, an inch wide and hundreds of yards long. Cutting the ribbon into tens of thousands of roughly six-inch strips was no trivial task. He invented a technique. He wound the ribbon around the back of a bentwood chair, thirty to fifty times over, and then made two strategic cuts—for as many as a hundred pieces at once. Then the ends of the strips had to be singed with a lighter, to keep them from fraying. Before the next planned protest, on December 24, Seryozha set up a workshop at his apartment. Several people he had met at a gathering called the Protest Workshop came to help. They also produced an instruction video and uploaded it to YouTube.

masha went to every action, protest, planning meeting, and related social occasion. Within two weeks of becoming an activist, she had started a new job, as press secretary to parliament member Ilya Ponomarev of A Just Russia, who had been speaking at the protests. She had joined the protest art group Pussy Riot. The all-woman open- membership collective staged guerrilla performances and posted videos online. In December, they sang on a garage roof outside the detention center where Navalny and other protesters were held. In January, they sang in Red Square; the song was called "Putin Pissed Himself." That time, like many other times, they were escorted to a police station and allowed to leave after a couple of hours. Next, Masha wanted them to stage an action in the parliament chamber. They would descend from one of the side boxes, in their mismatched multicolored tights and balaclavas, when the parliament was in session.

This action turned out to be harder to organize than Masha could have imagined. On February 21, Pussy Riot performed instead at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the gaudy giant wedding cake of a church near the Kremlin. They sang a song called "Punk Prayer," in which they pleaded with the Virgin to "chase Putin out." Their message was directed at the protesters as much as at anyone else. Rather than assemble in cordoned-off spaces, it said, be confrontational—go where you are not supposed to go and say what you are not supposed to say. In this case, they were confronting the church and state where church and state became one. The presidential election was two weeks away. The patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church was campaigning for Putin.

On March 4, just before the polls opened, two members of Pussy Riot were placed under arrest on suspicion of felony hooliganism, a

charge that could carry up to seven years in prison. Masha was not one of them because she had not made it to the cathedral that day.

lyosha happened to be in kiev the first weekend of March, at a seminar in the Gender, Sexuality, and Power series. The election looked even more bizarre from a distance. Putin declared victory in the first round with 63 percent of the vote, and the white-ribbon crowd in Russia seemed shocked by this predictable outcome.

On March 8, International Women's Day, the participants staged a march down Kiev's main avenue. They marched for gender equality, LGBT rights, and freedom for Pussy Riot. There were maybe 150 of them, twice as many police, and, it looked to Lyosha, four times as many counterdemonstrators. It was the first time Lyosha marched for LGBT rights. It was also the first time he saw police protecting protesters rather than threatening them. He felt oddly inspired, despite having had to march through a tunnel of police in riot gear.

When he returned to Perm, his dean said nothing about the march. But she did suggest that it would be wise to change the title of the seminar when he put in the paperwork for where he had been.

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MASHA: MAY 6, 2012