You are the president of a large country with a growing economy,
intent on keeping your name up there in the lights. You pride yourself
on your popularity, your sense of history, and the fact that you
personify the destiny of your country (or so you keep telling yourself).
A criminal court sentences three young women, two of them mothers, to
two years in prison
for staging a 40-second punk feminist stunt inside your country's
official church and the world's social network sites go mad. Two years
of gulag for
Vladimir Putin's
enemies, they scream. Demonstrations erupt on the streets outside your
embassies. Ageing celebs queue patiently to condemn you. There is even
someone offering knitting patterns for
Pussy Riot's
balaclavas. The punk feminist band becomes a global brand before it
even releases its first album and you a pariah so sullen that not even
botox conceals your scowls. Mr Putin did not so much shoot himself in
the foot on Friday, as fire a Kalashnikov into his size 8s.
Pussy
Riot must have offended many Russian Orthodox believers by screaming
lyrics such as "Shit, shit, the Lord's shit" behind the iconotasis of
the Church of Christ the Saviour. An opinion poll released by the
independent Levada research group found that only 6% of Russians polled
sympathised with the women and 51% felt either indifference, irritation
or hostility. Similar umbrage would have been taken inside St Paul's or
the Vatican. And those who doubt that may well wonder what tension would
have been caused by a flash-mob invading a mosque at Friday prayers.
How
many museums around the world would have looked the other way as a
number of couples – including a heavily pregnant Nadezhda Tolokonnikova,
one of the three convicted on Friday – were filmed having sex to
illustrate how Muscovites were being screwed by their government? The
British Museum? The Louvre? The Metropolitan? The wish to punish
anarchists is not Russian alone.
But the wish to crush political
dissent, in this way and at this time, is Mr Putin's alone. Pussy Riot
had two points to make, both of them valid: that the Orthodox Church
provides intellectual and religious cover for Mr Putin's increasingly
messianic political brand; and that this man is driving
Russia
straight up a cul de sac. The agent of stability is becoming the
obstacle to change. The omens are not good. Mr Putin has no policies to
offer a generation that has been politically awakened. He is not ready
for dialogue with any part of country, and he is all about reinforcing
central control. He has lost his grip on his popular image so he is
forced back on an essentially conservative base. The result is that in
his third term as president, Mr Putin has a real problem re-establishing
himself as a leader for Russia as a whole.
The Pussy Riot trial
will not be the last. Criminal prosecutions will become the weapon of
choice against political activists like the anti-corruption blogger
Aleksei Navalny, journalists who face stiffer penalties for libel,
websites, or foreign-funded NGOs. Of course the world reaction is
selective and partial. Would that Sergei Magnitsky, the lawyer whose
corruption investigation led to his death in prison, have produced the
same reaction as the Pussy Riot verdict. That does not change the
verdict that all Mr Putin has to offer the next demonstration, called
for September, is a bigger stick.
It need not be this way. Mr
Putin still has time to climb out of the hole he has dug himself into.
He could call early parliamentary elections, because it was the rigged
Duma elections last year that triggered the current crisis. He could let
a popularly elected prime minister run the country. He could retreat
from the political frontline, and still fashion a role for himself as
father of the nation. To continue as he is doing, as the only and
increasingly unsteady hand on Russia's tiller, spells disaster.
@
'The Guardian'
