Last night I saw Pussy Riot, on the London leg of their Riot Days European tour to raise money for a children’s hospital in Ukraine. Their producer, Alexander Cheparukhin, came on stage to introduce them. I guess he was about my age; I couldn’t be precise because I didn’t have my glasses. He vibed the sort of age, where you can’t see things without glasses. He described how he met Maria Alyokhina (who also goes by Masha Alekhina), one of the founding members of the band who was first imprisoned in 2012 and then under constant surveillance, harassment, house arrest, arrest-arrest and persecution, until she escaped from Russia to Iceland earlier this year. When her sentence was handed down 10 years ago, he said, it was the first time in his life he had witnessed the political imprisonment of artists.
This was a useful bit of context, or rather, a glass of cold water to the face, after years of somnambulance: no one is laughing at Vladimir Putin now, of course, but for years, he was almost a figure of fun, with his bare-chested, horse-riding photoshoots and florid turn of phrase. On the world stage, he was the uncle who might say dodgy things, but got invited anyway: what was the worst that could happen? This indulgent, pretty feckless view of Putin was overlaid by the sense that Russia merely did things differently; perhaps the state was a bit thin-skinned and hotheaded, maybe it didn’t prioritise human rights as much as one would like, but this was a cultural thing, probably related to the weather. If we had maybe expressed that view out loud more often, Russian citizens could have said: “No, actually, punk bands sentenced to hard labour for protest actions is very much a now thing, rather than an always thing.”
The subtitles weren’t working last night and the band were disappointed because a lot of incandescent poetry has gone into the lyrics, but they were magnificent. Alyokhina and Taso Pletner were in their trademark balaclavas; Diana Burkot, one of the founding members, broke her foot in Germany recently, and using crutches and wearing a plastic boot seemed to make her, if anything, more punk.
The visual continuity – not just the balaclavas, but the stagecraft, the choreography of defiance, took you straight back to that Moscow cathedral in 2012, and underlined what an exceptionally long time these Russian dissidents have been at it: protesting against Putin’s growing authoritarianism, brutal prison conditions, the erosion of LGBTQ+ rights, the invasion of Crimea in 2014, the misogyny baked into a system with no women anywhere near the levers of power, the subsequent invasion of Ukraine. There has never been any shortage of support – moral authorities from Barack Obama to Paul McCartney deplored the harsh prison sentences. But there has been a lack of symmetry: you can’t meaningfully recognise “the oppressed” without shunning the oppressor. That second shoe never really dropped in the early 10s, when the world was still desperately clinging to an idea of itself as carefree. Brutality meted out to LGBTQ+ activists on an ad-hoc, placard-meet-truncheon basis, becoming more systematised in the anti-gay purges in Chechnya, was likewise deplored without logical follow-through.
What good would it have done to have bestowed pariah status on Putin when he first displayed his pariah behaviour, rather than waiting for him to wage war? A decade-long head start might, at the very least, have left Europe less than entirely dependent on Russian gas, facing a continent-wide recession. Earlier economic sanctions might have put more pressure on the kleptocrat class around Putin, who might then have exerted their own pressure on him. Sure, it’s hypothetical; but you can say with relative certainty that doing more, sooner, would have been better.
I wouldn’t want to speculate on why the international community is so slow to react, when feminist and LGBTQ+ activists are oppressed – all I will say is that when you wait until the straight men are also in prison, you have left it too late.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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