Permission to play for Pussy Riot
A local concert in support of the controversial punk band looks set to go ahead, despite alleged threats.
Published: September 5, 2012 (Issue # 1725)
A concert in support of Pussy Riot that came under attack soon after Glavclub — a club with a capacity of 2,500 — was named as its venue earlier this month looks set to go ahead, as the club added the concert to its website and started selling tickets late last week.
The concert will not, however, be advertised on street posters, because the outdoor advertising agency that was approached to do the job “got scared,” the organizers said.
Earlier, Glavclub’s owner Igor Tonkikh — the only owner of a large club in the city to agree to host the charity show — asked the organizers to get at least some kind of “permit” from the police that would guarantee that the venue would not be shut down on the day of the concert, he said at a press conference last week.
Tonkikh said that he had started receiving threatening calls from the police and district administrations of both the Petrograd Side of the city, where Glavclub’s temporary summer marquee was located, and of the Central District, where Glavclub moved its activities to on Sept. 1.
According to Tonkikh, he was told that there were many agencies who would probe various violations that the club was allegedly responsible for.
Tonkikh said he had decided to host the Free Pussy Riot Fest because he organized concerts by Televizor — one of the show’s participants — as an underground promoter in Moscow when the band was banned in the late 1980s for its protest songs such as “Get Out of Control” and “Your Daddy Is a Fascist.” However, he said he also felt responsible for the jobs of the people working at his venue.
The Pussy Riot benefit concert on Sept. 9, if it goes ahead, will be the second charity event to be held at the club this week. On Thursday, the club will host a non-political concert aimed at supporting the homeless (see article, this page).
“We haven’t received any calls about that event,” Tonkikh stressed.
The police denied they had called the venue, and said that no permits for holding concerts were needed, Rosbalt reported last week.
However, on Thursday, organizer Olga Kurnosova said she had managed to get a “permit.”
“I asked the police to provide assistance in holding the concert and received a document from them,” she said, adding that the piece of paper does not guarantee the event from further harassment from the authorities. Glavclub promptly put an ad for the show on its website and started selling tickets.
Kurnosova said she had previously submitted an application for a Pussy Riot support rally on the Field of Mars, also scheduled to be held Sunday, just in case the concert is shut down by the authorities.
“Of course we were redirected to the remote Polyustrovsky Park, but I think they realized that if they stop the concert, it will not end there,” she said.
With tickets costing 500 rubles ($15), the proceeds will go to support the imprisoned members of Pussy Riot — Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich — who were sentenced to two years each in a prison colony as the result of what was described as a “kangaroo trial” in Moscow last month. Despite the fact that the feminist punk group’s “punk prayer” was directed against President Vladimir Putin and criticized anti-constitutional merging of the state and church in today’s Russia, the women were found guilty of “hooliganism motivated by hatred of a religious group,” i.e. Orthodox Christians.
The court refused to acknowledge that the performance — prompted by Patriarch Kirill’s support of Putin as a presidential candidate ahead of the March 3 elections — was a political protest.
Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina were arrested on March 4, the next day after the presidential election, while Samutsevich was arrested on March 15. Last week, Pussy Riot released a statement saying that the two other members of the group who took part in the performance had fled Russia.
In addition to political activist Kurnosova, the organizers include musicians Mikhail Borzykin of Televizor and Vadim Kurylyov of the Electric Guerillas, journalists Dmitry Gubin and Valery Nechai and filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov.
According to Kurnosova, the participants’ opinions about Pussy Riot may vary, but they all agreed that the verdict was “monstrous.”
Borzykin, who described the type of former KGB officers who now claim to be Orthodox believers and are in power in Russia — Putin included — in a song years ago, believes that the link between the Church and the Kremlin became more obvious during the Pussy Riot trial.
“The Russian Orthodox Church has been hired by the authorities and has stepped under their flags; that is becoming clear to more and more people,” Borzykin said.
According to Kurnosova, one of the police chiefs with whom she negotiated argued that Glavclub was “too close” to the St. Alexander Nevsky Lavra monastery — which is about 1 kilometer from the club — and suggested that the organizer should find a venue located further from a church for the concert.
“My brain exploded when I heard that; when reasons like that are offered, I am simply lost for words,” she said.
DDT, Televizor, PTVP, Electric Guerrilas, Razniye Lyudi and Gleb Samoilov will be taking part, as well as some younger bands who offered to play, but several acts refused to take part, most notably Boris Grebenshchikov of Akvarium.
“I don’t play political games,” was how Grebenshchikov explained his rejection of Borzykin’s emailed invitation, Borzykin said. Grebenshchikov has however met repeatedly with the Kremlin’s “gray cardinal” Vladislav Surkov, played for Dmitry Medvedev during the former president’s meeting with loyal rock musicians at a Moscow club and has spoken favorably of Putin in interviews during the past decade.
“There is a certain split, but I am happy that most of the younger, fresher bands do not need the importance of solidarity between musicians explaining to them,” Borzykin said.
“We still lack the kind of solidarity that was showed by Paul McCartney, Peter Gabriel and Sting — the people we have been listening to since we were kids. But judging from the hundreds of bands who wished to participate, this solidarity is emerging.”
Tonkikh argued that the word “split” should not be used, because the rock scene was not monolithic.
“In my family as in no other, we know that society should keep the authorities in check, because one of my grandfathers was killed in the war, and the other was shot on May 9, 1944 by the authorities,” he said.
“That’s why I am not only a club director, but also a citizen of the Russian Federation.”
A portion of the funds raised will go to the “Prisoners of Bolotnaya,” activists arrested in the aftermath of the May 6 demo on Bolotnaya Ploshchad in Moscow that erupted into clashes as the result of an alleged police provocation, and also to Taisia Osipova, an opposition activist sentenced last week to eight years in Smolensk on dubious drug distribution charges.
“The situation is only getting worse,” Kurnosova said.
“First it was two years for Pussy Riot, then eight years for Taisia Osipova, and no-one knows how many the activists of the Bolotnaya Ploshchad rally will get.”
Free Pussy Riot Fest — featuring DDT, Televizor, PTVP, Electric Guerrilas, Razniye Lyudi, Gleb Samoilov, Makulatura, Brigadir, Kirill Komarov, Vasily K, Mikhail Novitsky, Alexander Zaslavsky, Atmoravi, Vladimir Rekshan and Dmitry Shagin — will take place at 7 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 9 at Glavclub, 2 Kremenchugskaya Ulitsa. M. Ploshchad Vosstaniya. Tel. 905 7555.