Pussy Riot’s Reckoning
There’s something tragicomic about what just happened. Pussy Riot, the Russian collective built on saying no to everything—Putin, the state, commercialism, selling out—just fired two of its most visible members for doing the exact thing the collective claims to stand for. Nadia Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina were canned while they’re out touring the US, speaking against Russian homophobia and documenting what happens in the country’s prisons.
Their crime, according to Pussy Riot’s official letter, is being too visible. Too legible. They’ve become personalities with faces and names. They’re letting their images appear on posters (with a man in a balaclava, which is somehow worse). Money is changing hands. They’ve crossed from being an anonymous collective action into being individual activists. And according to Pussy Riot’s founding principles—no hierarchy, no commodification, no individual personalities, art given freely—this is unforgivable.
The letter is almost religious in its purity. It’s not angry, just clear. The band explains, point by point, why Nadia and Masha have to go. And there’s a kind of integrity in it I can’t completely dismiss. Pussy Riot has always said that the collective matters more than any individual in it, that anonymity is how you avoid becoming a cult of personality, that you can’t actually resist a system of hierarchy while building one of your own.
The thing is, they’re not wrong. But they’re also firing two people for being effective at the very work the collective was formed to do. And there’s something broken about that calculus. Nadia and Masha have put their names and faces out there, made themselves targets, because they think it matters. And Pussy Riot is saying, yeah, that matters, but not as much as maintaining our purity. Not as much as the ideology. So they had to go.
I don’t know if that’s the most punk thing possible or the most punk thing’s opposite. Maybe it’s both. Either way, the world probably just got two more serious activists, and Russia’s government probably doesn’t care whether they wear masks or not.