This wasn't a play and so I'm not writing a review. Several hundred people crowded into the Royal Court Theatre's underground cafe in Sloane Square this morning to hear three actresses, including the extraordinary Lydia Wilson, read the closing statements by the Pussy Riot trio. This event wasn't an attempt to score artistic points on behalf of the theatre, just a modest attempt to bring to a wider audience what's going on in Moscow. So congratulations to translator Sasha Dugdale, director Caroline Steinbeis and all those responsible.
So what is going on in Moscow? Why does it matter to us that three women have been sent to a labour camp for two years for a brief, outrageous protest against Vladimir Putin in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour? Sometimes even those who know a lot about Russia manage to miss the point spectacularly, as Professor Robert Service did on the Today programme this morning, when he described Pussy Riot in patronising tones as misguided and their protest as counter-productive. My impression is the opposite; the group clearly knew exactly what they were doing, and still do. This isn't silly little 'girls' getting out of their depth, this is a deliberate attack on the Putin system and its strange ideology, a mish-mash of Soviet-style xenophobia, nostalgic nationalism, macho posturing and obscurantist Russian Orthodox Christianity. Pussy Riot's boots aimed for the regime's most sensitive place and kicked it in the groin.
What matters is not whether or not Pussy Riot are talented punk rockers or not, or whether they are Guardian-reading liberals with views like ours; I suspect nobody is going to queue up to buy their music. What matters is the authoritarian reaction to them; it is what Pravda in the old days would have called a razoblachenie (an unmasking) that has brilliantly exposed the current Kremlin regime's hypocrisy, ideological vacuity and lack of legitimacy. The closing statements by the imprisoned women that I heard this morning show that they are well aware of the historic context of dissidence and protest in Russia. The parallels are not with Stalin's Russia, which exercised the kind of totalitarian control which made show trials possible; for a real show trial, you need to torture the accused sufficiently and/or threaten their families to force them into public recantation. And you need an audience of millions with enough religious fervour to swallow the message. None of those conditions apply in 21st century Russia, which has no coherent ideology to replace Marxism-Leninism, no believing masses, and not enough fear. The parallels are more with the Brezhnev regime between 1964 and 1982, when Khrushchev's deStalinisation ground to a halt, degenerating into stagnation before Mikhail Gorbachev triggered its final collapse by administering a fatal injection of democracy and openness. In the early Brezhnev period, one of the key events was the trial of the writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky in 1967; nobody remembers now what they wrote, just that they were tried and sent to labour camp under article 70 of the Russian Federation criminal code for defaming the Soviet system. It was a signal to the Khrushchev-era intelligentsia that the times were changing and the limits of what was acceptable were being drawn tighter. There are strong resemblances, it seems to me, between the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial and the current trial of Pussy Riot. The new element, of course, which didn't exist in the 1960s, is the feminist dynamic of their protest.
Both trials caused an international outcry and led to the Kremlin being vilified in the West; but that was and is a price which Russian rulers, then and now consider worth paying. Gorbachev and Yeltsin, while hating each other and struggling for power, both cared about their country's image abroad and wanted to bring its values into line with international norms on human rights. Most Russian rulers think differently. Russian history moves in a rhythm of two steps forward and one step back; after a period of reform and 'westernisation' comes reaction and retrenchment, and that's where we are at the moment.
There are a couple of aspects of the current trial that I'm not sure about; one is the implications for relations between the state and the Orthodox church. Which needs the other more? I rather suspect that it is Putin who needs the church at the moment more than it needs him. The other is whether the decision to make an example of Pussy Riot is still worth the candle for Putin in terms of internal Russian politics (the foreign reaction in Sloane Square and other places is far less important). When the dust settles, will he be stronger or weaker as a result of this month's theatrical event in a suburban Moscow courtroom?