Closing statements delivered by Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich at the Khamovnichesky District Court, Moscow, on 8 August 2012. The three members of the feminist punk collective Pussy Riot were on trial for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” following their performance of a “punk prayer” at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow on 21 February 2012. These statements, delivered before the verdict, constitute one of the most significant intersections of performance art, political speech, and courtroom rhetoric in the twenty-first century.
On 21 February 2012, five women in brightly colored balaclavas entered the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, approached the altar, and performed approximately forty seconds of a “punk prayer” before being removed by security guards. The performance — later edited into a music video titled “Punk Prayer — Mother of God, Chase Putin Away!” — took place two weeks before the Russian presidential election and was directed against the Orthodox Church’s public support for Vladimir Putin’s re-election campaign. Three of the five performers — Tolokonnikova, Alyokhina, and Samutsevich — were identified, arrested, and charged.
The trial became the most internationally visible political prosecution in Russia since the Soviet era. The courtroom itself became a performance space, and the defendants’ closing statements — traditionally a brief, formulaic element of Russian criminal procedure — were transformed into extended political, philosophical, and artistic declarations. Each woman spoke for approximately thirty minutes. Their statements, reproduced in substantial excerpts below, draw on Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, the history of political art, feminist theory, and the defendants’ own experiences as artists and activists. They were composed in a pre-trial detention facility where the women had been held for five months.
From the Closing Statement of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova
In the closing statement, the defendant is expected to repent, plead for mercy, or enumerate extenuating circumstances. I shall do none of these things.
What we have done — our performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour — was not motivated by hatred of religion. It was motivated by a political situation in which the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church were behaving as agents of a political regime, providing spiritual cover for the consolidation of authoritarian power. Our action was a punk prayer — a genuine prayer, addressed to the Virgin Mary, asking her to become a feminist and to chase Putin away. The form was deliberately provocative; the content was sincere.
I am not ashamed of what I have done. I am ashamed of a country in which people are imprisoned for forty seconds of punk rock in a church while billions are stolen from the public treasury without consequence. I am ashamed of a judicial system in which the outcome of a trial is determined before the trial begins. I am ashamed of a political culture in which the word “freedom” requires quotation marks.
Dostoevsky wrote that the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. I have entered yours, and I have my judgment. But I will go further than Dostoevsky: the degree of civilization can also be judged by examining what a society is willing to call a crime. In a society where forty seconds of punk rock constitutes a criminal act warranting years of imprisonment, something has gone very wrong with the calibration of justice.
We are accused of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. But there is no hatred in our hearts. There is anger — anger at a system that uses the language of faith to justify the mechanics of power. There is grief — grief for a country that once produced Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and Solzhenitsyn, and now produces show trials. And there is hope — hope that this trial, precisely because of its absurdity, will awaken those who have been sleeping.
From the Closing Statement of Maria Alyokhina
I have been in detention for five months. During that time I have had the opportunity to think about many things — including the nature of punk, the meaning of prayer, and the relationship between the two.
Punk is not a musical genre. It is a stance — a refusal to accept the world as it is presented to you, a commitment to making noise in spaces where silence is demanded. Prayer is not a ritual. It is a cry — a desperate, honest address to whatever power you believe might be listening. What we did in the cathedral was both: a punk prayer, a noisy cry in a space where only approved speech was permitted.
The prosecution claims that we have offended the feelings of believers. But which believers? The believers I have met in detention — the women who share my cell, who pray quietly every night — have not been offended. They understand that our quarrel is not with God but with those who presume to speak on God’s behalf while serving the interests of earthly power. The only feelings we have offended are the feelings of those who have confused their political preferences with divine will.
I am told that I should repent. I have thought about this carefully. Repentance requires the acknowledgment that one has done something wrong. I acknowledge that I have done something uncomfortable, something disruptive, something that violated the norms of behavior expected in a cathedral. But I do not acknowledge that I have done something wrong. To remain silent in the face of the merger of church and state, of spiritual authority and political authoritarianism — that would be wrong. To perform a punk prayer — that is an act of conscience.
From the Closing Statement of Yekaterina Samutsevich
I want to speak about the relationship between art and politics, because this trial is, at its core, a trial of that relationship.
The prosecution has argued that our performance was not art — that it was merely hooliganism dressed up in the language of artistic expression. This argument reveals more about the prosecution’s understanding of art than about our performance. For the prosecution, art is something that hangs in galleries, sits in museums, receives prizes from committees. It is, above all, something harmless — something that does not interfere with the operations of power. By this definition, our performance was indeed not art. It was something more dangerous: it was art that worked.
Throughout history, the most significant art has been art that violated the boundaries of the permissible. The Russian Futurists were persecuted. The Constructivists were suppressed. Shostakovich was denounced. Brodsky was tried for parasitism. In each case, the state’s response confirmed the art’s significance: you do not prosecute what does not threaten you.
Our performance lasted forty seconds. The trial has lasted five months. The disproportion is itself a statement — an unintended confession by the state that forty seconds of unauthorized art in a cathedral is perceived as a greater threat to public order than the corruption, inequality, and democratic regression that prompted our action. We accept this confession. It confirms everything we set out to demonstrate.
The Verdict and Its Aftermath
On 17 August 2012, the court found all three defendants guilty and sentenced each to two years in a penal colony. Samutsevich’s sentence was later suspended on appeal after she changed lawyers; Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina served their sentences in penal colonies in Mordovia and the Urals, respectively. Both were released in December 2013 under an amnesty widely interpreted as a pre-Olympic public-relations gesture by the Kremlin.
The case generated sustained international attention. Amnesty International designated the three women prisoners of conscience. Protests were held outside Russian embassies worldwide. The trial was covered extensively by international media and became a focal point for criticism of the Putin government’s authoritarian trajectory.
Editorial Note on Significance
The Pussy Riot closing statements represent a rare convergence of courtroom speech, political manifesto, and performance art. Composed under conditions of detention, delivered in a courtroom whose verdict was widely understood to have been predetermined, the statements transformed the trial from a punitive proceeding into a platform for the very critique the prosecution sought to suppress. The defendants’ refusal to repent — their insistence on treating the courtroom as a continuation of the performance rather than its negation — enacted the principle their words articulated: that art which accepts the boundaries imposed by power has already failed.
The statements also function as a compact history of the relationship between art and state power in Russia, from the Futurists through the Soviet period to the present. By placing their own case within this genealogy — alongside Mandelstam, Brodsky, and Shostakovich — the defendants claimed membership in a tradition that the state’s own actions had validated. The trial, intended to silence, instead amplified. The punishment, intended to deter, instead inspired. The closing statements, intended as a formality, became a manifesto that will outlast the regime that provoked them.
