Pussy Riot, the activist Russian art group, has released a new video, “Like in a Red Prison.†Posted to YouTube on Tuesday, it shows several women clad in Pussy Riot’s trademark balaclavas and bright dresses, performing atop an oil pipeline, lambasting the Russian president Vladimir Putin’s energy policy in punk yelps. They also take aim at his allies, like Igor Sechin, the head of the state oil firm Rosneft, pouring what appears to be black oil on his portrait as they denounce “homophobic vermin,†a reference to Russia’s new anti-gay legislation. The legislation, passed last month by the Duma, Russia’s parliament, also included a blasphemy bill that stiffens the penalty for isulting religion, a direct response to the act which made Pussy Riot famous, the performance of a “punk prayer†in Moscow’s main orthodox cathedral.
The new song and video, the first to be released in the year since three members of the collective were jailed on charges of “hooliganism,†includes a grab-bag of political and cultural references, from a Gerard Depardieu character to Hugo Chavez to Alexei Navalny, the outspoken Russian opposition leader now on trial for embezzlement. Singing from the roof of a gas station as bemused pedestrians and workers look on, Pussy Riot compares the Russian president to an ayatollah and the church to one in the United Arab Emirates. Their aim, the group said, according to Reuters, was to highlight cronyism and corruption in the distribution of energy wealth; they also continue to spread a feminist message and to oppose the Russian government’s closeness to the Orthodox church, the same sentimnt which was behind their 40-second cathedral show.
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich were sentenced to two years in prison for that last August. Ms. Samutsevich was released in October. Forbidden to leave Russia, she remains a critic of the regime there, along with her handful of still-masked, still-free cohorts. Transferred among remote penal colonies in Russia, Ms. Alyokhina is due for a parole hearing this month, but not expected to be released before her sentence is up in 2014. Both she and Ms. Tolokonnikova contributed lyrics to “Like in a Red Prison†from jail, the group said.
