When a boy is afraid of girls, his friends call him a sissy. But this can’t possibly be the case with Russian strong man, karate black belt Vladimir Putin. So there must be another reason why Moscow’s establishment is taking such a hard stance against the members of the female punk rock band Pussy Riot.

The motive is blatantly political, Russian dissidents claim, commenting on the decision made last week by a Moscow court to prolong the detention of three members of the band, known for its ‘guerrilla performances’ staged with colourful balaclavas, miniskirts and leggings. The three were arrested in early March for organizing a singing protest against Putin in a cathedral.

The ruling was met with new protests. In front of the courthouse over 200 social activists, artists and supporters of the rock group gathered, handing out coloured balloons to bystanders and chanting “Freedom, Freedom.” Scuffles broke out and police arrested over 30 people.

Maria Alyokhina, Yakaterina Samutsevich and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova have been charged with hooliganism for the performance staged by five members of the band on 21 February in front of the main altar of Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral.

On that day, a couple of weeks before the general election which ended with a controversial victory for Putin, five members of Pussy Riot burst into the cathedral to stage a punk prayer, singing “Holy Mary get rid of Putin.”

The three accused women have admitted to being members of the band, but they deny having taken part in the act at the cathedral.

The performance offended Russian Orthodox believers and stirred animosity throughout Russia, igniting a debate on church-state relations and turning Pussy Riot into a symbol of dissent, not only against what many believe to be undemocratic policies of the Kremlin, but also against the Russian Orthodox Church, perceived as too compliant towards the government.

Formally , church and state are separate under Russia’s constitution but, after the end of Communist rule, the church was granted an implicit moral authority over society at large. And recently, church representatives have called for tighter controls on TV programming and for the banning of supposedly morally corrupting books such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

Pussy Riot в храме христа спасителя from Profile Russia on Vimeo.

Commenting on Putin’s election to a third term as president, the church Patriarch, Kirill, said it was a “miracle of God.”

Kirill also said that that Alyokhina, Samutsevich and Tolokonnikova deserved to be prosecuted for their “blasphemous” performance. He added that the Pussy Riot performance in the cathedral –which was recorded on video and went viral on the Internet– was an act of desecration and he invited believers to unite in prayer this Sunday “in defence of the faith.”

An aid to the patriarch defined Pussy Riot’s performance in the cathedral as a “crime worse than murder.”

Thousands of believers have nonetheless signed a petition urging the church to forgive the band.

The arrest of the three women, who are in their twenties and have young children, has also been at the centre of an international campaign in their favour.
Last week, American, punk rock star Kathleen Hanna posted a video on the Internet inviting artists, intellectuals and human rights activists from all countries to show their solidarity by calling a day of worldwide protests.

Supporters of the group stress that Pussy Riot is not a defined entity but an amorphous ensemble with a dozen core members and occasional affiliates who share the same passion for rock music and political, anti-establishment activism.
The recent Tagansky court ruling orders the accused to stay in jail until 24 June. No date has been set yet for their trial. If found guilty, the three women face up to seven years in prison.

Amnesty International has called on the Russian government to free Alyokhina, Sumetsevich and Tolokonnikova, defining them as “prisoners of conscience.”
“Pussy Riot is really very much like Mikhail Khodorkovsky,” Mark Feygin, who serves on the group’s legal team, told Bloomberg Businessweek. Like the former Yukos chief, imprisoned for defying the Kremlin, Pussy Riot was inherently destabilizing, Feygin insisted, defining the punk rock group “a very powerful political symbol.”

“This is a political case,” Samutsevich told journalists in the packed courtroom. “It is clear that Russia has now decided to crack down on all opposition activists,” she said before the ruling.

Alyokhina agreed that the Pussy Riot case is politically motivated. She complained of not having yet been allowed to contact her family, not even her young son, and stated that her case should remind Russians of the so called “show trials” under Josef Stalin in the late 1930s against anti-communist dissidents. “If for criticising the authorities I can’t even hear the voice of my own child, welcome to 1937,” she said.

After complaining about not receiving any medical care in jail, despite her chronic headaches, Tolokonnikova told reporters that she is now reading First Circle, a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn about the Soviet gulag system.

Tolokonnikova is also a member of a dissident art group called “War.” In 2008, with members of this group, she participated in a “fertility rite,” which entailed some nudity and had been organised by philosophy students at Moscow State University as a protest against newly-elected President Dmitry Medvedev, who chose Putin as his prime minister.

International commentators have often pointed out that back then, Putin, who after two terms in office was ineligible to run again for the presidency, used Medvedev’s election to allow him to keep running the country from behind the scenes as prime minister and then return to the Kremlin by winning this year’s presidential polls. Dissidents and international observers believe these were rigged.