What Pussy Riot teaches us
By Olga Oliker, Special to CNN
Olga Oliker is a senior international policy analyst at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation.
"The international outcry to free Pussy Riot was no doubt driven in part by the fact that artists with a political message are part of a long tradition globally and in Russia itself. Artists and musicians were also appalled by what seems an unduly harsh response to Pussy Riot's behavior (offensive though it may have been). Thus, the anger over Pussy Riot’s jailing hinged on two factors: free speech and excessive punishment.
This all but ignored the broader protest movement, in which tens of thousands of urban middle class Russians took to the streets to voice their frustration with a lack of representative, accountable government. With Putin back as president, the state has pushed back on these activities, arresting protesters and threatening or pressing criminal charges against prominent activists and their supporters. In the meantime, the movement itself has had difficulty gelling, lacking either clear leadership or a solid platform with appeal to large numbers of Russians.
The Pussy Riot phenomenon would seem to present an opportunity to draw more global attention to Russia’s opposition, help it develop a cohesive agenda, and perhaps channel foreign support toward efforts to make Russia as a whole freer. But this hasn’t happened.
The Russian opposition – along with much of Russian society – finds Pussy Riot’s language, tactics and overt championing of feminism and gay rights too extreme. The group’s foreign supporters, for their part, know little about Russia’s political and social context. The result was a focus in Russia and abroad on the women themselves and leniency towards them, not their message or that of the opposition as a whole."
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