My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Riot Days is a memoir by Maria, “Masha”, Alyokhina, one of the founding members of the Russian feminist protest punk band P*ssy Riot. Its subject the events following the band’s anti-Putin Demonstration in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral in 2012, to the arrest and then imprisonment in Russian penal colonies.
The arrested members of the band were charged with “Hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” because the prosecutor made the case that the use of the words “Holy Shit” in the song was an attempt to insult to all of Christianity.
Obviously the pun was lost in translation.
For 30 seconds of a song Masha and her band mates were each sentenced to two years in penal colonies.
The book takes you through the court case, it’s wonderfully presented as there are excerpts from the court transcript showing just how much of a farce their case was, or perhaps the entire Russian legal system where government opposition is concerned. Whether that’s the leaps of logic the prosecution make to charge them with more than just trespassing, or the blatant disregard from the Judge and guards.
The majority of the book concerns the penal sentence and the dire conditions, including being put in to solitary confinement with no books, barely a mattress, and just a hole in the floor to take care of your business. As well as the daily humiliations and verbal abuse from the guards, tantamount to emotional torture when prisoners were denied theirs letters, phone calls, or visitations.
The penal colony, the day to day regime, the so called “rehabilitation”, reminded me a lot of the Red Centre in the Handmaid’s Tale – telling the girls they were either worthless or their only proper place was at home making Borsch.
Actually a lot of it reminded me of the Handmaid’s Tale
I found it incredibly ironic that the reaction from the Putin regime – let’s face it, they were the ones controlling the situation – was to be draconian, Soviet even, and put the girls in prison for a long time to silence their protest, to bend them in to submission. However, the result was that not only did P*ssy Riot become internationally known for their protest, but they continued to protest and defy the regime of the prison systems to fight for the human rights of their fellow prisoners.
It’s a very candid account of what it means to be a part of the resistance in Putin’s Russia. It’s also a wakeup call to rest of us; not just to the extent of the police state and authoritarianism under Putin, but that this should no way to be admired or aspired to, especially not by Western leaders. But equally it a warning to populations who hunker down in their own ignorance to elect such leaders and parties, or blithely accepting what is presented on pro-party news outlets to maintain the fiction these regimes create.
Between the subject material and the Russian writing style it could have been heavy and dry, with very wordy prose, but Masha kept the sentences short and simple, and created a wonderfully accessible narrative while maintaining a good pace and tone.
It’s laid out in short bursts of paragraphs, somewhere between diary entries and the transcript of a vlog. It feels very appropriate as a memory piece, rather makes me wonder whether Masha dictated the text rather than writing. I admit to start with it felt a little disjointed to read but once you get in to the momentum you find a certain kind of poetry in her style.
It’s not all doom and gloom, there is inspiration, a rallying call, for protest and for what can be achieved through persistence in the face of popularism.
I think it’s an important read for anyone who considers themselves part of a resistance, whether #MarchForOurLives, or the Time’s Up / #MeToo movements, or any anti-austerity bodies in the UK. Just to pick up a line;
“Revolution is a story. If we fell out of it, disappeared, it would be their story, not ours.”
That was in reference to the choice not to leave Russia or hide in the countryside, but I think it appeals to all of us not to think our job is done after one protest. That there needs to be persistence, that no government can be allowed to have behaviours unchecked, regardless of what the consequences might be for the protester.
I received a copy of this ebook courtesy of NetGalley
The Curvy Bookcase 