The Birth of Pussy Riot: Six Early Songs

Blog Post for “Putin’s Pissed Himself”

“In the song ‘Putin’s Pissed Himself,’ we are proposing a scenario of revolt [occurring] in Russia: to do this, we are suggesting that Russians occupy key places in the country and pursue political change. Be braver than the wetting-himself Putin and his security services. In this hot and exciting time when the political regime in Russia has been shaken and the [Time] Person of the Year was the Protester,1 anarchists, feminists, the LGBT, as well as liberals, the Madonna and Child, and all the saints have gathered together in ‘direct action.’

The song contains the line, ‘For our freedom and yours, I will punish them with a whip.’ We are reminiscing on the events of 1968 and the sit-down dissident protest in Red Square, after which those dissidents were tortured and sent to psychiatric hospitals, prisons, and into exile. Those same power structures that were under Brezhnev have stayed in power, they haven’t gone anywhere. Forms of authoritarianism, control, and state terror have changed, but the country is still run by those same security forces who have no issue with knocking out people’s teeth during an interrogation. Our phrase ‘Its patients are invited to accept conformity,’ refers to the measure of punishment that was used in the USSR, as well as to the fact that the authorities in Russia still treat their citizens as mentally ill and unable to make decisions on their own.”2 

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  1. “TIME’s 2011 Person of the Year is The Protester,” TIME, December 14, 2011, https://timemagazine.tumblr.com/post/14212577849/times-2011-person-of-the-year-is-the-protester.↵
  2. “Pank-vystuplenie na Lobnom meste Krasnoĭ ploshchadi ‘Putin Zassal.’”↵

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