Another day, another photo of Russian president Vladimir Putin riding a horse shirtless, wrestling a bear or scoring eight goals in an exhibition hockey game. Whether it’s an “off-the-books” invasion of the Ukraine or an unexplained 10 day vanishing act that had the world playing a bizarre, high stakes game of geopolitical Where’s Waldo over the past few months, the Russian President has been a continuous subject of front page news. But strangely enough, perhaps one of the most stark and illustrative controversies involving the second most powerful world leader isn’t a secret war or a public absence — it’s his enduring battle with an all girl punk rock band, the notorious group known as Pussy Riot.
A self-described “performance art collective” made up of 11 rotating members, Pussy Riot has been a thorn in the Kremlin’s side for more than half a decade. Springing up at random to perform disruptive pop-up concerts in front of famous, camera-ready sites such as the Cathedral of Christ The Savior or at the Olympics in Sochi, the group has gained an international following — and faced legal repercussions, physical abuse, even incarceration — for a catalogue of often-profane song lyrics espousing violent feminism, anarchism, and explicit, anti-Putin rhetoric.
Ben Mezrich, author of The Accidental Billionaires and Bringing Down the House, has annotated some of the lyrics in one of Pussy Riot’s more provocative numbers, “Kropotkin Vodka,” to help explain some of the more cryptic lines. In this song, it’s not just the Russian President the group takes aim at, but also the wealthy class of Russians who’ve benefitted from the country’s turbulent climb from socialism to its current form of robber baron capitalism.
Hot off the heels of the Oscar-winning The Social Network, which was based on his Facebook story, Mezrich’s new book, Once Upon A Time In Russia, lays bare this world of Russian billionaires known as the Oligarchs. Built from unprecedented first person accounts, Once Upon A Time In Russia is a true story of ambition, betrayal, murder, and the greatest accumulation of wealth in the history of the world. The book has also recently been optioned by Brett Ratner and is in development at Warners, soon to be a major motion picture.
“Kropotkin Vodka” by Pussy Riot
Кропоткин-водка
Оккупируй кухонной сковородкой город
Выйди с пылесосом, добейся оргазма
Соврати батальоны полицейских девиц
Менты голые радуются новой реформе
Пиздец сексистам ебаным путинистам!
Кропоткин-водка плещет в желудках
Тебе хорошо, а у кремлевских ублюдков
Восстание сортиров, отравление смертельно
Мигалки не помогут, Кеннеди встретит
Пиздец легавым ебаным начальникам!
Вроде поспала, день — снова угнетать,
Кастет в кармане, феминизм наточен
В Восточную Сибирь перенеси свой суп,
Чтобы райот стал достаточно груб
Пиздец сексистам ебаным путинистам!
Пиздец сексистам ебаным путинистам!
Пиздец сексистам ебаным путинистам!
“Kropotkin Vodka” (1) by Pussy Riot
Occupy the city with your frying pan (2)
Date your vacuum, it’ll make you cum
Turn those lady officers to lesbians
Uniforms off, writhing on reform (3)
Down with the fuckin’ sexist Putinists!
Kropotkin vodka fills your bellies
It warms you up, while the bastards in the Kremlin
Face a ghetto rebellion, a deadly venom
Their lights and sirens can’t help ‘em, they dead like Kennedy (4)
Down with the snitching fuckin’ bosses!
You been snoozing, but it’s their turn to lose
Brass knuckles on, sharp-edged feminism
Send that homemade soup shit to Siberia
So we can get our rude riot on
Down with the fuckin’ sexist Putinists!
Down with the fuckin’ sexist Putinists!
Down with the fuckin’ sexist Putinists!”
(1) Pyotr Kropotkin was a popular late-19th-century, early-20th-century anarchist whose work influenced the revolution that led to the fall of the Czars and the establishment of socialism. However, Kropotkin was as much against the authoritarianism of the Bolsheviks who took power as he was against the capitalism of the West. He believed that evolution was actually a process of cooperation, rather than competition — and that society should be striving toward a state of pure sharing and cooperation, without classes or leaders.
(2) Pussy Riot’s culturally specific brand of feminism is more than just a philosophy; it’s really a call to arms. The goal is revolution — feminism as an engine to spark political, cultural, and social reform. Pussy Riot’s guerrilla-style performances — faces masked by balaclavas, garbed in brightly colored dresses, springing up unannounced in high-profile public places — are meant to be assaults on the status quo, a challenge to authority. That, in essense, is their mission: if only for a moment, to occupy Moscow with a frying pan, to violently shake things up via revolutionized stereotypical female tropes.
(3) Taking the imagery even further — “turn those lady officers to lesbians” — the idea is for those stereotypical housewives to head out into the streets to combat authority with their very femininity. Frying pans and vacuum cleaners instead of torches and pitchforks, police officers won over to the cause through sex rather than violence, this isn’t your grandfather’s revolution; this is something very modern, feminist, and characteristically Pussy Riot.
(4) Wealthy and well-connected Russians are given (often officially, via government agencies) flashing blue lights known as migalki to circumvent traffic laws on everything from speeding through stop lights to going the wrong way down one-way streets. These migalki are a very visible, daily reminder of the wide separation between the haves and have-nots in modern Russian society, and a stark illustration of what an anarchist like Kropotkin would have described as the unfair, oppressive character shared by both Bolshevism and Capitalism. The lyrics imply that even these sorts of powerful, oppressive tools of the upper classes won’t protect them, any more than a presidential security team could protect Kennedy.
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Once Upon a Time in Russia: The Rise of the Oligarchs — A True Story of Ambition, Wealth, Betrayal, and Murder, by Ben Mezrich
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Cover photo image by Andrej Isakovic / Getty Images
