ABSTRACT

The minute-long performance by five colourfully dressed girls in balaclavas on 21 February 2012 in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour triggered one of the most notorious and politically accentuated debates in post-Soviet Russia. Members of the Pussy Riot group, which was little-known at that time, danced and 'prayed' at the most sacred site of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), the soleas and ambon, thus ignoring the taboo on access to those areas and evoking awe among other visitors. This chapter addresses the cultural mechanisms of post-Soviet protest art as exemplified by the Pussy Riot affair. It argues that the reaction of the Kremlin to the actionist art of Pussy Riot was an attempt to adjudicate on a religion-based case in political terms that can be understood as the state's politics of 'sacralization' of the religious space based on 'tabooing' it from public activity.