I’m watching a BBC documentary about the arrest and trial of Pussy Riot in Moscow.
There seems to be a very ‘un-holy’ co-incidence of interest between Putin and the Russian Church.
Are they both feeling that threatened that a public trial, which reminds me of earlier times, is the best approach to establish confidence with the more than 50% of Russia’s population who are female.
Sorry if this is an obvious question, I’m astonished, shocked and embarrassed that I assumed Russia had moved out of it’s Medieval Viking background.
Shame, shame and shame again.
P
I should add, of course that I don’t actually live in London. Iowa or maybe Nebraska, anywhere the FSB can’t find me…
P
They broke the law. They got punished. What’s the problem?
The law.
Interrupting a church service should be legal, in your opinion?
Did you know that the Moscow Kremlin (is there more than one lol) has a chapel for prayer and that it is just down the hall from President (or is it Premier) Putin’s office is located?
Not only that, but Putin himself has been seen walking down to the chapel and seen coming out of same chapel … interesting, no?
Me and my big mouth … now I will have to go find a cite.
What is it that you find so interesting about it?
See also Russia’s bullshit laws against “homosexual propaganda”.
Leaving aside the rest of this thread, “kremlin” is, IIRC, just the word for “fortress.” Of course, if you capitalize it it’s pretty clear which one you’re talking about, but most large cities of sufficient age would have one.
False question.
No service was interrupted. Their video was recorded at a time when the building was empty.
A charge of disturbing the peace with a sentence of a few hundred rubles or thirty days in jail would not have been a problem.
Charging them with blasphemous acts using a law that was written after their performance to condemn them, holding them without bail for several months, giving them one week to prepare a defense against a charge that had been created specifically for their actions, and sentencing them to two years in jail for an action that hurt no one is a serious problem.
Cite, on both of these claims? I.e. no on-going church service, and an empty building.
I have searched around, and have found references to everything from an ongoing “church service” (in The Spectator, here) to an “almost empty church” (in The New Yorker, here).
Nowhere have I read that the church was “empty”, as you claim.
I won’t quibble over “empty” vs “nearly empty.” If there were a half dozen people scattered around the church, praying, that qualifies as “empty” when I visit a church and it still contradicts your claim that they were interrupting services. The “interrupted a service” narrative is from a blog, not a news service. The actual video shows no priests or acolytes in the sanctuary as there would have been during a service.
I also note that you are dodging the issue that they were charged for an invented crime, that they were held without bail for months, that their sentence was much longer than any reasonable sentence for disturbing the peace would have been, and that it included being prevented from seeing their families–a practice that is not even imposed on murderers and rapists.
Yes. In fact, there are many kremlins. A kremlin is basically a fortified city center.
In post-soviet russia, church organ play you.
It seems as though Russia’s new order is tentatively rediscovering the despotic joys of having church and state in the same bed.
No no no, on this issue I absolutely agree with you. I will admit that this aspect was news to me, so thanks for the ignorance-fightin’.
It seems that we agree that a) they did indeed commit a crime, as well as b) therefore deserve punishment. For disturbing the peace, as you mentioned in an earlier post.
The OP, however, seems to be upset about them getting arrested and tried in the first place, as if no crime was committed at all.
There is, and it’s bad news for everybody other than the Russian government and the Russian Orthodox Church.
I’m pretty sure the Vikings were not Russian.
And you have no problem that the law they were charged with breaking was written after they supposedly broke it?
See my previous post, where I agree that it’s fucked up that they got charged with a new, “invented”, crime - an aspect of the case I admitted was new to me.
One would assume that Russia already had some kind of “disturbing the peace” law before the Pussy Riot thing happened, under which screaming and shouting in a church (not to mention staging an orgy in a museum, as at least one Pussy Riot gal did during an earlier action), would and (IMHO) should still be a crime.
Until now, I was under the impression that it was under such a law, already in place at the time, that they were charged. Clearly I was wrong about that. Ignorance fought.