| Abstract: | The performance put on by the feminist punk group Pussy Riot in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior (CCS) in Moscow is rightly considered a major event in the international protest movement of 2012. The Pussy Riot case became a litmus test for liberalism and for the schisms in Russian society, raising a wave of irreconcilable criticism from the radically inclined pro-Putin majority, including politicians, the clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church, and journalists. A central theme in the criticism directed against Pussy Riot was anti-Western rhetoric. Asserting that the West supported Pussy Riot's actions, the critics portrayed the performance as an attack on the authority of the Russian Orthodox Church and on Russian statehood. In the ideological components of the anti-Western campaign against this punk group, a parallel emerges between the Pussy Riot case and the Beilis trial held a hundred years earlier in terms of social antagonism and the appraisal of liberal values. Whereas Beilis's acquittal on the eve of World War I marked a tendency toward the establishment of democracy in Russia at that time, the conviction in the Pussy Riot case was a triumph for antidemocratic and anti-Western values, showing that contemporary Russia has completed its transition to an authoritarian regime. |
