Many people called on the head of the Church, Patriarch Kirill, or the official Church bodies to ask the state to show mercy and release the women, but instead Patriarch Kirill described them as doing the work of Satan and said they should be punished in full accordance with the law.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/plight-of-punk-rockers-turns-russians-against-the-church-7619191.html

“Nor is the Orthodox Church in Russia simply an extension of the Russian state.”

Samutsevich reminds us that Putin’s former KGB colleague Kirill Gundyaev is now head of the Russian Orthodox Church, and that with the advent of his tenure, Christ the Savior Cathedral is now a regular site for political theater featuring Russian security services.  Explain.

“Is Russia an oligarchy?  Of course it is.  So are most ‘democratic’ states on the rest of the planet.”

And your point is what?

“And let’s not pretend that the ‘opposition’ in Russia or elsewhere are blameless angels…”

Again — your point?  What is the bearing on the Pussy Riot trial?

“The brou-ha-ha over Pussy Riot…”

Oh yes — that’s *really* neutral language.  When they get out in seven years, say to the faces of these women, their children, and their families that it was just a brou-ha-ha.

You’re barking up the wrong tree throughout.

Free the Pussy Riot 3!

That said, the Church in question as an institution is exactly where it was for the last 400 years, a leech on the government’s body. It had ample opportunity to rethink itself, and it’s just not happening. Not while there are money to be had.

Putin is not the devil; Russia is not some disguised Soviet Union secretly longing to dominate the planet and send everyone to the gulags. Nor is the Orthodox Church in Russia simply an extension of the Russian state. Look, as an Orthodox Christian and as a left-libertarian, I don’t particularly care for Vladmir Putin, the Russian state, or the Russian Church’s too-close relationship with the state. The proper course for the Church would have been to graciously forgive Pussy Riot for their political stunt and to use the situation as an opportunity to critically think through the Church’s place in wider society and especially vis-a-vis the state. That said, what has transpired is in no way equivalent with the actions of, say, the Soviet state, nor is it particularly exceptional in the world of modern late-capitalist nation states. Is Russia an oligarchy? Of course it is. So are most ‘democratic’ states in the rest of the planet. And let’s not pretend that the ‘opposition’ in Russia or elsewhere are blameless angels; as with many of the much-vaunted ‘color revolutions’ of the last decade, the replacement of one oligarchy with another is just as likely in the case of Russia as elsewhere.

I hope that Russians, like people elsewhere, will in time shake off statist domination and forge a more just, more liberatory society. However, the brou-ha-ha over Pussy Riot has tended towards an unfair singling out of Russia and Putin as somehow exceptionally evil and terrible, and plays all too well into a general tendency in the West to demonize and marginalize Russia as the ‘bad guys’ on the world stage, standing in the way of the US and friends spreading friendly democracy and liberal values, etc. Surely there must be a way of critiquing Russian state policy without veering off into such demonization and exceptionalizing.

Russia is ruled by postmodernist artists.

Why all the punks of the world are so serious?

Nobody seems to get the double metaphor.

And now even boing boing is falling into the trap set by dramaturges from Kremlin.

Girls trolled the judicial system, now the judicial system is trolling them.

LOL

God forbid these kids get political.

now all we need is a motive.