Pussy Riot

“Freedom is when you forget the name of the tyrant.”

—Joseph Brodsky, 1975

take heed to yourselves

incitement of religious hatred.

feel such affinity

the plight of civil right

For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened

Another element of this framework is becoming aware of how this government functions as a performance, a play. While in reality, it turns into chaos

This experience is especially traumatizing given the overall punitive tendency of the environment and the absence of any real psychological assistance. All interactions are based on exploiting children’s feelings of fear and forcing them into submission. And as a result, their own cruelty increases many times over. Many children there are illiterate, but no one makes any effort to battle this—to the contrary, every last drop of motivation for personal development is discouraged. The individual closes off entirely and loses faith in the world.

I have personal experience with psychiatric clinics for minors. And I can say with conviction that any teenager who shows any signs of active nonconformity can end up in such a place. A certain percentage of the kids there are from orphanages. In our country, it’s considered entirely normal to commit a child to a psychiatric clinic who has tried to escape from an orphanage. And they treat them using extremely powerful sedatives like Aminazin, which was also used to subdue Soviet dissidents in the 1970s.

And it is interesting that our situation was depersonalized from the start. This is because when we talk about Putin, we have in mind first and foremost not Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, but Putin the System that he himself created—the vertical power, where all control is carried out effectively by one person. And that vertical power is uninterested, completely uninterested in the opinion of the masses. And what worries me most of all is that the opinion of the younger generations is not taken into consideration. We believe that the ineffectiveness of this administration is evident in practically everything.