The 2012 trial of Russian punk band Pussy Riot was a scandalous case of censorship dressed up as preventing offense. Claims that US campus protests over Gaza represent “faith-based harassment” are doing the same thing.
A police officer guards members of the punk band Pussy Riot sitting in a glass-walled cage in a court in Moscow, on October 10, 2012. (Natalia Kolesnikova / AFP via Getty Images)
Three women sit before their country’s highest deliberative body, on trial for incitement of hatred against a religious group. Their statements, which rigorously distinguish political speech from criminal harassment, earn widespread condemnation from liberal and conservative commentators alike. In the eyes of the federal government and the court of public opinion, these women have crossed an unspoken boundary on acceptable political discourse. Calls for their public punishment abound.
One would be forgiven for confusing this scenario with the 2012 trial of Russian punk band Pussy Riot. In fact, I’m referring to the recent Congressional hearings on antisemitism at college campuses, which began on December 5, 2023, in Washington, DC. University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill and Harvard University president Claudine Gay resigned after backlash to their testimony, while the leaders of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University also faced immense pressure to step down. While the state-sanctioned cases against Pussy Riot and the Ivy League presidents differ vastly in context, content, and consequences, they rely upon the same tactic: invoking accusations of religious intolerance, faith-based harassment, and faith-based animus as a reason to censor political speech. The repercussions of the Pussy Riot trial in Russia should give all Americans pause as they consider the appropriate tools, and actors, to combat hate speech.
Fighting Words
While the prosecution of Pussy Riot struck many Western observers as a cynical show trial, the charges against them reflect a rather conventional interpretation of free-speech limitations in the Russian context. On February 21, 2012, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich disrupted services in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior to sing the following lyrics from their song “Punk Prayer:”
Black robe, golden epaulettes
All parishioners crawl to bow
The phantom of liberty is in heaven
Gay pride sent to Siberia in chains
The head of the KGB, their chief saint,
Leads protesters to prison under escort
In order not to offend His Holiness
Women must give birth and love
Shit, shit, the shit of God!
Shit, shit, the shit of God!
They were apprehended before reaching the second verse and chorus, which contained more explicit denunciations of President Vladimir Putin. For this protest performance, the three women faced criminal charges of “disruption to the social order . . . motivated by religious hatred or enmity.” Patriarch Kirill of Moscow asserted that “Nadia has a plan . . . to destroy church and state,” while a commentator for state television declared that “a sin must be called a sin, not a political act.” Aliokhina’s explanation that “God’s shit” referred to the relationship between church and state, rather than religion itself, resonated with an international audience. However, Putin’s argument that “we must protect the feelings of believers” reflected the dominant response in Russia.
In both Russia and the West, the apparently simple notion of free speech becomes complicated when it clashes with religious freedom. Soviet history helps clarify the rationale for prosecuting anti-Orthodox political statements as hate crimes. In an English-language interview for Russia Today, which touched on the events, Putin cited the communists’ persecution of Orthodox believers to justify the punishment of Pussy Riot. Although the idea that punk singers could destroy the Orthodox Church seems ludicrous, the memory of Bolshevik radicals suppressing religion remains fresh for many devout Russians. The prosecution reasoned that “one may not spit at another or poke a person in the eye. One may not insult those who have different beliefs.” This argument invokes the “fighting words” restriction on statements that, “by their very utterance, inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.” Do the location and choreography of Pussy Riot’s song “Punk Prayer” qualify the lyrics as “fighting words”? American courts have historically protected similar protests, but powerful organizations across the political spectrum seek to censor speech that disrupts religious worship. The Anti-Defamation League claims that a 2023 anti-Israel march in St. Louis, which led protesters by a synagogue, infringed “on the right of Jewish people to pray without harassment.” This logic echoes the Russian prosecution’s argument that Pussy Riot had deprived worshippers “of their dignity” and freedom to pray in peace.
Moreover, the Russian government employed its doctrine of “sovereign democracy” to sacralize the state and deny the political nature of “Punk Prayer.” Putin’s party, United Russia, developed the concept of sovereign democracy in 2006 to restrict viewpoints and actors that ostensibly threatened Russian sovereignty. The ruling elite has cynically interpreted this notion to imply that a stable dictatorship reflects the will of the narod, or common folk. However, the basic logic of sovereign democracy can be compatible with democratic principles. In his influential 2006 speech at a United Russia rally, Kremlin ideologist Vladislav Surkov attacked a variety of perceived threats to Russian sovereignty: Western cultural imperialism, military patronage networks such as NATO, and economic globalization. He proclaimed that these forces imperil Russian values, norms, and traditions, which largely derive from Orthodox Christianity. Fundamentally, Surkov argued that certain issues are too important to be left to democracy — an idea with surprising sway in liberal democracies themselves. The Senate, the Electoral College, the Bill of Rights, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — these measures and countless others attempted to limit the influence of foreign agents, white supremacists, populous states, communists, and similar groups that could threaten “liberal values” by winning democratic elections.
The trial of Pussy Riot illustrates the danger of the sovereign democracy doctrine, especially when the state locates its sovereignty in organized religion. In an essay on the Pussy Riot affair, anthropologist Anya Bernstein documents the state’s efforts to strip “Punk Prayer” of its political message. She links Putin’s claim that Pussy Riot threatened the “moral health of our society” to the trial judge’s statement that “Punk Prayer” did not count as political speech because no politicians’ names were uttered in the church. Bernstein argues that the prosecution employed Orthodox notions of heresy or blasphemy in their case against the band — as she points out, Putin himself declared criticism of the Orthodox Church an offense against the Russian state. The state prosecutors recast Pussy Riot’s political performance into an apolitical desecration of sacred space. By imprisoning the performers, the government restricted its notion of “politics” to the official actions of elected politicians, excluding gender, religion, or any other social issues.
The government response to anti-Israel speech at American universities bears troubling resemblances to the prosecution of Pussy Riot. In particular, members of Congress have repeatedly equated anti-Zionism with antisemitism and mischaracterized the constitutional limits on free speech, both during and after the December 5 hearings. In her questioning, Representative Elise Stefanik linked chants of “intifada” (Arabic for “uprising”) to calls for “genocide,” which implicitly equated the two and potentially led to the university presidents’ confused responses. Presidents Magill, Gay, and Kornbluth all maintained that calls to “genocide” only rise to the level of harassment in certain contexts, which earned the ire of Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike. Among many others who criticized the “unacceptable” statements, Democratic senator John Fetterman remarked, “it isn’t ‘free speech,’ it’s simply hate speech.” However, legal doctrine on the First Amendment supports the university leaders’ emphasis on context. For speech to become incitement, the plaintiff must prove a direct connection between statements and (potential) violence; for speech to qualify as harassment, it must be directed at specific individuals with the intent to bully, threaten, or infringe on a protected activity such as worship. Otherwise male chauvinists could successfully sue Pussy Riot for the song “Kill the Sexist!” because its lyrics endorse violence.
Official Censure
Since December 5, the federal government has pressured private universities to censor political speech well beyond restrictions in the Constitution. The House of Representatives passed a resolution on December 13 that stated, “President Magill has resigned, and the other Presidents should follow suit.” Federal elected officials have repeatedly called on university leaders to arrest and punish student protesters, with Speaker Mike Johnson even demanding the deployment of the National Guard. Although less direct than the Russian model, Congress’s use of investigations, public hearings, and the leverage of funding to achieve its aim counts as state censorship nonetheless. Why does censorship at private, Ivy League universities pose a threat to free speech more broadly? First, academic freedom translates the abstract ideal of free speech into societal practice by providing a relatively open and democratic forum for different viewpoints. Second, pro-Palestinian protesters on campus already risk being doxxed and blacklisted from future academic or professional endeavors. Official censure from the university, which impacts students’ educational disciplinary records, immigration status, and access to on-campus housing, has a chilling effect on speech.
Even before the new year, developments within the University of Pennsylvania administration painted a grim picture of the censorship to come. The New York Times has chronicled the monthslong effort of Zionist billionaire Marc Rowan to oust president Magill and board chairman Scott L. Bok. Following their ouster, the Washington Post published a column by Claire Finkelstein, law professor and member of the school’s Open Expression Committee, entitled “To fight antisemitism on campuses, we must restrict speech.” Finkelstein asserts that “calls for genocide against Jews — or even proxies for such sentiments, such as calling for intifada against Jews or the elimination of Israel by chanting ‘from the river to the sea’ — are, in the present context, calls for violence against a discrete ethnic or religious group.” Her claim that “such speech arguably incites violence” mischaracterizes the several decades of legal precedent on the “fighting words” doctrine. More alarmingly, her proposed ban of “proxies” for genocidal statements dangerously conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism. The chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” calls for the end of a Jewish-majority ethnostate, but the phrase makes no mention of the type of state that should come in its place. By characterizing this chant as an endorsement of genocide, Finkelstein suggests that Palestinians are incapable of living in a multicultural democracy.
Finkelstein’s essay underscores the Israeli sovereign democracy doctrine that limits criticism of Zionism. In her final trial statement, Pussy Riot member Yekaterina Samsutevich declared, “Orthodox culture does not belong solely to the Patriarch.” The state proved her right in one important sense: the imprisonment of Pussy Riot demonstrated that Orthodox culture belongs to the Patriarch and the Kremlin, but not to the people. The Israeli government, which has appropriated Jewish religious symbols into its national iconography, makes a similarly broad claim over Jewish culture. Israel equates rejection of a Jewish state with hostility toward Jews and their right to exist. Whereas Russia censors domestic criticism of the relationship between church and state, Israel manages to restrict speech abroad as well. The trial of Pussy Riot clearly illustrates the danger posed by any ethnoreligious regime that seeks to control the bounds of political discourse.