For years the world saw Putin as almost a figure of fun – while in Russia he was already meting out brutality to dissidents and LGBTQ+ activists
Last night I saw Pussy Riot, on the London leg of their Riot Days European tour to raise money for a children’s hospital in Ukraine. Their producer, Alexander Cheparukhin, came on stage to introduce them. I guess he was about my age, I couldn’t be precise because I didn’t have my glasses. He vibed the sort of age, where you can’t see things without glasses. He described how he met Maria Alyokhina (who also goes by Masha Alekhina), one of the founding members of the band who was first imprisoned in 2012 and then under constant surveillance, harassment, house arrest, arrest-arrest and persecution, until she escaped from Russia to Iceland earlier this year. When her sentence was handed down 10 years ago, he said, it was the first time in his life he had witnessed the political imprisonment of artists.
This was a useful bit of context, or rather, a glass of cold water to the face, after years of somnambulance: no one is laughing at Vladimir Putin now, of course, but for years, he was almost a figure of fun, with his bare-chested, horse-riding photoshoots and florid turn of phrase. On the world stage, he was the uncle who might say dodgy things, but got invited anyway: what was the worst that could happen? This indulgent, pretty feckless view of Putin was overlaid by the sense that Russia merely did things differently; perhaps the state was a bit thin-skinned and hotheaded, maybe it didn’t prioritise human rights as much as one would like, but this was a cultural thing, probably related to the weather. If we had maybe expressed that view out loud more often, Russian citizens could have said: “No, actually, punk bands sentenced to hard labour for protest actions is very much a now thing, rather than an always thing.”
