“I wonder who the experts are”: Who Helps to Keep Pussy Riot in Jail?

By Innokenty Grekov

Three members of the female punk band Pussy Riot remain in pretrial detention for staging a nonviolent protest against Vladimir Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow’s main cathedral. They were originally charged with “hooliganism” (punishable by up to 7 years in prison), but they could be penalized further if they are found guilty of “inciting hatred” toward Christians.

This scheme has worked well in the past: Russian authorities use anti-extremism laws to suppress civic dissenters, religious groups, and artists. The growing mountain of cases often rely on the testimony of “independent” experts who are recruited to determine whether the accused tried to incite hatred through words or actions. These subjective testimonies—often misleading and full of blunders—carry a lot of weight. A regional court in Orenburg issued a federal ban on 65 Islamic publications without consulting an expert affiliated with a Muslim group or even a religious scholar.

“I wonder who the judges are” is an oft-quoted phrase from Alexander Griboedov’s classic Woe from Wit. It’s too early for a final verdict in the Pussy Riot case, so for now let us consider the experts. They include three esteemed professors—Vsevolod Troitsky, Vera Abramenkova, and Igor Ponkin—who scrutinized the video clip of Pussy Riot’s “Punk Prayer” through “psychological, linguistic, and judicial-linguistic” lenses and concluded that the accused had indeed conspired to violate public norms and showed considerable contempt for the society overall and religious believers in particular, and that their motive was religious hatred.

Here is how these three particular experts testified in past cases, all related to the problem of misuse of anti-extremism laws in Russia:

• “The Jurist” Igor Ponkin. In 2008, Igor Ponkin’s expert opinion (written jointly) about an episode of South Park (“Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo”) almost resulted in the show’s banning in Russia. While resisting Parker & Stone’s coercive influence in Russia, Dr. Ponkin at about the same time authored a federal bill aimed at “curbing dangerous trends” in the sphere of spiritual and ethical education by targeting emo, goth, and skinhead (all lumped together) subcultures through heavy website regulation and the banning of fashion attributes from schools and government buildings. Professor Ponkin made headlines by referring to emos as “dangerous to society” and a “threat to national stability.” The bill went nowhere, but Dr. Ponkin’s interest in extremism lives on, evidenced by his 2011 article championing the decision to prosecute Yuri Samodurov and Andrei Yerofeyev, who were fined but not imprisoned for organizing a contemporary art show. He is also a prominent critic of the European Court’s interpretation of Church-State relations, which according to him is a double standard that leads to unlawful interference in internal affairs of the Church and inevitable violations of freedom of religion.
• “The Psychologist” Vera Abramenkova. Yuri Samodurov went through not one but two trials for extremism in Russia, and Vera Abramenkova played a role in the first verdict against the executive director of the Sakharov Center for his role in organizing the 2003 “Caution, Religion” exhibition. A psychologist, Dr. Abramenkova aided the prosecutors by testifying that “the sacrilegious comparison of a sanctity and a mass product, of the high and the low, contains a provocation, and causes reciprocal hostile actions on the part of the recipient, the development of affective reactions, and aggressive and intolerant relations between individuals and social groups on the grounds of their religious beliefs.” In 2007, Abramenkova—together with Igor Ponkin— contributed to a collection of essays titled “Gay-parade as an element of the globalism of militant immorality.” The publication’s main goal was to demonstrate the illegal nature of “imposing homosexuality” in Russia and to justify the banning of gay pride parades in Russia’s major cities. Although in 2010 the European Court for Human Rights issued a verdict proclaiming 164 such bans illegal, the authorities in Moscow recently announced that the capital won’t see a march for another 100 years.
• “The Linguist” Vsevolod Troitsky. Professor Troitsky’s name and expert knowledge of “religious sects” is well-known to Russia’s Jehovah’s Witnesses. Ten years ago, when state pressure on the Jehovah’s Witnesses began to increase, the believers argued against including Vsevolod Troitsky in the list of experts chosen to “investigate” their literature for signs of incitement of ethnic or religious discord. The lawyers cited Troitsky’s writings, in which he stated that the Jehovah’s Witness activity was “aimed at disconnecting Russians’ feelings of civil attachment, is of a destructive nature, and objectively works towards the destruction of the national and state security of Russia, and should be officially banned.”

“My! I see familiar faces!” is another celebrated phrase from Griboedov’s comedy. There can be no question about their bias against the accused punk artists. Russia should stop playing games and release Pussy Riot immediately before proceeding to making significant alterations in the country’s strategy for combating extremism, in which the experts are often a bigger problem than the accused.