The performance of Pussy Riot and its repression represent the deep political challenge of post communist authoritarianism and its progressive – transgressive alternatives. This is the first of two posts by Kitlinski that have great significance for Eastern Europe and beyond. -Jeff

Don’t let Putin fool you. Banishing Pussy Riot to a penal colony allowed the Russian leader to reassert his rule. Democracy be damned. Civil rights, religious freedom, and gender equality from herein would be subject to his purview. The ex-KGB officer’s message wasn’t just aimed at Russia. It was directed at all of Eastern Europe, too.

For anyone familiar with the history of regional politics, Putin’s positioning was thick with signifiers. Pussy Riot’s sentencing would please fellow reactionaries, obviously, as well as help serve as a salve for social distress. It also confirmed that the post-Communist period was formally over. Authoritarian capitalism is the rule of the day. There’s no alternative.

The political transition in post-Communist countries has turned majoritarian, as ex-Soviet bloc states start to formalize discrimination against pro-democracy forces.  Curiously, this reaction, of what can only be described as the ancien regime, both Stalinist, and its antecedents, focuses on sexual dissidence, to broadcast its worldview.  In the Ukraine, it’s Femen. In my own home, Poland, it’s Dorota Nieznalska, an artist who was convicted of blasphemy.

It’s a familiar story, one that Pussy Riot’s Nadia Tolokonnikova was quick to point out, when, in her closing statement, she compared her band’s fate to the trial of Socrates, and the kenosis of Christ. Jesus was “raving mad,” she reminded her religiously observant tormentors. “If the authorities, tsars, presidents, prime ministers, the people and judges understood what ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’ meant, they would not put the innocent on trial.” Tolokonnikov also cited the prophet Hosea, in the Hebrew Bible: “For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice.” Surely, the authorities were not thrilled.

Pussy Riot’s choice of Jewish scripture is of course telling, as well as calculated. The prophets argue for forgiveness (Hosea forgave his unfaithful wife) and for social justice. Tolstoy, ultrademocratic, anarchist and religious, was also in conflict with the same Orthodox Church (and excommunicated by it) that now condemns Pussy Riot. Dostoevsky similarly emphasized the importance of forgiveness in Crime and Punishment, when Raskolnikov receives it from a prostitute. Pussy Riot are obviously traditionalists.

The forces that have condemned Pussy Riot are not religious. They are secular, despite their Orthodox pretense. Pussy Riot, ironically, respond as Christians. They protest the emptiness of consumer culture, and the lack of forgiveness on the part of their persecutors. Thus, they appropriate the figure of the Virgin Mother, to criticize authoritarianism. “Mary is with us in protest! Mary, become a feminist!” the band screamed during its infamous cathedral performance.

As a Pole, I find the entire affair reminiscent of an attack on the previously mentioned Dorota Nieznalska, at a Gdansk gallery, where her seminal Passion installation was being exhibited in 2002. The work, an exploration of masculinity and suffering, shows a cross on which the photograph of a fragment of a naked male body, including the genitalia, has been placed.

Staged by members of the reactionary League of Polish Families, the political party sued the artist over the exhibit.  In July 2003, a court found Nieznalska guilty “offending religious feelings” and sentenced to half a year of “restricted freedom” (she was banned from leaving the country.) When the judge read her sentence, members of the League packed the courtroom and applauded ecstatically. It took six years, but Nieznalska’s conviction was eventually overturned in July 2009, on the grounds that her freedom of speech had been violated.

Nonetheless, Nieznalska  suffered inestimable damage as  consequence of her successful prosecution. For years, Polish galleries refused to show her work. It took curator Pawel Leszkowicz to rehabilitate her reputation, by featuring her sadomasochist works in the exhibitions Love and Democracy and the GK Collection, claiming she was working in the S&M tradition of renown Polish writer Bruno Schulz.

I could go on. My point is that misogyny is the biggest threat to Eastern Europe’s incomplete democracies, and that it’s been a problem across the region for a good while now, not just in Russia. Abortion, for example, is banned, and a number of cultural and economic constraints on women and queers alike exist. Female artists who deal with sexuality have been especially hard hit by censorship. Pussy Riot is just the best-known example.

If Pussy Riot is what it takes to wake the West up to this situation, and help us complete our transition to democracy, so be it. Until then, as it has been said, we are all Pussy Riot. I’m sure the ‘band’, as it were, would agree with me.

The post was originally published in ‘Souciant’ (August 23^rd, 2012) under the title “Pussy Riot in Polish.” Tomasz Kitlinski acknowledges the help of Joel Schalit, editorial director of Souciant, for his assistance in preparing the English text version.

Angry young Poles are protesting online and on the streets  in the biggest demonstrations since 1989. The pretext is the government’s signing of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which jeopardizes Internet freedom. But there are more reasons for our fury: a transition which has strengthened economic inequalities and lack of perspectives for the younger generation. As sociologist Adam Ostolski writes, “Life in Poland is getting harder, the privatization-by-stealth of health services and education is going on, the prices of municipal services and staple foods are rising. Poland is now the leading country in Europe in terms of non-permanent job contracts.” Hence social anger today. Are the protests changing into a civil society movement, a Solidarity 2.0? We hope that this defiant and militant mobilization will not exclude migrants and minorities. An optimistic sign is that alternative collectives (Rozbrat in Poznan and Tektura in Lublin) are at the forefront of these events where ordinary people in Poland are demanding their rights – at last.

Poland has transitioned from fake Communism (the unrealized Marxist ideal) to turbo capitalism-cum-fake Christianity, as a religion has been instrumentalized into political anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-foreigner hatred. The economic transformation is sold as a success story, but, in fact, the situation of many groups of the population has worsened. Social justice, an empty concept under East European “socialism,” has become a dirty phrase. It’s a taboo to pronounce it, let alone practice it. Poles have been Foucault’s docile bodies of commercialization and corporatization. Until today’s wrath.

Still, the political class here believes in discipline and profit – and prejudices.  The ACTA treaty was signed by the Polish government without social consultations. When the protests broke out, the first reaction of the leaders was to deny them. Later, head of the National Security Bureau, General Koziej, claimed that he wouldn’t exclude introducing emergency measures if the cyber attacks continued. When the Parliamentary Committee on Innovation was meeting to discuss ACTA, a Law and Justice (the rightist opposition party) lawmaker, Michal Suski, referred to black MP John Godson as a “little Negro” in another example of ugly racism in this country. Transphobia also occurred when MP Jan Dziedziczak called transgender parliamentarian Anna Grodzka “Pan”/“Mr”, a direct insult because she is a woman after having undergone transsexual surgery.

But some leading figures of public life have supported the protests. The legend of the Helsinki Foundation, Halina Bortnowska, and Poland’s first ombudsman, Ewa Letowska, said on Tok fm Radio that the government should listen to the protests. All across the country, in fifty cities and towns, mass demonstrations have taken place. In Cracow, 15,000, and in Poznan, 5,000 people took to the streets, convening in the medieval market square where anarchists were very active – Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper ran a lead article about the demo titled: “There hasn’t been such a demonstration in Poznan for years.”

At a rally in Lublin, an anarchist drum circle was attacked by the far righters with roots in Poland’s interwar anti-Semitism. Such extremist factions want to capitalize on the protests, but they are not at the heart of the events. Rather, it is Anonymous hacktivists and various leftist organizations who have taken hold. Originally, the Social Democratic Alliance was the only political party against ACTA, but now the self-styled “moral majority” Law and Justice party of Jaroslaw Kaczynski has attempted to co-opt this movement for its own designs. The MPs of the progressive Palikot Movement have now supported the protests, wearing the Guy Fawkes V masks in parliament, an international sign of dissent that is finally catching on in this country.

In fact, it is a popular movement – from below. A placard designed as a tombstone, “Liberty. Died Young 1989-2012,” attests to a failure of post-communist Poland. The determination of the protesters is evidenced in the strong language that has been used online and on the streets. In a demonstration in front of the newly-opened Warsaw’s National Stadium, a banner read: “Jestesmy wkurwieni”/“We’re fucking cross”/“We’re pissed off.”

Is this more than a fit of aggression? This is an open revolt, an expansion of action which had been at the margins of public life. Until now, Polish young people have expressed their social discontent in art as activism, the feminist and LGBT movement, and the Greens’ and Krytyka Polityczna milieu. Today, it is a societal protest against ACTA, but also against joblessness, low wages and rising costs. We also demand participation in democracy when the young feel powerless. Active civil society is awakening. Journalist Jacek Zakowski may have hyperbolized, “We are dealing with a historical change on a scale similar to the United States when slavery was abolished. Access to culture requires a similar emancipation.” Free expression in the Internet is indeed the young’s participation in culture – and in politics. The lack of debate on ACTA in Poland revealed an enormous gap between leadership and populace and what we called back then under real “socialism:” the arrogance of the authorities.

After 1989, the ideals of the dissident Workers’ Defense Committee and of the oppositionist theater movement were abandoned. What we want is broad social justice, self-organization of society (as in the anarchist streak in the pre-1989 opposition, diagnosed by David Ost). The aims in the anti-establishment alternative were participatory democracy, student movement, worker self-management, mutiny against marketization. Let’s continue this post-1968 pre-1989 anti-authoritarian project, as defined by Adam Michnik. As a transfer of power and wealth was made with the fall of “communism,” we lost social protection. Privatisation and commodification have alienated students and workers. The former Solidarity unionists have betrayed the labor issues and joined the economically liberal agenda and the morally illiberal one: an abortion ban and homophobia.

Solidarity has been destroyed by ultranationalism and, all in all, a majoritaritarian spirit. It has ignored or even denigrated minorities. This is where a dangerous concept was coined: “true Poles.”  A commentator has called the current protests “the most authentic citizens’ movement.” Citizens? Are minorities and migrants excluded again? The rising far right must not be part of the movement. We’ve had enough of business-suited skinheads in the leadership when the chauvinist League of Polish Families was in government.

The protests in Poland are a call to action. We all have a responsibility now. ACTA can restrict Internet openness, endanger generic pharmaceuticals and strengthen corporations – the unfair banality of post-modernism. And today’s outrage in Eastern Europe protests the brutality of post-communism.

There is, as Richard Hofstadter put it many years ago, a paranoid style of politics. While, he came up with this notion in his examination of American politics, McCarthyism and its predecessors, I am struck how this sort of politics can be found in just about every democracy.  The paranoid knows that enemies surround us.  We must be vigilant and protect ourselves, limit or eliminate immigration, impose loyalty oaths, arm ourselves.  For, “they” are out to get us.  The complexities of the world are explained by the machinations of “them.”  (A most popular them these days are Muslims.)

The paranoia continues: we will resolve the problems posed by them only through vigilance.  Those who don’t see this are naïve, in some ways worse than the enemy itself.  You’re either with us or you’re against us: our country right or wrong, love it or leave it.  The National Front in France, the Swedish Democracy Party, the Austrian Freedom Party, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, the Bulgarian Ataka party,  Hungary’s Jobbik party, the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, the British National Party, the League of Polish Families, among others in Europe and beyond, including the Tea Party in the U.S., utilize this style of politics, the populist, xenophobic kind. (link) (link)

In each country, the health of democracy, it seems to me, will be determined by whether the paranoid style is marginalized, and remains so through time, or if it seeps into the political mainstream.  When a right wing coalition ruled in Poland and included the League of Polish Families, the prospects for Polish democracy dived, only reviving when that coalition was defeated in the polls, and , indeed, to mention Hofstadter’s immediate concerns, when Dwight Eisenhower’s Republican Party turned against McCarthy, American democracy was strengthened.  A pressing American concern today has to do with the paranoid style of politics in the Tea Party and in the anti-immigration movement.  Our fate is tied to how we respond to the Park Islamic Community Center and other such activities around the country.  There are other places the cat of paranoid politics is getting out of the bag, threatening democracy in even more dramatic and potentially deadly ways.  Indeed, I have been thinking about all of this while observing recent events in Israeli politics, to which I will turn Sunday.