Pussy Riot returned Thursday (February 20) with a new video calling for a boycott of the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics. The games have created an oppressive environment, they said — not only for the punk collective but for all citizens keen on speaking their minds.
Pussy Riot held a press conference in Sochi Thursday in coordination with Cinema For Peace and The Voice Project during which the women spoke about their experiences in Sochi and their arrests in the Olympic city. The press conference — which a rep for the band said was held outside after it was cancelled by a local hotel — also heralded the release of the new video.
The video — for a song titled “Putin Will Teach You How To Love” — is a disturbing affair, showing the band performing in crashing waves, as well as under an Olympic sign where they are attacked by authorities with horsewhips. According to The Washington Post, the women have been detained several times during their stay in the city and the filming of the video.
With the song and video, Pussy Riot is asking for a boycott of the games, claiming that Putin is restricting human rights. The tune touches on Russia’s new federal law prohibiting “gay propaganda” (“50 billion and a gay-driven rainbow/ Rodnina and Kabaeva will pass you those flames/ In prison they will teach you how to obey”) as well as the state of Russia during the Olympics (“Sochi is blocked – Olympic surveillance/ Special forces, weapons, crowds of cops”).
“The Olympics has turned the police state into a total police state and the authoritarian regime into a totalitarian regime with preventive arrests,” collective member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova said at the press conference, according to the Post. “The Olympics has created an environment of sweeping violations of human rights in Russia. We are banned from speaking out here.”
Several people have been arrested for protesting during the Olympic games, be they activists in the vein of Pussy Riot or those rallying for gay rights.
Pussy Riot members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alekhina spent nearly two years in prison after they were arrested for “hooliganism” in March 2012 after performing an anti-Putin “punk prayer” at Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral. They were released in December via a new amnesty law courtesy of President Vladimir V. Putin — a pardon that they would have rejected if they were able.
The two women used their newfound freedom to protest alleged abuse in Russian prisons and to defend prisoners’ rights, as well as to appear at Amnesty International’s concert in Brooklyn earlier this month.
The women plan to head to Moscow next to attend the trial of 20 people who were arrested for protesting Putin’s third-term inauguration in May 2012 on Bolotnaya Square, according to the Post.
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