Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

Another notable chapter has been written in the annals of Russian judicial practice. The Supreme Court of the Republic of Mordovia refused to grant Nadezhda Tolokonnikova early release from prison. Nadezhda is a member of the feminist protest rock group Pussy Riot, and was sentenced to two years’ detention for singing a punk prayer in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. She was refused early release for a curious reason: the court deemed her unworthy of such clemency because she had refused to take part in the ‘Miss Charming’ beauty contest that was held in correctional colony No. 14 in Mordovia, and therefore they could not say that her behaviour in the colony had been exemplary.

Nadezhda refused to take part in the beauty contest not as a protest against the rules of the camp, but because she was taking a principled civil position. As an activist in a feminist group, she cannot by conviction take part in a sexist ritual dreamt up by a patriarchal society; it would be like asking a vegan to join in a barbeque. In her deposition to the court, Nadezhda said that her aesthetic values would not allow her to participate in such a competition. This is the very same reason given by another dissident, the writer Andrei Sinyavsky, half a century ago when he had a ‘stylistic disagreement’ with the Soviet state. [10] In 1966, Andrei Sinyavsky was sentenced to seven years in a labour camp for ‘anti-Soviet activity’, because of the opinions voiced by some of the characters in his novels, which had been published in the West. His trial, along with fellow writer Yuli Daniel, was seen as marking the end of the period of liberalization under Nikita Khrushchev (who had been ousted in 1964) and the start of the dissident movement.

Feminists the world over should applaud the Mordovian court for uncovering the truth: it actually acknowledged that women were obliged to take part in the beauty contest, and that a refusal to do so would bring disciplinary sanctions. According to this logic, the whole world is one big women’s prison colony, in the middle of which there stands a catwalk on which the entrapped women are required to show off their charms so as not to be penalized. In a patriarchal and sexist society, a woman is imprisoned in her own body from the very beginning, in a cage of social norms and male expectations. She is controlled far more than a man is by the discipline of her body, the dictates of physiology and the battle with age. Throughout her whole life, a woman has to walk a particular line; and beauty contests simply take to extremes the stereotypes of gender slavery.

Criticism of beauty contests has been growing around the world as being one of the more odious institutions of the patriarchal society, a symbol of exploitation, standardization and commodification of the female body; and it’s not just feminists or left-wingers who protest about this. Even organizers of beauty contests themselves have been trying to adapt to the new mood, doing away with the line-up in bikinis, as the Miss World competition has done. Another approach has been for the women taking part to answer questions to show how bright they are. The supposed value of these tests was shown up by the Mrs Russia competition in 2012. In conversation with a correspondent from Russian television, Inna Zhirkova, wife of the footballer Yury Zhirkov, failed to answer the simplest of questions: ‘Does the Earth go round the Sun, or the Sun go round the Earth?’; ‘Who composed the Ogiński polonaise?’; and ‘Who is Agniya Barto?’ (a well-known Russian children’s poet). She also admitted that she had never done a day’s work in her whole life. Following the public outcry following this test, Mrs Zhirkova refused to accept her crown.

Of course, most people in Russia aren’t bothered about the ethics of beauty contests. This is a country that adopts laws regulating people’s private lives and enforcing heterosexual ‘normality’. It’s a country where, for a significant part of the female population, the indicator of a successful life is a good marriage. In such a country, beauty contests are a way for a girl to climb the social ladder; they are considered the norm, and an example of how a girl should behave. A Russian girl’s dress code is clearly laid out on the catwalk: long, flowing hair, a nice dress, high heels and expensive make-up are still considered the measure of femininity; and if a man has a wife who’s a model, he’s thought to be a success.

In October 2013, Russia hosted the Miss Universe contest. This was run by Donald Trump, who is renowned for his weakness for tastelessness and kitsch, and it was held at that bastion of Russian glamour, the Crocus-City exhibition centre. The organizers and sponsors were unaware that the real Miss Russia hadn’t been able to appear in the spotlights of their competition, wearing a tight dress and with her mascara running down her cheeks. She was working as a seamstress in a prison colony in Mordovia. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova won her crown not in a prison beauty contest or on the catwalk, but in a cage in the Khamovinchesky Court, [11] The dock in Russian courts is usually inside a cage. This is ostensibly to protect those in the courtroom from violent defendants, but in practice is more usually simply a way of denigrating the accused. The principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is often not adhered to in Russian courts. where she was sentenced to two years in a labour camp; she accepted her sentence simply and with dignity. But the jury of a beauty contest wouldn’t be able to understand that.

In the summer of 2016, Russian society experienced a totally unexpected show of collective psychotherapy; and society is still trying to come to terms with what happened. Following the English language flash mob #MeToo, there appeared in Russian social media a flash mob called #yaNyeBoyusSkazat, (‘I’m not afraid to speak out’). This became the largest ‘coming out’ in Russian history. Thousands of women shared their memories of the violence that they had suffered at the hands of men – rape, beatings, harassment, stalking and humiliation. Most of these stories were being heard for the first time, because these women were scared of sharing their experiences even with those closest to them, afraid of being judged, stigmatized or labelled as a victim; but thanks to the strength and solidarity of social media, for the first time in their lives they were able to speak about their trauma.

This prompted an explosion of comment: there was a strong and widespread reaction against this unasked for, unexpected and frightening truth. Thousands of social media users, men and women, greeted these revelations with ridicule, calling it ‘public striptease’, suspecting that it was all PR or some kind of provocation, making fun of the ‘erotic fantasies’ of these women, or hypocritically fearing for their mental health. Two visions of hell met in this flash mob: the women’s hell of pain, fear and a lack of understanding, and the hell of male chauvinism evident in these comments. But these are two sides of the same coin; two rooms in one hell; two articles of our main social agreement: on the one hand, violence as the norm in our life and the main bond of society, and, on the other, ‘the silence of the lambs’, as the unspoken recognition of the right to violence.

No, this was not a ‘war of the sexes’, nor was it a display of feminist propaganda. Society wasn’t split into men and women, nor divided between the violators and the victims. The division was between those who see violence as the normal way of sorting out relations in society, and those who oppose it and are prepared openly to speak about this. This flash mob, started by women, about women and for women, had taken the lid off the microphysics of power in Russian society: there is a source code of violence at the heart of the Russian matrix.