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Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot Paperback – Bargain Price, January 8, 2014
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On February 21, 2012, five young women entered the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. In neon-colored dresses, tights, and balaclavas, they performed a “punk prayer” beseeching the “Mother of God” to “get rid of Putin.” They were quickly shut down by security, and in the weeks and months that followed, three of the women were arrested and tried, and two were sentenced to a remote prison colony. But the incident captured international headlines, and footage of it went viral. People across the globe recognized not only a fierce act of political confrontation but also an inspired work of art that, in a time and place saturated with lies, found a new way to speak the truth.
Masha Gessen’s riveting account tells how such a phenomenon came about. Drawing on her exclusive, extensive access to the members of Pussy Riot and their families and associates, she reconstructs the fascinating personal journeys that transformed a group of young women into artists with a shared vision, gave them the courage and imagination to express it unforgettably, and endowed them with the strength to endure the devastating loneliness and isolation that have been the price of their triumph.
- Print length308 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRiverhead Books
- Publication dateJanuary 8, 2014
- Dimensions5.48 x 0.71 x 8.24 inches
- ISBN-101594632197
- ISBN-13978-1594632198
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Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
Review
Named a Best Book of 2014 by NPR and The Guardian
“Urgent … damning … Much here will be new to the American reader. All of it is infuriating.” –Alexander Nazaryan, The New York Times
“Remarkable…Masha Gessen [is] one of the most important activists and journalists Russia has known in a generation… disquieting, moving, and closely reported.” –David Remnick, The New Yorker
"Simply put, this is the best, most urgent book I've read about art this year. Through rigorous research and furiously fine storytelling, Masha Gessen places the band's founding members unflinchingly into context, revealing the worlds they move between (of Russian activists, intellectuals and prisoners) and reminding us that art really can change the world — if you're an artist with the guts to try." –NPR
“The fullest account so far of the Pussy Riot story… A moving object lesson in the power of art — perhaps especially messy and exuberant art — to rise above repression and have the last, cement-breaking word.” –Sara Marcus, Los Angeles Times
"Valuable for its insights into the modern cultural history of Russia, with all its idealistic muddles, dead-ends and false starts … ideal for those curious about the country behind the Games.” –The Economist
“What makes someone into a dissident? Why do some people give up everything — home, family, job — to embark on a career of protest? … Gessen set out to answer this question … in this excellent short account.” –The Washington Post
“A compulsively readable book that explains in unflinching terms the tragedy that is modern Russia…Words Will Break Cement is an instant classic, destined to take its place with Solzhenitsyn’s writings about the Gulag... one comes away…marveling at the courage of the Pussy Riot members making a stand against tyranny while demonstrating the willingness to pay a steep price” –New York Journal of Books
“Riveting… [Gessen] is a sharp observer of people and events, and she tells Pussy Riot’s story in a lively style that is somehow casual, precise, and powerful all at once. She has written a terrific book, a compelling story of three creative women who courageously attacked a repressive regime by disrupting the spectacle of its propaganda.” –The Rumpus
"The significance of Words Will Break Cement...is its demonstration that Pussy Riot's rambunctious confrontations with the authorities are the result of several years of growing frustration with Putin's rule...The genius of Pussy Riot...has been to employ guerilla street theater and a sense of humor along with unbridled profanity–all the better to skewer the pretensions of power and privilege Putin insists are his due...Words Will Break Cement makes clear that Pussy Riot is more than just a small group of disorderly anarchists." –New York Times Book Review
“Masha Gessen’s history of founding Pussy Riot members Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich provides some crucial context for understanding the motives and means of the group…Gessen’s account helpfully highlights the lineage of art and protest that gave rise to Pussy Riot.. Pussy Riot is what art endangered looks like; their songs are salvos; their hits are strikes.” ––Boston Globe
“[A] fascinating insider account … As Russia waves sabers at the Ukraine and considers a new cultural policy that explicitly rejects multiculturalism and tolerance, the young women of Pussy Riot increasingly seem not like radicals but prophets. … Vivid and empathic.” –Seattle Times
“A compelling and eloquent account of current events.” –The Christian Science Monitor
“Gessen offers a lively and sympathetic portrait of the three women at the center of the storm… keenly observed and often moving.” – The Guardian
“[An] angry, clear and intimate look at the women behind Pussy Riot.” – The Sunday Times
"Compelling and highly readable. It’s an artist biography, a meditation on revolutionary art and gender politics, an absurdist courtroom drama and defiant commentary on the cultural climate of Gessen’s homeland — a place for which the author obviously has enduring love and concern.” –Eugene Weekly
“Pussy Riot is a global cause célèbre, and now Gessen—prickly, frank, precise, and sharply witty—provides the first in-depth look at this story-in-progress”–Booklist (starred review)
"Based on interviews with Pussy Riot members (including those arrested and others in the group), their families, friends, and attorneys, Gessen puts their protest and arrests in the context of post-Soviet, Putin-era Russia’s culture and society… Recommended to readers in feminist studies, those following Putin’s Russia, and all who study protest art.” –Library Journal
Praise for THE MAN WITHOUT A FACE: THE UNLIKELY RISE OF VLADIMIR PUTIN
“Gessen has shown remarkable courage… [An] unflinching indictment of the most powerful man in Russia.” –The Wall Street Journal
“[Gessen] shines a piercing light into every dark corner of Putin’s story… Fascinating, hard-hitting reading.” –Foreign Affairs
“Illuminating… It is with [the] explosive revelations that Gessen truly excels… An electrifying read from what can only be described as an incredibly brave writer.” –Columbia Journalism Review
“Part psychological profile, part conspiracy study. As a Moscow native who has written perceptively for both Russian and Western publications, Gessen knows the cultures and pathologies of Russia… [and has] a delicious command of the English language… A fiercely independent journalist… Gessen’s armchair psychoanalysis of Putin is speculative. But it is a clever and sometimes convincing speculation, based on a close reading of Putin’s own inadvertently revealing accounts of his life, and on interviews with people who knew Putin before he mattered.” –The New York Times Book Review
“Absorbing.” –The New Yorker
“Powerful and gracefully written.” –The San Francisco Chronicle
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Pisya is a kid’s word for genitals of either sex; it is most like “wee-wee” or “pee-pee.”
Being a fictional group, Pisya Riot could not write its own music. Neither of the real-life members of the phantom group could; Nadya had taken music lessons as a child and had not done well, and Kat had no musical background. So they borrowed a track from the British punk group Cockney Rejects and used a handheld Dictaphone to record their lyrics over the sampling:
You are sick and tired of stinky socks,Your daddy’s stinky socks.
Your entire life will be stinky socks.
Your mother is all in dirty dishes,
Stinky food remains in dirty dishes.
Using refried chicken to wash the floor,
Your mother lives in a prison.
In prison she’s washing pots like a sucker.
No freedom to be had in prison.
Life from hell where man is the master.
Come out in the street and free the women!
Suck on your own stinky socks,
Don’t forget to scratch your ass while you’re at it,
Burp, spit, drink, shit,
While we happily become lesbians!
Envy your own stupid penis
Or your drinking buddy’s huge dick,
Or the guy on TV’s huge dick,
While shit piles up and rises to the ceiling.
Become a feminist, become a feminist
Peace to the world and death to the men.
Become a feminist, kill the sexist!
Kill the sexist and wash off his blood.
Become a feminist, kill the sexist!
Kill the sexist and wash off his blood.
They found they liked being Pisya Riot. Maybe they even really wanted to be Pisya Riot. To become a punk rock group, though, they would need musicians. They thought of N, a woman Nadya’s age who had come to Voina, an art group to which Nadya and her husband, Petya, had belonged. Nadya sought her out. N found Nadya changed: “In Voina, she had been this chubby-cheeked child, and now her cheeks had thinned and her voice took on a certainty. She had chosen her issues, and she may even have chosen them at random, but now she was serious and her topics were LGBT and feminism. And the choice had changed her: she no longer saw herself as an appendage to Petya and [fellow Voina member] Vorotnikov, even if she had once been a willing appendage. It had still limited her. When you are with someone, you are not flying through the cosmos, because your soul always has its home in another person—you may need it sometimes, but it is limiting and it keeps you from taking flight. Nadya got this at some point and took flight.” Pisya Riot, on the other hand, seemed to N almost pure silliness, but she envied whatever it was Nadya felt. She took on the music.
They would need other participants too, but that did not seem like a big issue; what they had in mind could be done by three or five or seven or eleven people, and there were friends and students to be recruited. They also needed a stage. At first, playgrounds, with their platforms and slides, looked pretty good. They had recorded “Kill the Sexist” at a playground. It was raining. It was also night time, which meant there were no children at the playground, but there were beer-drinking and cigarette-smoking young people, who grew concerned when they heard young women screaming their heads off about stinky socks.
They said, “What happened? Did someone hurt you? Do you need help? ”
Nadya and Kat had said, “Don’t worry, we are just making a record.” But now that they were planning on making videos, they needed a different stage, something more spectacular. One day, as they got off the Metro, they spotted it: some stations had towers made of scaffolding, with platforms at the very top, for changing light bulbs or painting ceilings, or performing punk rock, perhaps. Moscow Metro stations are, for the most part, grand architectural affairs, all marble and granite and ostentatiously spanning arches and dramatic lighting; they look like classical concert halls, and the crude scaffolding towers, viewed from the right angle, look very much like a punk affront of a stage.
They performed a number of reconnaissance missions and identified several stations where the towers were particularly tall and well placed, which is to say, placed close to the center of the hall. Then they began rehearsing. If they were going to be a feminist punk rock group, they were going to have to have instruments—Kat picked up a bass—and they were going to have to climb up the tower and unpack their instruments and mics and amplifier and take up positions fast, faster than the Metro police knew what was happening.
They practiced at playgrounds.
As they rehearsed, it became clear they needed staging and visuals and costumes. “Because if we just got up there and started screaming, everyone would think we were stupid,” Kat explained to me. “Stupid chicks just standing there screaming.”
First they came up with wearing balaclavas, which would make them anonymous—but not like Russian special forces, who kept their identities hidden behind black knit face masks with slits for the eyes and mouth, but like the opposite of that: their balaclavas would be neon-colored. Then they would need dresses and multicolored stockings, to show that the whole getup was intentional. Bright, exaggerated makeup showed surprisingly well through the slits in the balaclavas. And the pillow—the pillow appeared because parliament members had begun talking about banning abortion and Putin kept talking about Russia’s so-called demographic problem, by which he meant that Russian women were not getting pregnant often enough, and so Nadya stuck a pillow under her green dress. And then she tried taking it out during the screaming, or the singing, and ripping it open. The feathers created a sort of snow effect, in addition to the birth effect and the abortion effect. That worked.
They spent a month filming their first clip. There was one time they climbed atop a Moscow electric bus and performed—it turned out the feather-letting worked outdoors as well—but mostly they filmed at Metro stations, as many as fifteen of them in all. A couple of times, they got detained. Once, Tasya, who was filming, got beaten up by police. This was before many Russians came to think of being beaten up by police as a regular part of their existence. There was the time when the police tried to beat up Petya, and Nadya wedged herself between him and them and literally shielded him with her body, and there was probably no one, not even Nadya, who appreciated the beauty of her doing this after screaming about stinky socks and penis envy.
And there was the time when the police called Kat’s father, Stanislav Samutsevich. “They would not let me see them,” he recalled. “They were in a holding pen. I had a conversation with two interesting young men. They talked to me about contemporary art and activism. I asked them who they were, and they said, ‘We are art critics in civilian clothing.’ “ It was an unfunny joke that Stanislav Samutsevich did not get: “art critic in civilian clothing” was a term used to denote KGB agents whose job it was to inform on dissidents in the Soviet Union; just like their predecessors in the 1970s, Pisya Riot had developed a following among these “art critics” before the broader public ever heard of them. That is, the secret police had literally started following them around—there were more of them with each consecutive taping.
Stanislav Samutsevich would not have known, or wanted to know, anything about dissidents in the Soviet Union, or about those whose job it had been to spy on them or jail them. “So I shared with them my views on contemporary art.” What were they? “Well, I am an old man.” The ones in civilian clothing were more knowledgeable about contemporary art. “The girls had really wreaked havoc there and the police didn’t know what to do with them. Then a big police vehicle came for them and Yekaterina told me to go home. She came home later, on the last train. I had a talk with her after that, but I am a dinosaur and I don’t understand anything about anything, so that was the last time she ever told me anything.” From that point on, Stanislav Samutsevich learned about performances from the media—or from police. He did try to protect the girls from themselves. “One time they were in the hallway, painting posters of some sort, and I came out and said to them, ‘Look, you’ve already been to the police station once, and no one knows how things could end.’ Nadya stopped coming over to the house after that.”
After that particular detention, the media got wind of the tower climbing and the screaming and the feathers flying in the Metro. They assumed Voina was back in action. Petya and Nadya were invited to the studios of the lone independent cable television channel. They denied it had been a Voina action. They said they had been detained while attending a performance of a new, different art group. They said it was called Pussy Riot.
Product details
- Publisher : Riverhead Books; First Edition (January 8, 2014)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 308 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1594632197
- ISBN-13 : 978-1594632198
- Item Weight : 9.1 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.48 x 0.71 x 8.24 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #681,076 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #235 in Punk Music (Books)
- #1,450 in Deals in Books
- #2,477 in Literary Criticism & Theory
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Masha Gessen is the author of eleven books, including the National Book Award-winning The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia and The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. A staff writer at the New Yorker and the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Carnegie Fellowship, Gessen teaches at Amherst College and lives in New York City.
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Gessen, M. (2014). Words will break cement: The passion of Pussy Riot (First Riverhead trade paperback). Riverhead Books. Masha's reconstruction of events.
Pussy Riot! A Punk Prayer for Freedom. (2013). The Feminist Press at CUNY. - A collection of letters, songs, poems, and courtroom statements.
Three first hand accounts detailing the story of Pussy Riot, formed in August 2011 consisting of a group of women ranging in age from 20 to 33, who, as a group, staged public guerilla performances generally filmed and placed on YouTube. Themes of their work included feminism, LGBTQ rights, and opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin with their public actions specifically designed to illuminate and affect change in the prevailing culture and society about these issues.
On February 21, 2012, Pussy Riot, dressed in bright colors and wearing balaclavas stepped into Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior unauthorized to perform Punk Prayer on the altar, a performance which lasted 40 seconds. During this performance they made the sign of the cross, genuflected to Mary, pumped their fists and kicked their legs while imploring the Mother Mary to banish Putin. The performance was staged two weeks prior to Russia’s national elections intending to draw attention to the ties between President Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church. Two group members, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (Nadia) and Maria Alyokhina (Masha) were arrested on March 3, 2012, and then on March 16, Yekaterina Samutsevich (Katya) was also arrested. The three were charged with hooliganism motivated by religious hatred, denied bail, found guilty and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. On appeal, Katya was freed on probation with the other two continuing to serve their terms. The facts of the case are public knowledge. The trial and sentence drew international attention and critique. The Cathedral of Christ the Savior is a Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Moscow. Patriarch Kirill was named as the leader in 2009, he endorsed Putin in 2012. Pussy Riot performed on the altar space, a space reserved for men, their balaclava, bright clothing, and bare arms further stood in contrast to the expected dress code for women in the church. As a conservative orthodox place of worship, there were strict codes of dress, behavior, and social norms related to the norms for women. The Cathedral, specifically the altar is sacred to the Russian people. Selecting the Cathedral as the place for their performance was a provocative move. They maintained that they were protesting the desacralization of the church resultant from a tight coupling between Vladimir Putin and church leaders such as Patriarch Kirill wherein the church was desecrated by this action and the performance sought to illuminate this concern.
The charges levied against Pussy Riot included Hooliganism (Article 213 § 2 Clause B of the Russian Federation) defined as “a gross violation of the public order manifested in patent contempt of society and attended. . . by reason of political, ideological, racial, national or religious hatred.” Kanonovich (2015) examined the legal charges and observed the following: (a) the court failed to interpret the prayer as a criticism of Putin’s actions concluding that Pussy Riot lacked a political motive but instead intended insult to the church and believers; (b) this interpretation reframed Pussy Riot’s actions towards blasphemy; and (c) due to the international attention, it was suggested that the performance was a publicity stunt designed to capitalize on the Cathedral’s fame. In this way, Kanonovich (2015) asserted that Russian authorities used the law “not just to enforce religious orthodoxy, but to delegitimize public political protests by pushing them beyond the boundaries of both socially and legally acceptable forms of citizens’ civic participation.” Pussy Riot’s political speech and deliberate critique of Putin was denied and reframed. Institutional power served to marginalize and reframe Pussy Riot’s stated purpose and intention from critique of the church/state relationship and Putin to a rebellion against the church. In so doing, the incident was ultimately reframed as an issue of morality by portraying Pussy Riot members as disrespecting Russian Orthodox Church values and trying to incite religious hatred specifically against Orthodox Christianity.
This is an intriguing case study from which to explore social protest, gender, legal interpretation, and the intersection of religion and politics. It also is a fascinating case to explore the role of the media in garnering international attention and the effects of this attention on outcomes.
Gessen, M. (2014). Words will break cement: The passion of Pussy Riot (First Riverhead trade paperback). Riverhead Books. Masha's reconstruction of events.
Pussy Riot! A Punk Prayer for Freedom. (2013). The Feminist Press at CUNY. - A collection of letters, songs, poems, and courtroom statements.
Three first hand accounts detailing the story of Pussy Riot, formed in August 2011 consisting of a group of women ranging in age from 20 to 33, who, as a group, staged public guerilla performances generally filmed and placed on YouTube. Themes of their work included feminism, LGBTQ rights, and opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin with their public actions specifically designed to illuminate and affect change in the prevailing culture and society about these issues.
On February 21, 2012, Pussy Riot, dressed in bright colors and wearing balaclavas stepped into Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior unauthorized to perform Punk Prayer on the altar, a performance which lasted 40 seconds. During this performance they made the sign of the cross, genuflected to Mary, pumped their fists and kicked their legs while imploring the Mother Mary to banish Putin. The performance was staged two weeks prior to Russia’s national elections intending to draw attention to the ties between President Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church. Two group members, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (Nadia) and Maria Alyokhina (Masha) were arrested on March 3, 2012, and then on March 16, Yekaterina Samutsevich (Katya) was also arrested. The three were charged with hooliganism motivated by religious hatred, denied bail, found guilty and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. On appeal, Katya was freed on probation with the other two continuing to serve their terms. The facts of the case are public knowledge. The trial and sentence drew international attention and critique. The Cathedral of Christ the Savior is a Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Moscow. Patriarch Kirill was named as the leader in 2009, he endorsed Putin in 2012. Pussy Riot performed on the altar space, a space reserved for men, their balaclava, bright clothing, and bare arms further stood in contrast to the expected dress code for women in the church. As a conservative orthodox place of worship, there were strict codes of dress, behavior, and social norms related to the norms for women. The Cathedral, specifically the altar is sacred to the Russian people. Selecting the Cathedral as the place for their performance was a provocative move. They maintained that they were protesting the desacralization of the church resultant from a tight coupling between Vladimir Putin and church leaders such as Patriarch Kirill wherein the church was desecrated by this action and the performance sought to illuminate this concern.
The charges levied against Pussy Riot included Hooliganism (Article 213 § 2 Clause B of the Russian Federation) defined as “a gross violation of the public order manifested in patent contempt of society and attended. . . by reason of political, ideological, racial, national or religious hatred.” Kanonovich (2015) examined the legal charges and observed the following: (a) the court failed to interpret the prayer as a criticism of Putin’s actions concluding that Pussy Riot lacked a political motive but instead intended insult to the church and believers; (b) this interpretation reframed Pussy Riot’s actions towards blasphemy; and (c) due to the international attention, it was suggested that the performance was a publicity stunt designed to capitalize on the Cathedral’s fame. In this way, Kanonovich (2015) asserted that Russian authorities used the law “not just to enforce religious orthodoxy, but to delegitimize public political protests by pushing them beyond the boundaries of both socially and legally acceptable forms of citizens’ civic participation.” Pussy Riot’s political speech and deliberate critique of Putin was denied and reframed. Institutional power served to marginalize and reframe Pussy Riot’s stated purpose and intention from critique of the church/state relationship and Putin to a rebellion against the church. In so doing, the incident was ultimately reframed as an issue of morality by portraying Pussy Riot members as disrespecting Russian Orthodox Church values and trying to incite religious hatred specifically against Orthodox Christianity.
This is an intriguing case study from which to explore social protest, gender, legal interpretation, and the intersection of religion and politics. It also is a fascinating case to explore the role of the media in garnering international attention and the effects of this attention on outcomes.
There is an endless sadness to the story of contemporary Russia. Nobody insists that the West is perfect but the Russian reality certainly doesn't belong to the 21st century. It seems like the concepts of fair trial or human rights are not in use there, except for propaganda purposes.
The book is not an easy read and it tends to be tedious, but it certainly does have lots of content and it is entirely based on primary sources, it does not quote newspapers, journalists or other books. A very honest approach indeed. I am looking forward to more books by this author.
Three young women living in Russia, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (Nadya), Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, were found guilty of hooliganism and went to prison (one was finally given a suspended sentence) because they spoke out against Putin and his tyranny. One of the most horrific parts in this book described the conditions of these prisons. The “prisons” aren’t fit for animals let alone human beings. Atrocious is the word that pops in my head. Along with living in terrible conditions, inmates are subjected to mistreatment by guards for doing something like complaining about the horrible conditions. For example, if an inmate complained about lack of hot water, all the water would be shut off for all the inmates.
These women showed amazing strength throughout their ordeal. This book takes us from the beginning with backgrounds on the women, their foray into political activism, the emergence of Pussy Riot, their fateful performance that got them arrested, the harrowing trial (another example of human rights violations), and finally their imprisonment.
A quote from Maria’s court statement: “And I am not afraid of you. I am not afraid of lies and fictions and of poorly coded deception in the verdict of this so-called court, because all of you can take away my inner freedom, the only sort that exists in the Russian Federation. But no one can take away my inner freedom.” She closes with this: “I believe that openness and public speech and a hunger for the truth make us all a little bit freer.”
I greatly admire these women for their heroism and strength to fight for better conditions and rights for all. They had the courage to speak out against Putin’s atrocities, and they were successful in encouraging others to do the same. If they had failed, they wouldn’t have scared Putin into having them arrested.
Pussy Riot lives on as an example of feminine power and courage.








