Video: Pussy Riot, ‘Track About Good Cop’

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pussy-riot
Pussy Riot

After wondering whether Pussy Riot would cause any ruckus at the World Cup in Russia, the collective found their moment, exhibiting considerable stamina running onto the field dressed as police officers during Sunday’s final match, and even got double-high-fives from France’s Mbappe before being dragged off the pitch. Not surprisingly, the four activists were arrested and sentenced two weeks in jail. After the incident, Pussy Riot posted a video (see below) explaining their inspiration for the act. Their statement reads:

“Today is 11 years since the death of the great Russian poet, Dmitriy Prigov. Prigov created an image of a policeman, a carrier of the heavenly nationhood, in the Russian culture.

The heavenly policeman, according to Prigov, talks on the two-way with the God Himself. The earthly policeman gets ready to disperse rallies. The heavenly policeman gently touches a flower in a field and enjoys Russian football team victories, while the earthly policeman feels indifferent to Oleg Sentsov’s hunger strike. The heavenly policeman rises as an example of the nationhood, the earthly policeman hurts everyone.”

That moment was pretty exciting, and the band’s new video for “Track About Good Cop” furthers their point. “This track is a utopian dream about alternative political reality in which instead of arresting activists and putting them in jail cops are joining activists,” they say. “The world where cops got rid of homophobia, stopped the war on drugs and actually understood that it’s much better to be joyful and nice to people.”

As if by some divine coincidence, today there’s even more monumental news for Pussy Riot. The European Court of Human Rights officially condemned Russia’s treatment of the punk band’s 2012 protest in a Moscow cathedral, which landed Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova two years in prison. The court said it “accepted that a reaction to breaching the rules of conduct in a place of religious worship might have been warranted. … However, it found that sentencing them to imprisonment for simply having worn brightly colored clothes, waved their arms and kicked their legs around and used strong language, without analyzing the lyrics of their song or the context of their performance, had been exceptionally severe.” As a result, Russia was ordered to pay 48,760 euros in damages and judicial expenses. That’s a win.

||| Watch: “Track About Good Cop”

||| Also: Watch “Policeman Enters The Game”