Pussy Riot, the controversial Russian activist group who were jailed for their protests against Russian leader Vladimir Putin several years ago, returned this morning with a fiery pro-environmental song and video called “Black Snow”; an open letter to Putin “and his cronies” that takes him to task for pollution in Russia; and the announcement of a Thursday benefit for Planned Parenthood and the Yellowhammer Fund in Birmingham, Alabama, where severe restrictions on abortion were recently enacted. (The concert, which has no advertised venue yet, is promoted by these two videos.)
The video for “Black Snow,” which features the group in various scenes of environmental distress, comes accompanied by photos of the group’s “series of guerilla actions in Russian forests (January-March 2019).” Posted on the group’s website are horrifying photos of pollution around bandmember Nadya Tolokonnikova’s hometown of Norilsk — a city in Russia’s far north that was built by Stalin-era slave labor and is deeply polluted due to nickel extraction and smelting. (See all the photos and read the full text of today’s missives via Google Translate here.)
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The letter to Putin reads in part, “You might remember me for that 2-year prison sentence you slapped me with back in 2012, when performed a 40-second act of protest and beseeched the Virgin Mary to chase you away. I was 22 at the time, and my young daughter Gera had just turned four. But right now I’m not interested in talking about church or prison – I want to talk about a different issue. I want to talk about rivers of blood, black snow, toxic waste, and acid rain.
“You fill the Russian North with unprocessed garbage (see Shiyes and 10 million tons of Moscow waste). You criminalize ecological activists (see 5 new cases against Alexandra Koroleva, the co-chair of Ecodefense!). Meanwhile, the inhabitants of Kuzbass are forced to seek environmental asylum in Canada to escape intolerable living conditions, high rates of oncological illness, black snow, poisoned water, and the indifference of local government officials. People in Kuzbass ask: ‘How can you be a patriot of something or someone who won’t even notice how we live? How we breathe? What we drink?’ Listen, this is just completely unacceptable.”
“I’m not suggesting that we immediately close all factories, but the way I see it – humanity has two options. Either we leave things as they are and we just die out, turning our planet into Chernobyl and Norilsk. Or we figure out how to build a technologically advanced civilization that uses renewable energy sources for its industries. … We need to act like we live in a clean Russia of the future, where we elect and be elected, where the media is free and independent, where we can create autonomous environmental watchdogs, where we can support Great Thunberg and ‘Fridays for Future,’ where we can go outside and be organic kittens.
“I love you – but I don’t love Putin.
xx Nadya”