‘Pussy Riot? More Like Pussy War’
‘On the morning the sentence was to be handed down, members of the topless feminist group FEMEN took a chainsaw to a giant wooden cross commemorating the victims of Stalin’s repressions. Soon, copycats were popping up across Russia. The latest cross was felled by Pussy Riots supporters in the subarctic city of Arkhangelsk. This prompted outrage from the Orthodox community, with the Church’s sharp-tongued spokesman Vsevolod Chaplin darkly prophesying that ‘those who fell crosses today may move on to murder in the future.’
‘Sure enough, four days later, two women turned up dead with ‘Free Pussy Riot’ scrawled on the wall, as Kremlin loyalists trilled their I-told-you-so’s. (‘If you still think that breaking the norms of behavior in a church doesn’t change anything, I recommend you read the latest news,’ one of them tweeted.) As if this weren’t enough, shortly after the double-murder swamped the headlines, news broke of a man who had been stabbed to death in St. Petersburg. Whoever killed him left the picture of a religious icon on his head …’
