Like a Red Prison

July 16, 2013

 

We’ve gotten to the heart of why our friends are in cages and Putin and his friends are not.
During our performances with the song “Like in a Red Prison” we broke out of Moscow for the first time and went on an all-Russian tour with the seizure of the country’s oil facilities.

Last year, oil and gas budget revenues amounted to 7 trillion rubles, but only Putin and a few of his friends see these 7 trillion. Therefore, we decided to deal with oil production ourselves and sing our new song about the red prison to oil and gas workers.

Some lines of the text “Like in a Red Prison” were written by Nadya Tolokonnikova in a Mordvin camp, so it is necessary to learn it by heart with special care. Although we write our texts collectively as a large group – so let the investigators not overexert themselves!

With a sledgehammer
Bastrykin is being poured
On oil wagons
On the super pipe

Lyrics to Pussy Riot’s Like a Red Prison (for group performance during the seizure of oil facilities)

Gruel-propaganda, gruel-propagandaaaaaaaa! The country has hardly mastered

the practice of machine labor successfully. In the heat of production,
I come more and more often – I don’t know if it’s appropriate.
Grassroots activists flow through the pipe, Fill it with life – and ask for a pogrom!
GUFSIN, MVD, EMERCOM and Rusnano, Lukoil, TNK, Rosneft and Gazprom, Gruel-propaganda, gruel-propagandaaaaaaaa!

Get registered,
Villains on the towers,
Oil on the tables,
Sechin with crocodiles,
Like in a red prison.

Bathe a worker in a Norwegian fjord,
Cut off your dick like Depardieu’s hero,
Your president is like the Ayatollah in Iran,
And your church is like the UAE.

So that everything is like in Qatar,
Villains on the rigs,
Pump without a trace.
In MEPhI – theology.
Shoulder straps and wells,
Navalny is imprisoned,
Hugo Chavez is alive,
Like in a red prison

Evil fucking sexist, get off the hole!

Homophobic bastard, get out of history!

Don’t fuck Murochka –
She’s wasting oil on the wrong things.
In the Mordvin silence of the days
She makes salads and sometimes eats them.

In the best traditions of feminist political punk, each takeover of an oil facility, such as oil pumps in remote regions of Russia, began with a breakthrough.

Before the breakthrough, the Pussy Riot members, along with punk-feminist flags, equipment and instruments, hid in the steppe until a security patrol from, for example, Rosneft drove away to a distance that would allow them to successfully seize the oil pump.

After the gym was captured, a special portrait was immediately hung on it. For example, a portrait of the Chairman of the Investigative Committee of Russia, Colonel General Bastrykin, who is known to Pussy Riot activists for his love of signing orders for the arrests of our friends who are unhappy that no one except Putin feels these 7 trillion oil rubles.

After hanging the portrait over the oil pump, feminist flags were unfurled: because all of Putin’s friends and he himself are evil-fucking sexists (as we sing in “Like in a Red Prison”), convinced that the state and power are built exclusively on the oppression of women, LGBT communities, atheists, and other social groups. Then punk rock immediately began.

When some stupid pipe got in the way of a proper breakthrough to the next gym, then the most fearless of us, punk feminist Grelka, would get out her sledgehammer and, running ahead of the feminist breakthrough, remove the obstacle.

At the fourteenth oil pump we captured in the third consecutive Russian region, we made a stop because an urgent telegram arrived from Mordovian colony No. 14. Tolokno was writing to us!

“The lack of faith in the value of the creative productive power of man is what constitutes my current reality. And, by the way, yours too. And this is exactly what turns reality into hell. Both in a single women’s colony and throughout Russia, the creation of new ideas and continuous search are not valued. To put it mildly, not valued. For adherence to the principles of creativity and experimentation, intellectual inquisitiveness, loyalty to which ensures cultural, economic and political wealth, they punish in Russia. Things are moving towards the establishment of a pre-industrial class-hierarchical system, where cozy places are bought with endless loyalty and unconditional submission, impeccable agreement and thoughtless conformism. If you are ready to bend under the will of the citizens-bosses day and night, in your sleep and in reality, then, probably, you can count on a quiet life. Perhaps they will not take away your business. Perhaps they will not put you in jail. Although, frankly speaking, this is already a pitchfork. It’s written on water. According to Stalin’s concepts, as we know, no one is irreplaceable.

A person becomes irreplaceable in another system of values. For the triumph of which you and I still have to fight. And here, in the red women’s colony, which became for me an expressive and precise model of what the bastard political regime is leading Russia to, the need for this struggle for values became even more acute for me.

The irreplaceability of man is affirmed where individuality and originality overcome fascist unification, and criticism and development overcome conservation and stagnation.

 

Nadya Tolokonnikova
Penal Colony No. 14, Mordovia

Having read the telegram from Mordovia, we rushed with redoubled force to seize oil facilities — after all, as Marx taught and as Tolokno wrote to us, the struggle for values begins with the struggle for the economic base.

The breakthroughs became more violent and dangerous: Pussy Riot activists always fight for the best places in the world for their performances. And within the framework of this terrible tour, it was necessary to perform “Like in a Red Prison” especially diligently.

One day we came across a thick silver pipe through which oil was noisily flowing.

Sometimes during the “Like in a Red Prison” tour we would go into big cities and take over the roofs of gas stations, especially preferring Rosneft stations. The workers were always delighted.

The workers below shouted to us and asked us to tell about the chant in the second verse:

Bathe a worker in a Norwegian fjord

And we told about one northern country where a worker lives better than an office clerk. And the government together with the police in this northern country are afraid of workers — and are embarrassed to take away their trillions from workers and clerks. And are embarrassed to throw workers and clerks in prison just like that.

The workers also wanted to know what the chant meant:

Cut off your dick like Depardieu’s hero

The activist Grelka, who knows cinema well, told them about the film by director Marco Ferreri, The Last Woman, in which Depardieu cuts off his penis as a fight against his instincts, which prevent him from being free. “What a man, this Depardieu!” the workers said.

Despite all the variety of oil facilities we captured to perform the song about the red prison, the main target remained the oil pumps on which portraits of the country’s leaders were spinning in a circle.

The main villain among those spinning on the oil pumps was the Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian government, Igor Sechin, such a close friend of Putin that he was entrusted with sole control over Russian oil.

Sechin spent his youth in Africa, where there was a saying among the locals that became part of the chorus of our song:

Sechin with crocodiles

What it meant in Africa was extreme human malice and greed and the willingness to rapaciously pursue one’s opponents and destroy people who disputed what one had obtained as booty. This man subjugated all the security forces in Russia and was put in charge of ensuring that 7 trillion oil rubles went to Putin and only Putin.

And we have already met another villain, Colonel General Bastrykin, who arrests everyone who doubts Putin’s right to 7 trillion rubles too much, as part of the “Like in a Red Prison” tour. And we will meet him again!

No matter how many people are thrown into Russian prisons, the punk feminists from Pussy Riot will continue to fight until the two slogans that sound at the end of our song lose their meaning in Russia:

You fucking sexist, get off your hole!
Homophobic bastard, get out of history!