Russia’s Punk Prayer: Pussy Riot, Orthodox Power, and Authoritarian Faith

Summary

n 2012, members of the feminist performance art collective Pussy Riot staged what they called a “punk prayer” in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior—an act so transgressive it landed two of them in a penal colony. Wearing bright dresses and balaclavas, they occupied the altar, a space barred to women in Orthodox Christianity, and sang an appeal to the Virgin Mary to “chase Putin out.” The performance was a direct indictment of the Russian Orthodox Church’s collusion with Vladimir Putin, its support for repression, its anti-feminist theology, and its role in laws targeting LGBTQ people. At a moment when protests, elections, and petitions had become meaningless under authoritarian rule, Pussy Riot turned to Mary—the revolutionary figure who once sang of the mighty being cast down—as a last appeal to a power greater than the state.

This episode of American UnExceptionalism uses Pussy Riot’s prayer as an entry point into a broader conversation about Orthodoxy, authoritarianism, and resistance in Russia and Ukraine. Hosts Matthew Taylor and Susie Hayward are joined by scholars Sarah Riccardi-Schwartz and Regina Elsner to explore how the Russian Orthodox Church became entangled with imperial power, how religion is mobilized to sanctify war and repression, and how these dynamics echo within far-right and MAGA movements in the United States. Distinguishing between church institutions and living religious communities, the episode asks what Americans can learn from those resisting religious nationalism abroad—and why acts of feminist, prophetic defiance still matter when democracy itself is under siege.

Additional Resources:

• Riccardi-Swartz, Sarah. Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia. Fordham University Press, 2022.

Dr. Sarah Riccardi-Swartz is an assistant professor of religion and anthropology at Northeastern University, where she is also an affiliate faculty member in the women's, gender, and sexuality studies program. Before joining Northeastern University she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Recovering Truth: Religion, Journalism, and Democracy in a Post-Truth Era project at the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict (Arizona State University). She has a Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from New York University.

Dr. Regina Elsner is a theologian and, since April 2023, has the Chair for Eastern Churches, Ecumenical Studies and Peace Research at the Universität of Münster.

From 1998 to 2005, Regina Elsner studied Catholic Theology in Berlin and Münster. Afterwards, she worked until 2010 as a project coordinator for Caritas Russia in St. Petersburg. From 2010 to 2013, she was a research associate at the Ecumenical Institute of the University of Münster, within the research stream ‘Institutions and Institutional Change in Post-Socialism’. In this context, she focused on the historical and theological aspects of the Russian Orthodox Church’s confrontation with modernity, completing her PhD on this topic in 2016.