Freed Pussy Riot Member Will Continue To Protest
Posted by Joseph Lee on 12.27.2012
She won't stop fighting for what she believes in...
In an interview with The Guardian, freed Pussy Riot member Yekaterina Samutsevich revealed that she will continue to protest even though two of the members of her band were jailed earlier this year for that very reason.
On being free: "Now that I've been let out early, I can be here and free and speak in the name of the group. We took part in the trial and only we saw it from inside. Now I can tell everyone about that. Unfortunately Nadya and Masha can't, since they're in jail. More than anything, what many people didn't see during the trial were those moments when our 'right to defence' was violated. It's not that we were helpless, it was a situation of despair. The trial was built in such a way that we couldn't defend ourselves. They didn't listen to us. We could have sat downstairs, where you wait till you're taken to the courtroom, and not go in at all and everything would've gone the same way. The fact that we took part physically [in the trial] didn't actually change anything."
On the trial: "Our trial was a political trial because our actions were political – we did political art. Because of that the authorities reacted, the system reacted. But that doesn't mean that everything was decided right away, that there's no game or competition between the prosecution and the defense. We always had hope. But everything was done so we couldn't defend ourselves."
On Russian president Vladimir Putin: "If you believe Putin has limitless power, against which it's impossible to do anything, then you get depressed. You start to think that you have no other way, that from the start, when you make some sort of political gesture, especially in the realm of art, then from the start you'll go to jail, that you can do nothing against Putin, that no one will help you. It seems to me a harmful way of thinking. One needs to change one's thinking, you need to think, on the contrary, about fighting, about gathering strength for the struggle."
