Soaring to dizzying heights: Christ the Saviour Cathedral as a historical arena for the persecution of Pussy Riot

Abstract

On 21 February 2012, a female Russian punk collective ‘Pussy Riot’ performed a ‘Punk Prayer Against Putin’ on the soleas of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. The ensuing controversy over the performance, as well as criminal charges brought against three members of the group, made explicit the contentious nature of the place of Pussy Riot’s ‘punk prayer’. The author examines place in its dual identity as an event and as an actor, one affected, the other affecting. As an actor, a place becomes capable of enacting change, and as an event, it takes on the qualities of its occupants. While the rebuilt Christ the Saviour Cathedral was once a women’s convent, a monument to Russian victory over Napoleon, a never-completed Palace of Soviets and a giant outdoor swimming pool, the author examines how this place oscillates between resonance and irrelevance, disenchantment and re-enchantment, deterritorialization and reterritorialization.

Keywords

Pussy Riot place architecture Christ the Saviour Cathedral Palace of Soviets deterritorialization reterritorialization avant-garde habitus techniques of the body

Introduction: Meditations on a (Shifting) Place

‘Is there anyone who has not, at least once, walked into a room and “felt the atmosphere”?’ asks Teresa Brennan (2004). Punctuating the Moscow skyline with its distinctive golden cupolas, the monumental Christ the Saviour Cathedral often evokes a strong reaction amongst visitors and concretizes a place of worship for Russian Orthodox adherents. Inside the cathedral, rising to over 100 m, the main dome is painted with frescoes depicting God, Christ and the Apostles. The interiors are lined with black, red and white marble; vaults and rounded arches are decorated with ornate ribboned and rhomboid Orthodox motifs; rotund windows below the cupola radiate light onto an impressive conical iconostasis dividing the space of the nave and the sanctuary and symbolically separating heaven from earth and the sacred from the mundane.

The structure and layout of Russian Orthodox churches has traditionally employed both symbolic and functional elements. Details such as the placement of the belfry, the number of domes, the levels of natural light and the flow of the congregation contribute to the overall atmosphere of the place. Pavel Florenskii, a Russian Orthodox theologian and philosopher from the turn of the 20th century, wrote of the aesthetic experience inside Russian churches as one that is highly sensory and embodied:

Let us recall the plastic, rhythmic movements of the officiating priests, as when they swing the censer, the play and modulation of folds in the precious fabrics, the aroma, the particular fiery waftings of the atmosphere, ionised by thousands of burning flames. Let us further recall that the synthesis of church ritual is not just confined to the sphere of the visual arts, but encompasses the art of singing and poetry, all kinds of poetry, church ritual being itself a musical drama on the aesthetic plane. (Florenskii, 2002: 109)

The ritual that Florenskii describes dictates the movement, behaviour and form of dress inside a church. Since there are no seats or pews, parishioners must stand during long ceremonies conducted in the Church Slavonic language. Much like inside any Russian Orthodox church, men are prohibited from covering their heads, while women are prescribed to wear a head covering and a long dress embodying modesty. Amongst other gendered distinctions, only men can serve as Orthodox priests, whereas women may only occupy administrative positions or sing in the choir. The sacred space of the soleas – a platform in front of the iconostasis – as well as the sanctuary, are off limits for women. Thus, religious and social functions, dress and gender, and ritualistic and improvisatory behaviour are delineated along a spatial hierarchy.

The site of the cathedral on the banks of the Moscow River, and in close proximity to the Kremlin, visually ties the edifice to Moscow’s historic centre. But for a place seemingly rooted in tradition, it is remarkable how many transformations it underwent over the course of its pre-Revolutionary, Soviet and post-Soviet history. The present account of the cathedral begins with a legend, when the Alekseevsky Women’s Convent – a unique, double-tented church that stood on the banks of Moscow River since the 17th century – was ordered to be demolished by an Imperial decree of 1837. It was to make way for the world’s tallest Russian Orthodox monument commemorating Russian victories over Napoleon. On the eve of demolition, the head nun was refused her plea to stay and die on the premises and had to be carried away by her legs and arms, cursing the site with the words, ‘Let there be a puddle on this place! A puddle!’ (Mihaylov, 2007). The existence of Christ the Saviour Cathedral would be short-lived. Following the Russian Revolution and the Red Terror, which swept through Russia with the urgency characteristic of the builders of utopia, and then, with the paranoia of those trying to preserve it, the cathedral in honour of Christ and the victory over Napoleon was torn down to make way for a cathedral to Lenin and the victory of the proletariat – the Palace of Soviets. However, owing to the Great Patriotic War, the construction of the Palace was abandoned, and after the War, the void of the place was turned into the world’s largest outdoor swimming pool. However, in the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Christ the Saviour Cathedral was rebuilt and consecrated as the nucleus of the Moscow Patriarchate. Then, in February 2012, 175 years after the nun’s curse, Moscow’s key Orthodox symbol became the stage for a ‘Punk Prayer against Putin’ performed by Pussy Riot, an anarcho-feminist punk-rock collective that donned colourful balaclavas and mini skirts, and shouted ‘Mother of God, Holy Virgin, Banish Putin!’ (Pussy Riot, 2012) and were subsequently carried away by their legs and arms.

The idea that space may affect our consciousness, behaviour and social relations has roots both in objectivist, materialist philosophy characteristic of Marxist approaches, and subjectivist, phenomenological perspectives. Marxist-inspired philosophers have favoured the notion of space as a site of production (Benjamin, 2002; Léfebvre, 1974) and argued that materiality determines our consciousness and informs social practices and perceptions. On the phenomenological side, philosophers have favoured dwelling places as central to our understanding and perception of space (Bachelard, 1958; Heidegger, 1951). The home as an intimate place of dwelling invokes a certain play of imagination and grounds us in a sense of place: ‘profound metaphysics is rooted in an implicit geometry which—whether we will or no—confers spatiality upon thought’ (Bachelard, 1958: 212). It is by recognizing our ‘intimate immensity’ (Casey, 1997: 294) from within the familiar place of our home, that we ‘enter space from place itself ’ (Casey, 1997: 294). From this point of view, rather than seeing place ‘as a delimited part or portion of space’ (Casey, 1997: 294), place prefigures space and gives it definition.

In the course of this analysis, I will try to reconcile these two competing but interdependent conceptions of place. If we enter place from space, characteristic of the Marxist position, we can analyse the language that gives spaces figuration, which is architecture. However, architecture is impossible to separate from its historical, political, artistic, and in this case, theological contexts, which have specific and sometimes unintended social effects. To begin analysing these effects, we must understand places as capable of enacting certain spatial practices, behaviours and ideologies; in short, as non-human actors capable of ‘modify[ing] a state of affairs by making a difference’ (Latour, 2005: 71). Thus, we can say that places are agentive and productive, used to create particular forms of civil life, civic engagement and civic subjects.

This perspective on place is explored in the first half of the paper, allowing us to analyse the figuration of space as it is ideologically and politically expressed. However, places also impart to us a narrative of their own figuration and are simultaneously bound up in the actuality of lived experience. In the second half of the paper, I shift my focus to how actors change the social configurations of places, viewing place as ‘tak[ing] on the qualities of its occupants, reflecting these qualities in its own constitution and description and expressing them in its occurrence as an event’ (Casey, 1996: 27). By entering space from place itself, I will argue that places are not immutable, but in constant flux, owing to the way they modify and are in turn modified by their occupants and their surroundings.

If we are to understand places as dynamic entities, we can also see places as ‘traveling, slow or fast, greater or shorter distances, within networks of human and nonhuman agents’ (Sheller and Urry, 2006: 214). Considering places in terms of movement, we can analyse how new social practices rupture previous social functions of places, or inversely, how they take hold again, and thus, how places become deterritorialized and reterritorialized (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972, 1980). In tandem with these movements, I assess Max Weber’s famous pronouncement that the ‘fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization, and above all, by the disenchantment of the world’ (Weber, 1918). Have highly charged places such as the site of Christ the Saviour Cathedral responded to the changing tide of secularization, or has a new set of social conditions that restructures existing practices produced the opposite, re-enchanting (Landy and Saler, 2009) and mythologizing effect? In examining these questions, I attempt to move away from the idea of place as enacting a set of prescribed social and ideological functions, and towards the idea of place as a fluid, dynamic and mobile event that may occupy the same site across different times, or may in turn resonate with nomadic ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980) that aim to radically restructure existing spatial practices, as evidenced in Pussy Riot’s ‘Punk prayer against Putin’.

Place as actor: Nation-building and the mythology of place

The trope of place has figured in the anthropological imaginary since at least the inception of modern ethnography. Having been methodologically legitimated by Malinowski’s (1922) account to examine intimate, bounded places found in a village, or amongst an isolated tribe, anthropologists of the first half of the 20th century were convinced that by looking at small, seemingly insular societies, larger cultural patterns would emerge. In other words, they saw place as a delimited part of space, as a microcosm for a larger world. As Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga reflect, ‘spatial dimensions of cultural beliefs and practices have always held an interest for anthropologists. Studies of tribal and village societies customarily included descriptions of the natural landscape and material conditions’ (1: 2003). The primacy of the local setting allows us to focus on place as an actor delimited by space, but involved in complex social and geopolitical forces that generate values and enact ideology, especially in the process of myth- and placemaking of an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1991) of the modern nation-state. Of course, this position limits us to a top-down perspective, viewing places as hierarchical, ordered and delineated; nevertheless, before we can ‘enter space from place itself’(Casey, 1997: 294), we must cover our ground and examine the ‘official’ account of the organization of space in the present-day Russian capital.

To this day, Moscow has retained the geographic model of a medieval city based on arteries flowing out of outwardly expanding concentric rings, with the historic, fortified Kremlin at the centre. This hierarchical ordering of space around the Kremlin allows us to regard the nearby place of the present-day Christ the Saviour Cathedral as instrumental throughout key epochs of pre-Revolutionary, Soviet and post-Soviet history. Thus, I examine the organization of space on that site through five key moments: the construction and demolition of the original 19th century Christ the Saviour Cathedral; the utopian avant-garde aspirations of city planners at the turn of the 20th century; the soon-to-be abandoned construction of the Palace of Soviets in the 1930s and 1940s; the Thaw-era swimming pool Moskva and the post-Soviet reconstruction of the cathedral.

Christ the Saviour Cathedral

Envisioned as forming part of a landscape, sacred spaces played an important role in establishing both the ontological and geopolitical status of a nascent, expansionist Russian empire. According to Susan E. Reid, ‘the symbolic significance of space was rooted in Russian religious culture’s tradition of sacred topography, whereby a landscape was articulated and given meaning homologously, that is, in structural relation to another, remote holy site’ (Reid, 2002: 152). The Tsar was considered a supreme monarch, an autocratic ruler of the Russian people as sanctioned by God. However, the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) the religious arm of the Russian empire, never existed as a leadership body and was under the law of the state. Consequently, sacred architecture of Russian Orthodox cathedrals was meant to inspire awe, emphasize the devotion of patrons and elevate the power of the sovereign and the Empire.

In 1812, following the bitter Russian victory over Napoleonic armies, Aleksandr I issued an order to build a cathedral ‘to signify our gratitude to Divine Providence for saving Russia from the doom that overshadowed her’ (Willis, 2013: 72). Plans for the cathedral materialized under Nicholas I, when an architect of the Imperial court, Konstantin Thon, designed the world’s tallest Russian Orthodox monument: a five-domed cathedral inspired by neo-Byzantine architecture. The cornerstone was laid in 1839 and work began on the interiors in 1858. Inside the cathedral, 177 marble slabs depicted every battle fought against Napoleon between 1812 and 1814 (Mihaylov, 2007). Christ the Saviour Cathedral, consecrated on the eve of Aleksandr III’s crowning as Tsar (Kirichenko, 1997) was not just a religious monument, but also an instrument of nation building.

Despite the monumental effort, public reception of the cathedral was lukewarm, reflecting the exorbitant cost of the construction, as well as the militant ‘Neo-Russian’ aesthetic, which was seen as ‘excessive, pompous, “in bad taste”’ (Boym, 1999: 52). Furthermore, ‘writers and members of the intelligentsia criticized the new cathedral for being a servile icon of official Russianness, the marriage of Church and Monarchy without “the people’s spirit”’ (Boym, 1999: 52). Increasing social unrest of the late 19th century rooted in disenchantment with the Monarchy created an unprecedented array of social and political movements. Emboldened by the Revolution of 1905 and foreshadowing the Bolshevik takeover in the Revolution of 1917, artists, writers, composers, architects and playwrights began to develop a poeisis through novel artistic forms, styles and tastes that both reflected and spurred the revolutionary pathos of their generation and fomented what was to become the Russian avant-garde of the early part of the 20th century.

The church and the factory

It was not place, but space, ‘always tending to the infinite’ (Casey, 1997: 294) that preoccupied the utopian city planners and avant-garde architects of the nascent Marxist-Leninist state. The predominant thought of the day was rooted in an environmental determinism that conceived of materiality as influencing consciousness. Thus, ‘space […] was a socializing project that undertook the formation of a new kind of person or moral subject. New ways of organizing the home, the workplace or the street would, in turn, produce a new consciousness’ (Crowley and Reid, 2002: 15). Galvanized by social change, the project of building a new world was conceived as the demolition and reconstruction of both the social and geographical pre-Revolutionary landscape:

City building became the most intensive sphere of developing the utopian thought. To the avant-gardists of the 1920s everything seemed possible, and everything that already existed—as aging and needing change. Everyone agreed that a blank slate was needed, emptying space for new systems. (Ikonnikov, 1995: 7)

A radical new heterotopic (Foucault, 1984) discourse emerged to foment this novel revolutionary consciousness amongst the early 20th century avant-garde. Thus, the founder of Suprematism, Kazimir Malevich, in his attempts to discover a universal language through novel forms of art in such paintings as ‘Black Square’ (1915a) or ‘Black Square and Red Square’ (1915b), was ‘convinced that these forms could help him construct a new “architecture” – in other words, a new relationship between man [sic] and the world, a new religion’ (Petrova, 2003: 92). Malevich compared the organization of Socialist society to its palaces and clubs, drawing parallels between the church and the factory:

The walls of both are decorated with countenances and portraits, also arranged according to merit or rank. Martyrs or heroes exist in both the former and the latter; their names are also listed as saints. There is no difference; on all sides, everything is identical, for the question is identical, the aim is identical, and the meaning is the quest for God. (Malevich in Petrova, 2003: 93)

For the newly established Marxist-Leninist ideology, this ontological position provided a set of myth- and placemaking imperatives that allowed the complete negation of pre-Revolutionary values and the design of a new social system through space.

Palace of Soviets

In contrast to the artistic movements of the 1920s favouring a new architectural language of society that amplified ‘asymmetry, dynamism of composition and the relationship between spaces flowing from one to another’ (Ovsiannikova, 1994: 5), by the early 1930s, Soviet policy came under the auspice of centralized discipline monitored by Joseph Stalin himself. By the decree of 1932, ‘On the Reconstruction of Literary and Art Organizations’ (Decree of the Central Committee of the VKP(b), 1932), Stalin established so-called objective scientific laws that were calibrated against Marxist–Leninist principles. This policy, which would soon become the theory of Socialist Realism, intended to glorify the socialist struggle by representing the proletariat in an idealized form. However, it also had several paradoxical consequences: on the one hand, it aimed to achieve liberation of all aspects of social, cultural and political life through complete ideological control (Yurchak, 2005: 40), and on the other, it functioned both to represent reality and to monumentalize it: ‘Architecture functioned in the socialist realist tradition rather the way the icon does in Russian Orthodox culture, in that it had a simultaneous existence in two orders of reality, sacred and profane’ (Clark, 2003: 11). The inverse relationship of the profane to the sacred will later become important in our analysis of Pussy Riot’s performance, which sought to challenge ideological control of sacred space through techniques of profanation.

In 1931, the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour became a target of a militantly atheistic Soviet state. Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov toured the territory of the Cathedral, issuing an order to demolish it to make way for the Palace of Soviets, the architectural embodiment of socialist cooperation. Between 1931 and 1933, several rounds of competitions evaluated Soviet and later, international designs. These ranged from classical architecture employing eclectic and traditional styles, to formalist avant-garde constructions employing clean lines and geometric forms (Khan-Magomedov, 1996). In 1931, one of the competitors, Boris Iofan, submitted blueprints for a neo-classical skyscraper, but received scathing reviews from a panel of judges who accused him of eclecticism and of pandering to bourgeois tastes:

The configuration of the building […] is innerly disharmonious and false, characteristic of foreign banks, hotels and offices – capitalist enterprises. The placement of a large figure of a worker bearing the likeness of the American Statue of Liberty gives the project a pseudo-proletarian character. (Kriukov, 1931)

In another publication, Iofan was accused of mixing ‘the principles of classical architecture’ with ‘blueprints of Egyptian and Assyro-Babylonian Cathedrals’ (Mihaylov, 2007: 3). However, by 1933, following the Socialist Realist decree, avant-garde architects were dismissed as youth falling into distracted fantasy and negating their architectural past, whereas Boris Iofan’s skyscraper was chosen as the favoured design, celebrated for the same reasons it was earlier dismissed.

In the final blueprints of the Palace of Soviets by Boris Iofan, Vladimir Gelfreikh and Vladimir Shuko, the original height was elevated from 220 to 416 m (Khan-Magomedov, 1996: 476), capped by a 100 -m statue of Lenin gesturing towards the Kremlin. Despite technological setbacks, work began in 1937 with the building of the circular foundation and the steel carcass. The spirit of the avant-garde may have been betrayed, but in a true instance of reterritorialization and re-enchantment (Landy and Saler, 2009), the new Palace of Soviets began ‘to serve as the antipode to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, [building] upon many religious myths, from ancient Egyptian paganism to Russian Christianity. Lenin took the place of the cross and cupola as a demigod’ (Petrova, 2003: 92).

The Palace of Soviets was not limited to its monumental or mythological functions. It was also designed to seat 20,000 delegates at an assembly hall reserved for International Congresses. By 1937, at the height of Stalinist purges, sculptural and monumental art was being planned inside the main spaces of the Palace of Soviets: ‘A colossal panorama of the Revolution is placed above the main hall, above which museum quarters form a tall composition together with the panorama, which serves as a grandiose pedestal for the giant figure of Lenin’ (Arkhitektura SSSR, 1937: 27–28). Susan E. Reid reminds us that statues and panoramas serve a greater function than to merely inspire Soviet patriotism: ‘monumental paining and sculpture could organize movement within, around and through the spaces they subtend’ (Reid, 2002: 162). The monumental staircase and the colossal plaza that was to adjoin the Great Hall to the territory of the Kremlin were also of great importance to the general plan, serving ‘as tribunes for the reception of demonstrations’ (Aranovich, 1934: 2), and ‘as a national forum—the space of collective socialization of the working classes: demonstrations, meetings, political carnivals, military and sporting spectacles, etc’ (Khan-Magomedov, 1996: 466). At that time, propaganda in the form of stamps and postcards bearing the design of the Palace began to circulate internationally. Thus, material, symbolic and ideological elements of the place combined to direct movement, assemble rallies and exhibit ideological spectacles, but were also meant to congeal the consciousness of the new socialist populace at home and abroad.

With the onset of the Great Patriotic War in 1941, construction on the Palace halted. Steel beams were disassembled and used to build bridges and barricades against German soldiers approaching Moscow (Khan-Magomedov, 1996: 466). The project was never revived after the war. Nevertheless, between 1947 and 1953, seven Stalinist skyscrapers nicknamed the ‘Seven Sisters’ were built in a spatial configuration around the non-existent Palace of Soviets.

In 1956, three years after Stalin’s death, Nikita Khrushchev delivered a ‘secret speech’ at the Twentieth Congress of Soviets, famously declaring that ‘it is impermissible and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics akin to those of a god’ (Khrushchev quoted in Fowkes, 2002: 81). Thus, began the official process of de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union. As the ‘Second Utopia’ of Soviet architecture crumbled during Khrushchev’s reforms, a ‘Third Utopia’, represented by the slogan ‘Communism by 1980’, emerged based on rational planning and bureaucracy (Ikonnikov, 1995: 8). Architectural projects aimed to solve the housing crisis and improve the lifestyles of ordinary citizens. Ironically, this was also when the curse of the nun was to be fulfilled, as the foundations of the Palace of Soviets were converted to accommodate the world’s largest outdoor swimming pool.

Swimming Pool Moskva

The flattening of the terrain of the Palace of Soviets was meant to give the impression that Stalin’s centralized, vertical hierarchy of power had gone the way of its leader. Whereas previous city planners relied on a medieval city model of concentric rings radiating from the Kremlin, in Khrushchev’s model, the centralized hierarchy was dissolved in favour of eight planning areas, signalling a shift from a vertical to a horizontal reordering ‘premised on equality of parts’ (Reid, 2002: 152). Reid analyses Khrushchev-era architecture as ‘emphasiz[ing] an easy-going horizontality and responsiveness to its surroundings’ (Reid, 2002: 160) presupposing the utopian dream that harmonious architecture would shape a person’s mentality, and thereby, a perfect communist society of the future (Reid, 2002: 147). Nevertheless, a degree of historical continuity lingered when the task of designing the swimming pool fell upon Dmitry Chechulin, a participant in the first round of competitions for the Palace of Soviets in 1931, the main city architect after the War, and the mastermind for one of the seven Stalinist skyscrapers on the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment.

The Swimming Pool Moskva embodied Khrushchev’s vision of promoting a healthy lifestyle of ordinary citizens, and this vision took on the form of the fizkultura regime (literally, physical culture) par excellence. In the Soviet Union, fizkultura was seen as an important way to inculcate values and beliefs in citizens, whereby physical fitness was both considered a leisure activity and a civic duty. O’Mahony examines the ‘complex relationship between sport as an officially approved social practice and as a subject of cultural production’ (O’Mahony, 2006: 9). The author argues that in the early Soviet Union the propaganda of sport, the positive effects of self-discipline and the aestheticization of the body – carefully cultivated through a socialist realist lens in literature, art and film – were aimed to create a ‘New Soviet Person’ (O’Mahony, 2006: 9). This archetype was of a selfless, ideological and physically healthy human being. ‘Physical culture’ – actively promoted by fizkultura brigades in factories, schools and organizations – could unite people for voluntary weekend labour or discipline soldiers in the army. Khrushchev’s promotion of fizkultura as leisure may have been a departure from the ideal of a ‘New Soviet Person’; nonetheless, it had an underlying ambition to inculcate positive behaviour in Soviet citizens. Behaviour, which we will later learn, could also be subverted.

Muscovites often fondly remember the giant circular outdoor swimming pool, open year-round. In the winters, in subfreezing temperatures, a giant cloud of vapour stood above it. An underwater ramp connected the dressing rooms to the pool, and one had to dive under to access the outdoor swimming area. However, more sinister myths of drownings and stabbings in the dense fog of the pool circulated as well.

Christ the Saviour Cathedral

Following a pivotal meeting between the ROC and Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as the 1990 legislation securing civil protections for religious practitioners and the inclusion of the ROC in the 1993 constitution following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it became widely acknowledged that the persecution of the church had ended. At the end of the 1980s, a newly established Fund to Rebuild the Cathedral of Christ the Savior began a grassroots initiative to reconstruct the demolished cathedral as the new seat of the Moscow Patriarchate. The mayor of Moscow, Yuriy Luzhkov, officially endorsed its reconstruction in 1994, placing tight deadlines on the project. Whereas it took almost half a century to build the first edifice, the reconstructed cathedral was to be ambitiously opened in 1997, for Moscow’s 850-year anniversary. It was to be consecrated for the ‘millenial anniversary of Christ’s birth’ (Posohin, 1995: 23) as explained by the secular architect of the restoration project. Because so little time was given to consultation over the cathedral’s reconstruction process, it was perceived as an inauthentic compromise, a critique not dissimilar to the reception of the original edifice. Scholars have underlined these continuities, suggesting that the resulting structure is a ‘continuation of the nineteenth-century mythology of Moscow’, which tried to ‘recreate nostalgia for eternal grandeur of the past as a time of mythical giants’ (Boym, 2001: 100).

After the lead architect, Aleksei Denisov, was fired from the project following disagreements with the Mayor’s office, Luzhkov’s favoured architect, Zurab Tsereteli – whose bronze statues have become a prominent, if unwelcome Moscow fixture – took over the reconstruction, substituting original Carrara marble reliefs for tacky, inauthentic bronze sculptures. Bruce Grant acknowledges that Tsereteli’s aesthetic decisions can be easily perceived as a continuation of Stalin-era monumentality: ‘From the neoclassical balustrades ringing the Manezh Plaza, to the vertiginously outsized scale and crushing weight of his monuments, the most celebrated artist of the late Soviet period everywhere provides state-sponsored visions of hierarchy and power’ (Grant, 2001: 350). Yet, Grant cautions against such an interpretation, arguing that Tsereteli’s grotesquely monumental sculptures bespeak of ‘an infantilization of public space that promotes an image of the new Russian capital as living in […] a “state of innocence”’ (Grant, 2001: 336). In the post-Soviet political imaginary, this state of innocence acts to subvert ‘questions of Soviet accountability after the fall of the USSR’, as well as to ‘[defer] expectations for a rise in standards of governance and standards of living’ (Grant, 2001: 351). Thus, we must acknowledge both the continuity between architecture of the 19th-, early 20th- and present centuries as amplifying power through vertically oriented structures, and the novelty of Christ the Saviour Cathedral as a manifestation of the metaphorical baptism of the new Russian state.

In the redesign of the cathedral, a state of innocence is represented by the absence of original features, but also by the presence of a new assembly hall for 1500 people, dozens of elevators connecting the space to another underground church, a museum and a parking garage for over 300 vehicles. Private enterprises operating on that space, including antique and jewellery shops, legal services and a car wash, receive municipal subsidies and tax exemptions. The property is owned and managed by the Christ the Saviour Cathedral Fund established during the fund-raising efforts to build the cathedral and to which ownership of the property was transferred upon its completion. Having accepted over 10 million private donations, the Fund rents out only 7% of the physical space to the Moscow Patriarchate for religious duties (Fomina, 2012: 2). The space of the cathedral has become intimately connected with Russia’s neoliberal market economy, a disenchanting state of innocence of both the state and the ROC.

Several events, such as the 1997 legislation that restricted religious freedom to non-Orthodox practitioners, the document The Basis of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church (2000) and the design of the course ‘Fundamentals of Religious Culture and Secular Ethics’ (2012) in state schools, have given scholars pause in the way the interests of the church and state have consolidated since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Some have suggested that while the ROC shares its nationalist vision with the Russian Federation, it is by no means subservient to it (Richters, 2013), while others argue that the ROC is increasingly acting as a moral voice for the Russian state (Zigon, 2011).

Whether these predictions receive further validation will remain to be seen, but in the preceding analysis I have examined the way each place – Christ the Saviour Cathedral, the Palace of Soviets or the Swimming Pool Moskva – expresses particular social, political and ideological goals, whether those goals are imperial expansionism or a state of innocence; totalitarianism or utopian avant-garde life building. I have also examined an underlying quality of places as able to influence and direct actions, control movement and inculcate values. Woven through the analysis, this thread focused on the way places are capable of acting on their occupants. As we dive into the next set of connections for examining place, the question of how occupants influence places remains. I suggest that one fruitful approach to take is to analyse ‘the technique and work of collective and practical reasons’, or habitus (Mauss, 1934: 71). Pierre Bourdieu expands on this concept, analysing how cultural patterns can become politically and socially inscribed on the body. Habitus need not be overdetermined; individuals may at times internalize and tacitly reproduce social practices, but they may also skilfully negotiate the effects of power and its ambiguities (Bourdieu, 1972: 95). It is through embodied practices that we will connect Pussy Riot’s contentious performance with the concept of place as ‘taking on the qualities of its occupants, reflecting these qualities in its own constitution and description and expressing them in its occurrence as an event: places not only are, they happen’ (Casey, 1996: 27).

Place as event: Embodied experience, subversive affirmation and Pussy Riot

A place affects our bodies. As Casey explains

the lived body is profoundly affected by its architectural setting […] and conversely, a building bears ‘the signature of the body’ in its own design and construction and use; it is usually intended, after all, to be inhabited by bodies that dwell and work therein. (Casey, 1997: 317)

How, then, do we get back from cultural patterns inscribed on the body, to a sense of place? Casey asserts that we are always already there ‘by our own lived body’ (Casey, 1996: 21). We train our bodies to stand in churches, march down steps or swim in bodies of water, which are all places: ‘to be located culture also has to be embodied. Culture is carried into places by bodies. To be encultured is to be embodied to begin with’ (Casey, 1996: 34). Habitus, for Casey, reconciles the philosophical misconception of the primacy of space, considered an a priori universal onto which cultural particularities are inscribed and turned into places. Bodies are ‘encultured and emplaced and enculturating and emplacing’ (Casey, 1996: 34). Keith Basso describes this ‘inter-animation’ as one where ‘as places animate the ideas and feelings of persons who attend to them, these same ideas and feelings animate the places on which attention has been bestowed’ (Basso, 1996: 55). We embody practice in a place, and in turn, a place embodies our practice.

Thus, we reconcile the objectivist and subjectivist understanding of place, since ‘human subjectivity […] arises not in opposition to material reality but as an expression of material reality, and place is, in this sense, the point at which the consciousness-environment nexus takes shape and can best be understood’ (Prieto, 2013: 25). I will go further still and suggest that if a place has the capacity to ‘happen’, it can also foment conditions for its own radical reinterpretation. Turning back to Christ the Saviour Cathedral, I analyse how bodies can conform to, or subvert existing practices of places, and how places can be redefined through customary or improvisatory techniques of the body.

Subversive affirmation

Several authors have examined the way Soviet citizens in the socialist era engaged in ways to subvert the habitus of place against practices prescribed by the ideological state apparatus. Crowley and Reid argue that ‘much as authority sought to control the meanings and uses of space, the spatial practices of citizens were not contained by the party-state machine. But they were still made in relation to its priorities and tactics’ (Crowley and Reid, 2002: 4). In the post-Soviet era, strategic techniques of the body that subverted the use of space persisted among the Russian avant-garde of the 1990s, but took on a decidedly public form in the movement known as Moscow Actionism.

Tactics of ‘subversive affirmation’ (Arns and Sasse, 2005) used the body as a strategy of resistance that appeared, at least on the surface, as agreement with the adversary position, but allowed for its simultaneous subversion. Most importantly, in order to gain resonance, these tactics used strategic places. Thus, in 1994, in a performative action protesting the construction of Christ the Saviour Cathedral, Aleksandr Brener climbed onto the diving board of the Swimming Pool Moskva and began to publicly masturbate. IRWIN, a collective of Slovenian artists dressed in suits and black ties performed an action on the Red Square, the most sacred place in Moscow, entitled ‘Black Square on the Red Square’ (1992) unfolding a giant black square flag – homage to Kazimir Malevich. They were so convincing in their performance that law enforcement personnel began helping unfurl a flag declaring sovereignty of a non-existent state. Such techniques elevated the performance from the mundane to sacred, ritualistic and ‘official’ action (Osmolovsky, 2011).

Staging an event

Pussy Riot’s action inside Christ the Saviour Cathedral could well be conceived as a strategy of subversive affirmation reminiscent of Moscow Actionist tactics and in accord with Pavel Florenskii’s invocation of church ritual as ‘the highest synthesis of heterogeneous artistic activities’ (Florenskii, 2002). Here, we find a successful oscillation between the provocative and affirmative, sacred and profane, embodied and ideological. Thus, the group did cover their heads according to Orthodox habitus, but replaced the traditional headscarf with an anonymous balaclava, a ‘mask of de-individualization, of liberating anonymity’, according to Slavoj Zizek (2012). That is why it later became so important to arrest and unveil the perpetrators of the ‘Punk Prayer’. Similarly, during Pussy Riot’s court trial, their dresses were deemed too short to embody modesty; rather, they came to represent feminism, which according to a victim impact statement read out in court by a female candle-keeper, was ‘an insulting, immodest word for an Orthodox believer’ (Masiuk, 2012). Western scholars have taken notice of Russian women’s hostility towards feminism in the Post-Soviet era (Gal and Kligman, 2000; Kuehnhast and Nechemias, 2004), to which the conservative attitudes of the ROC have undoubtedly contributed and which Pussy Riot deliberately challenged.

Pussy Riot’s name itself suggests a radical, revolutionary break from commoditized, capitalist appropriation of women’s bodies. The group’s ‘Punk Prayer’ reinvigorates a feminist critique of patriarchy embodied both in church rites and the state/body politic. ‘Punk Prayer’ lyrics read, ‘Don’t upset his Saintship [referring to Vladimir Putin], women should make love and babies’, and ‘Rites cannot take the place of rallies, the Holy Virgin is at our protest’ (Pussy Riot, 2012). These lines highlight the tensions embodied in post-Soviet discourses on women’s roles. The lyric: ‘Patriarch Gundy believes in Putin, better believe in God, you bitch!’ (Pussy Riot, 2012), denounces the alliance between church and state, evident in the Patriarch’s endorsement of Putin’s 2012 election campaign. Pussy Riot’s performance is a political critique of patriarchal oppression of women, and of the church and state in their hypocritical abuses of wealth and power. The ‘Punk Prayer’ is a strategy of subversive affirmation, but one that has the ambition to depoliticize the church through politics and desacralize politics through ‘prayer’. It is also an attempt to eventualize the place of the cathedral, subversively retaliating against a prescribed set of complacent actions that inform church habitus. However, if Pussy Riot redefined a place as an event, they themselves became actors that changed and modified the place into something spontaneous and improvised. To borrow from the terminology of Deleuze and Guattari (1980), Pussy Riot members became ‘nomads’ aiming to deterritorialize the ‘striated space’ of the cathedral, which acted to exclude them based on their infringement of prescribed, gendered habitus.

What does Pussy Riot’s action mean for our understanding of place? For nomads, space is vast; it is an entire region across which they travel. Points do not necessarily exist as destinations, and the nomad occupies a territory and travels between places: ‘the life of the nomad is the intermezzo’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980: 380). For the nomad then, ‘place itself is everywhere’ (Casey, 1997: 305). Casey attempts to explain this paradoxical situation: ‘more important than locality (qua unit) is the “local operation” (the action), whereby I make my way through the localities that punctuate a region, modifying them along the way’ (Casey, 1997: 305). When Pussy Riot performed a set of ‘local operations’ in the place of the cathedral, they severed a set of connections that made the place what it formerly was: a site for the re-enactment of church habitus. According to Deleuze and Guattari, they pursued a line of flight that broke with the bounded and striated space, creating nomadic ‘smooth space’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980) marking the deterritorialization of the cathedral.

Why is it important to analyse the dual identity of place in its capacity as an actor and as an event? Because in the case of Pussy Riot’s performance, the place retaliated. The few witnesses in an otherwise empty cathedral – church security guards, a candle keeper, a cleaner and a treasurer who all became the injured party during the trial (Lipman, 2012) – were not the instigators of a criminal court case that sent Pussy Riot members to prison. All they had to do was confirm that Pussy Riot knowingly entered a forbidden, sacred space. If Pussy Riot deterritorialized and disenchanted the place of the cathedral, the place was made to enact the opposite movement of reterritorialization and re-enchantment in full force. Memories of the place began to resonate once again as officials from the Moscow Patriarchate denounced Pussy Riot’s action comparing their assault on the cathedral to the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust, and the church, to soldiers in the Second World War who ‘rejected any propagandistic lures that would destroy a person’s consciousness, disorient, and tear at his will’ (Melnikov, 2012: 2). They even blamed the women for disrespecting the memory of fallen soldiers of 1812 (Melnikov, 2012: 2). Above re-establishing the cathedral as a venerated, and thus forbidden site, the ROC undoubtedly saw Pussy Riot’s action as an opportunity to reassert and legitimize itself. Pierre Bourdieu calls these types of tactics, ‘officializing strategies; the object of which is to transmute “egoistic,” private, particular interests […] into disinterested, collective, publicly avowable legitimate interests’ (Bourdieu, 1972: 40). Theirs was another performative act reasserting the ROC’s relevance by reterritorializing space.

The habitus of forced compliance came into play during the trial, when Pussy Riot members were made to sit in a glass cell for a gruelling 10–12 h a day, five days a week. There were no microphones in the cell, so the women had to communicate with the judge and their lawyers by crouching in front of the mail slot. They were deprived of sleep, water, food and toilets. Defence witnesses were not given speaking time and there were few breaks in the court process (Masiuk, 2012: 6). The judge and state prosecutor probed witnesses on whether they believed in God, followed Orthodox fasts or attended church on Sundays. Religious documents from the fourth century outlining penalties for heretics were read out in court (Masiuk, 2012: 6) and were even evoked by a panel of experts trying to prove that Pussy Riot members were motivated by ‘religious hatred’ (Egorova et al., 2012) – a key detail in ascertaining culpability – all of which re-enchanted the place of the courtroom.

In a recent publication, Anya Bernstein retraces how the bodies of the three Pussy Riot members were subject to a voyeuristic and objectifying gaze of media, the state and the intelligentsia on all sides of the political spectrum. Her examination underscores Pussy Riot’s inadvertent sacrifice as women, mothers and political activists (Bernstein, 2013). I find it productive to complement her reading with an analysis of place, connecting human bodies to non-human entities such as churches, cathedrals and palaces. Pussy Riot’s line of flight aimed at deterritorialization and disenchantment was met by a line of force that re-enchanted and reterritorialized both their bodies and the place embodied in their actions as a strategic placeholder for specific actors vying for relevance and legitimacy.

Furthermore, we can recall the story of the head nun who was forcibly carried out from the territory of the future Christ the Saviour Cathedral. This account resonates with us precisely because it has both a mythologizing, enchanting quality (the curse of the nun), and the mundane, disenchanted and profane reality (a clerical figure being forcibly dragged out from the monastery she wanted to die in). Pussy Riot’s action bears dramatic resemblance: enchantment uttered in the form of a prayer, the sacrifice, the threat of corporal punishment embodied in a physical removal from their dwelling place. However, I want to avoid explaining Pussy Riot’s action as a sacrifice, thus reproducing the discourse of martyrdom that Bernstein (2013) warns comes with the ‘reconstitution of political sovereignty’ (229–230). Construed as a sacrifice, it is necessarily accompanied by a process of purification that moulds Pussy Riot participants into martyrs and usurps the political message of their performance, restoring the imbalance of power between them and the political elite. Instead, I suggest it is productive to see their action as an a priori political, nomadic line of flight that attempted to deterritorialize striated space and change the configurations of the place of Christ the Saviour Cathedral, turning it into an event.

After a five-month silence following the Punk Prayer, Vladimir Putin made a public statement proclaiming that Pussy Riot ‘should not be judged too harshly for what they did’ (Kostiuchenko, 2012), but that they should be judged to the full extent of the law. Commentators suggested this was a win-win declaration showing that he was both benevolent and rational. Thus, the head of state, himself oscillating between enchantment and disenchantment, voiced his verdict, reterritorializing the court process as his domain and concurrently placating the demands of Russian Orthodox clergy. On 17 August 2012, the three Pussy Riot members received two-year sentences to be served in women’s corrective labour colonies. One member was released on 10 October 2012, following an appeal to the Moscow City Court. Having served over a year and a half in prisons and labour camps and having undergone hunger strikes and extended prison hospital stays, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina were released under amnesty on 23 December 2013. Alyokhina immediately expressed her frustration at what she perceived was a politically motivated move to appease international pressure preceding the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi: ‘If I had a choice, I would have refused Putin’s benevolence’ (Alyokhina, 2013).

Conclusion

At the writing of this paper, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina are no longer members of the anonymous, all-female anarchist punk collective Pussy Riot; a law has been signed into effect incriminating those who hurt the feelings of Orthodox believers, and Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian accountant and whistle-blower has been found guilty of tax evasion and sentenced to nine years in prison in a truly enchanted posthumous trial. Several weeks after the Olympic Truce in Sochi, military forces in unmarked uniforms were in the Crimean Peninsula, and in line with imperial expansionist aspirations to reterritorialize space, Russia’s geopolitical borders were once again being redrawn with all the ensuing international consequences. The message is clear: we no longer live in a state of innocence.

In the second half of the 20th century, anthropologists began to seek new methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of places, acknowledging that in an increasingly globalized, interconnected world, ‘old localizing strategies—by bounded community, by organic culture, by region, by center and periphery—may obscure as much as they reveal’ (Clifford, 1994: 303). Arjun Appadurai (1996) reminded us that, ‘the landscapes of group identity—the ethnoscapes—around the world are no longer familiar anthropological objects, insofar as groups are no longer tightly territorialized, spatially bounded, historically unselfconscious, or culturally homogeneous’ (Appadurai, 1996: 47). All the more so, since in urban environments architects and city planners rarely start from a blank slate, having to reconcile with material remnants of previous eras and ideologies (Crowley and Reid, 2002). This paper attempted to heed Appadurai’s call for ethnography to ‘capture the impact of deterritorialization on the imaginative resources of lived, local experiences’ (Appadurai, 1996: 52). It is also, by extension, an attempt to practice what George Marcus (1995) calls ‘multi-sited ethnography’ in a strategically situated way, without having to move very far from one place. This method is consistent with the paradigm advanced by new mobilities scholars, who imagine places as ‘not so much fixed as implicated within complex networks by which hosts, guests, buildings, objects, and machines are brought together to produce certain performances in certain places at certain times’ (Sheller and Urry, 2006: 214). This prompts us to examine places as dynamic entities, modified and modifying their surroundings and radically restructuring existing practices.

Through a peripatetic account of Christ the Saviour Cathedral, I attempted to reconcile the dual identity of place as actor, capable of enacting change, and as event, ‘taking on the qualities of its occupants’ (Casey, 1996: 27). I have explored the way places affect and are affected by human interaction and I examined the movement of places through vectors of deterritorialization and reterritorialization; disenchantment and re-enchantment. On the surface, the recent history of the site of Christ the Saviour cathedral suggests that each new movement to sever social and cultural practices from a place is a movement towards deterritorialization and rationalization: the flattening of the double-tented church; the explosive demolition of the white marble Cathedral; the dismantling of the steel carcass of the Palace of Soviets; the filling of its foundations with a swimming pool, and a performance that reinterpreted the repressive habitus of a place. However, as each successive movement attempted to create its own set of myth- and placemaking imperatives, the opposite process of reterritorialization and re-enchantment (Landy and Saler, 2009) also occurred and reconfigured existing practices of the place. Here, we are reminded that ‘space is a way of dealing with history, a spatial history, a way of making historical myths’ (Tlostanova in Suchland, 2014). I argued that these movements in space can occur in many different forms, including the construction of striated spaces of utopian monuments that soar to dizzying heights and inculcate habitus, or the improvised and subversive techniques of the body that dislocate it. Above all, I tried to avoid edifying those forces whose legitimacy and rational authority are precisely called into question by their own often-irrational practices, whether these practices answer to a curse or a prayer.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I wish to express heartfelt gratitude to my family in inspiring me to write this paper: Irina Gavrilova’s candid and intellectual accounts of her life in Moscow prompted a much closer read into the city’s history, Tatiana Gavrilova meticulously tracked and enhanced my sources on Pussy Riot, Masha Yecheistova made a significant contribution to the research on the competition for the Palace of Soviets, and Olga Gan, in addition to poignantly recalling her swims at the Moscow Pool, suggested countless improvements, proofread various versions and provided much warmth and engaging conversation during the writing process. Further gratitude must be expressed to Dr Alexia Bloch and Dr Leslie Robertson for their attentive readings and suggestions following several versions of this paper. The author also wishes to thank three anonymous reviewers who provided detailed suggestions and offered creative solutions to problems in the earlier version of this manuscript. Finally, I owe a tremendous intellectual debt to Dr Sharon Roseman, without whose insight and encouragement this work would not, and could not, have been written. It is to her that I dedicate this paper. The author is much indebted to each individual mentioned herein; however, the responsibility for any mistakes or omissions rests solely with him.

Author Biography

Gregory Gan is an Anthropologist and filmmaker whose current PhD research at the University of British Columbia spans the themes of transnationalism, visual anthropology, material culture and the Russian diaspora. Gregory’s ethnographic work commonly engages in multi-sited fieldwork approaches and visual anthropology methods. He has made several ethnographic films, including two feature-length films: ‘Turning Back the Waves’ (2009, 96 min) on women of the Russian intelligentsia, and ‘The Theory of Happiness’ (2014, 82 min), where he became a participant in a radical Ukrainian sect trying to discover happiness through mathematical formulas. Gregory has an Honorary BA from the University of Toronto and an MA from Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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