New Russia, Same Old Oppression

From MOSCOW (Reuters) -

Three women from the Russian punk band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in jail on Friday for their protest in a church against President Vladimir Putin, an outcome supporters described as the Kremlin leader's "personal revenge".

The group's backers burst into chants of "Shame" outside the Moscow courthouse and said the case showed Putin's refusal to tolerate dissent in his new six-year term as president. Dozens were detained as tensions rose and scuffles broke out.

The United States and the European Union condemned the sentence as disproportionate and asked for it to be reviewed, although state prosecutors had demanded a three-year jail term and the maximum sentence possible was seven years. But while the women have support abroad, where their case has been taken up by a long list of celebrities including Madonna, Paul McCartney and Sting, opinion polls show few Russians sympathise with them.
"The girls' actions were sacrilegious, blasphemous and broke the church's rules," Judge Marina Syrova told the court as she spent three hours reading the verdict while the women stood watching in handcuffs inside a glass courtroom cage.

She declared all three guilty of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred, saying they had deliberately offended Russian Orthodox believers by storming the altar of Moscow's main cathedral in February to belt out a song deriding Putin. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, Marina Alyokhina, 24, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30, giggled as the judge read out the sentences one by one.
They have already been in jail for about five months, meaning they will serve only another 19, and could be released if Putin were to pardon them. The Orthodox Church hinted it would not oppose such a move by appealing, belatedly, for mercy.

Pussy Riot took on two powerful state institutions at once when they burst into Moscow's golden-domed Christ the Saviour Cathedral wearing bright ski masks, tights and short skirts to protest against Putin's close ties with the Church.
Putin's opponents depicted the case as part of a crackdown by the ex-KGB spy against a protest movement that took off over the winter, attracting what witnesses said were at times crowds of 100,000 people in Moscow to oppose his return to power.

"They are in jail because it is Putin's personal revenge," Alexei Navalny, one of the organisers of the protests, said outside the court. "This verdict was written by Vladimir Putin." Putin's spokesman did not immediately answer calls following the verdict, but the president's supporters said before the trial that he would have no influence on the court's decision.

Declaring the sentence to be just, Irina Yarovaya, a parliamentary deputy from Putin's United Russia party, said: "They deserved it."
A police source told Itar-Tass news agency 50 people had been detained by police near the court after scuffles broke out. Among them were Sergei Udaltsov, a leftist opposition leader, and Garry Kasparov, the chess great and vehement Putin critic.

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Despite the fall of the so-called 'communist' block, or more correctly totalitarian state capitalism, the allegedly new found 'freedom' of Western style democracy has been revealed as the sham it is in every other country, a small token gesture that can be removed at any time. As with many countries, the accepted sense of 'freedom of speech' is often found wanting in practice, as underlined by this case.
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