Photo by Igor Mukhin.

The women of Pussy Riot were not the first punks to disrupt a European church service in the name of art or protest. One hundred and twenty years ago, followers of Louis Auguste Blanqui, the socialist theorist, disrupted a French mass with cries of “Long live the Commune!” and “Down with the Church!” On Easter Sunday, 1950, members of the ascendent Letterist movement assumed the altar at Notre Dame dressed as Benedictine monks, where one of them, Michel Mourre, read a sermon penned by cohort Serge Berna:

Today, Easter day of the Holy Year,
Here, under the emblem of Notre-Dame of Paris,
I accuse the universal Catholic Church of the lethal diversion of our living strength toward an empty heaven,
I accuse the Catholic Church of swindling,
I accuse the Catholic Church of infecting the world with its funereal morality,
Of being the running sore on the decomposed body of the West.
Verily I say unto you: God is dead,
We vomit the agonizing insipidity of your prayers,
For your prayers have been the greasy smoke over the battlefields of our Europe.
Go forth then into the tragic and exalting desert of a world where God is dead,
And till this earth anew with your bare hands,
With your PROUD hands,
With your unpraying hands.
Today Easter day of the Holy Year,
Here under the emblem of Notre-Dame of Paris,
We proclaim the death of the Christ-god, so that Man may live at last.

At least, Mourre intended to read that sermon. Before he could finish, an angry mob chased the false monks from the cathedral, and only swift arrest saved them from dismemberment by the Catholic crowd. The Letterists were not imprisoned for long.

Three members of Pussy Riot — an all-girl punk band who, to date, have yet to record an album — were sentenced today to two years in prison for their assault on a Russian Orthodox service last December, even though their behavior was far less provocative than that of the Letterists, and even though blasphemy is far less scandalous in 2012 than it was in 1950. Of course, Russia is not France. France has long been vaguely Catholic on paper, while remaining secular in fact; Russia has long been Russian Orthodox in fact, while on paper resolutely (and, under Communism, militantly) godless. In Russia, considerable public opprobrium may yet be manufactured by accusing people of blasphemy. The particular crime of which the members of Pussy Riot were convicted was “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.”

This is, at best, morosely ironic. When four members of Pussy Riot entered Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ last December and began to perform one of their songs, they did not insult Jesus or the tenets of Russian Orthodoxy. Rather, Pussy Riot petitioned the Virgin Mother to put Putin in jail, and accused the Orthodox hierarchy of toadyism, denigrating the Church only insofar as it had subverted its own principles to remain in Putin’s good favor. Which the Church plainly has. The Church’s Patriarch, Kiril I, is a friend and supporter of Putin’s, and Russians seldom hear clergy decrying Putin’s human rights abuses and crimes against free speech from the pulpit.

It is unlikely that Patriarch Kiril or Judge Marine Syrova, who handed down Pussy Riot’s sentence, have forgotten Vladimir Putin’s own acts of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.” When he was a high-ranking KGB officer, Soviet law enforcement regularly imprisoned priests for their missionary or democratic zeal, while the KGB engaged in a secret infiltration of the upper reaches of Russian Orthodox hierarchy, intentionally destroying for generations the church’s moral and spiritual authority. This is rather worse than disrupting a mass with a punk song, yet Vladimir Putin and his fellow KGB have yet to be arrested.

Cathedral of Christ, France, hooliganism, Letterists, Louis Auguste Blanqui, Michel Mourre, Moscow, Notre Dame, Pussy Riot, Russia, Serge Berna, Virgin Mother, Vladimir Putin