Pussy Riot's World Cup pitch invasion

Yesterday’s Russian FIFA World Cup final will be remembered not only for the great plays of the two teams on the pitch, but also for the curious incident occured at the beginning of the second half of the match. Four people, three women and a man, dressed as old-school policemen, ran onto the pitch: Croatian defender Dejan Lovren helped the stewards to catch one of the invaders, while France’s forward Kylian Mbappe high-fived one of the girls. The protesters were dragged out of the pitch by policemen and Pussy Riot later claimed responsability for the action with a video uploaded on YouTube.

The punk rock Russian collective, feminist and politically engaged, has a long list of similar actions. The activists of the group – mainly composed of women – have been fighting for years for democracy and LGBT rights in Russia, against Putin’s repressive politics. Yesterday’s protest, which took place in front of Putin, who was watching from a box, was entitled by the Pussy Riot Policeman enters the game. The action was mainly a demonstration against Russian police: among the group’s demands there are the release of all political prisoners, the end of fabricated criminal cases against political opponents and detention of protesters. Moreover, the collective explained that it was 11 years since the death of Russian poet Dmitrii Prigov, who created an image of an extremely masculine policeman, which engraved in the society’s culture. The collective wanted also to draw attention on Oleg Sentsov’s case, a vocal opponent of Russia’s Crimea annexation in 2014, who was sentenced to 20 years of detention for cospiracy to commit terror acts and has been on a hunger strike since last May.

Yesterday’s incident was the only moment of protest and opposition to the regime in a World Cup unanimously praised for the organization and the final outcome. Pussy Riot brought the audience back to reality, but more than them were the policemen. During the interrogation, in fact, a police officer said that he is sorry that we don't live in Stalin’s 1937 anymore, otherwise he could have shot the protesters. An apparently trival and shallow protest like yesterday’s one has actually much more deeper implications and recounts a society still complicated and conflictual.