[dirtboy]

Whether they have climbed in or not is besides the point. There has been a law for years on a person getting jailed if they did such a thing in a Church.

Two years for simple trespass.

If you can't see that Putin is using this to crack down on dissent, well, maybe you need to read up on some Orwell or Solzhenitsyn.

[Cronos]

I've read most of Orwell include Down and Out in London and Paris and yes some of Solzhenitsyn -- and I've lived for the past two years in Warsaw, so yeah I know the Russian threat and yeah I dislike Putin

However Pussy Riot is not a legitimate opposition, they're just anarchists

and, the law which remember has existed for some years is the law. This was not "simple trepass" as you state but disrespect for the Orthodox Church.

[Antoninus]

If you can't see that Putin is using this to crack down on dissent, well, maybe you need to read up on some Orwell or Solzhenitsyn.

The group's members are part of a larger protest group called Voina, which has previously been involved in various acts of public nuisance, including group sex in a museum and shoplifting a whole chicken from a supermarket by stuffing into an activist's lady parts.

Sounds exactly like Solzhenitsyn.

[piasa]

They might have earned a sympathetic ear if they had kept their "political" protesting outside the church and in front of a political venue. Instead, they do Putin a genuine favor by acting like sluts and jackasses, insuring that the faithful would never want to associate themselves with "dissidents."

A *brilliant* move it is to give one's enemy the opportunity to play defender of the faith. Putin could not have asked for better helpers.

That people defend this behavior and even compare it to "classic" Russian dissidents like Solzhenitzen is galling.