Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot performs at Secret Solstice Festival powered by Icelandic Glacial on June 21, 2019 in Reykjavik, Iceland.
Matthew Eisman/Getty Images for Icelandic Glacial
Pussy Riot never stop pushing the envelope. The Russian punk collective stormed back on Tuesday (July 9) with an in-your-face video for their dark environmental disaster nursery rhyme “Black Snow,” which was accompanied by photos of a series of subversive guerilla actions they undertook in Russian forests earlier this year to protest what they say is Russian president Vladimir Putin’s disregard for their country’s environment.
“You fill the Russian North with unprocessed garbage (see Shiyes and 10 million tons of Moscow waste). You criminalize ecological activists (see 5 new cases against Alexandra Koroleva, the co-chair of Ecodefense!). Meanwhile, the inhabitants of Kuzbass are forced to seek environmental asylum in Canada to escape intolerable living conditions, high rates of oncological illness, black snow, poisoned water, and the indifference of local government officials,” member Nadya Tolokonnikova wrote in an open statement addressed to “Putin and his Cronies” that was released alongside the video. “their People in Kuzbass ask: “How can you be a patriot of something or someone who won’t even notice how we live? How we breathe? What we drink?” Listen, this is just completely unacceptable.”
The song, which features a screwed and chopped interpolation of the traditional English nursery rhyme “London Bridge is Falling Down,” pulls no punches in enumerating the kinds of environmental issues facing the nation. “A blizzard’s burning out my air, we’re buried in ash we’re the furthest from Pluto/ We’re a nuclear planet we’ve dominated nature, but we’re slaves to the internet/ I’m marching in the ranks and quietly crying about it,” Tolokonnikova sings. “Red water flows in Russian Russian rivers/ Dust sticks to my eyelids, I’m hanging on a thread.”
The photos of the actions from earlier this year include images of the lyrics (as well as phrases such as “eat the rich” and “we need a new earth”) on giant banners hung in forests and in the letter Tolokonnikova talks about growing up in the industrial city of Norilsk, where she says they had “black blizzards,” and she used to play on “giant mountains of slag” amid dead trees with black branches whose leaves “have necrosis from acid rain.” Click here to read the full letter.
Watch the “Black Snow” video below.
The group is also slated to play a fundraiser for Planned Parenthood and Yellowhammer Fund on Thursday (July 11) in Birmingham, Alabama, in protest of the state’s recent passage of the nation’s most restrictive anti-abortion law.