JULGAMENTO PUSSY RIOT | ALEGAÇÕES FINAIS DE MARIA ALYOKHINA

"This trial is highly typical and speaks volumes. The current government will have occasion to feel shame and embarrassment because of it for a long time to come. At each stage it has embodied a travesty of justice. As it turned out, our performance, at first a small and somewhat absurd act, snowballed into an enormous catastrophe. This would obviously not happen in a healthy society. Russia, as a state, has long resembled an organism sick to the core. And the sickness explodes out into the open when you rub up against its inflamed abscesses. At first and for a long time this sickness gets hushed up in public, but eventually it always finds resolution through dialogue. And look—this is the kind of dialogue that our government is capable of. This trial is not only a malignant and grotesque mask, it is the 'face' of the government’s dialogue with the people of our country. (...)

What really irritates me is how the prosecution uses the words 'so-called' in reference to contemporary art. I would like to point out that very similar methods were used during the trial of the poet [Joseph] Brodsky. His poems were defined as 'so-called' poems; the witnesses for the prosecution hadn’t actually read them—just as a number of the witnesses in our case didn’t see the performance itself and only watched the clip online. (...) But for me this trial is a 'so-called' trial. And I am not afraid of you. I am not afraid of falsehood and fictitiousness, of sloppily disguised deception, in the verdict of the so-called court. Because all you can deprive me of is 'so-called' freedom. This is the only kind that exists in Russia". (aqui)