Pussy Riot Unleashes Anti-Sochi Music Video, ‘Putin Will Teach You How To Love The Motherland’

Pussy Riot is back. The Russian political performance art protest collective unleashed a new music video Thursday that includes footage of the group’s members being attacked and manhandled by Russian police and, surprisingly, features the two most famous members, or ex-members, of the group who were recently kicked out of Pussy Riot.

The video is set to the soundtrack of a new, fast, loud punk-rock protest song entitled, “Putin Will Teach You How To Love The Motherland.” As always, the lyrics include scathing put-downs of Russian leader Vladimir Putin. But this time, the main Pussy Riot target is the Sochi Winter Olympic Games themselves, which Pussy Riot see as simply a propaganda vehicle for Putin.

The lyrics proclaim that, “Sochi is blocked – Olympic surveillance / Special forces, weapons, crowds of cops.” In the video, viewable below, the lyrics are supported by images of Pussy Riot members under attack by police.

The song also ridicules the high cost of the Olympic Games as well as the “two ass toilets,” which posed a brief embarrassment for the Russian organizers. A men’s room in a Sochi facility was photographed with two toilets in a single stall — presenting a situation most Western visitors would find unusual to say the least.

Nadia Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina, the two Pussy Riot members who were recently freed after two years in the Russian prison system for an earlier protest and who recently toured the United States appearing on several TV talk shows, appear in the video — which was a surprising development since recently other members of Pussy Riot announced that the group had expelled them.

Apparently, whatever rift existed has since healed, as the pair spoke at a Pussy Riot press conference blasting the Sochi Olympics.

“The Olympics have turned… an authoritarian regime into a totalitarian regime with preventative arrests,” said Tolokonnikova at the press conference. “The Olympics creates a space for the complete destruction of human rights in Russia. Here we are banned from speaking out. Here everyone’s rights are banned, including political activist, LGBT representatives, ecologists.”

The International Olympic Committee, however, fretted that Pussy Riot were using the Sochi Games as a “political platform.”

“It’s a shame the Olympics are used as a political platform,” said IOC Spokesperson Mark Adams. “We ask that the Olympics are not used as a platform to express political views, and we continue to say that.”

Here is the new Pussy Riot video, “Putin Will Teach You How To Love The Motherland.”