Turning Point: The death of George Floyd, a Black man who was handcuffed and pinned down by a white police officer in Minneapolis in May, sparked demonstrations around the world.
In 2020 we were not only hit by a global pandemic, but also by police batons. We watched as protesters around the world breathed in air thick with tear gas, lost their eyesight from rubber bullets and endured torture and, in some cases, death. We desperately tried to find our loved ones among those arrested and imprisoned for participating in peaceful protests.
This was a year of radical political imagination: 2020 invited us to take our dreams seriously and inspired us to envision a better, alternative future.
I’ve been an active part of the anti-authoritarian, feminist and L.G.B.T.Q. communities since 2007. When I co-founded the activist band Pussy Riot in 2011, I could only dream of a time when feminist and queer communities would thrive in Russia, and when mainstream performers would be involved in our anti-Kremlin rallies. But global activists have achieved so much in recent years. My arrest and imprisonment with another Pussy Riot member in 2012, together with our stubborn refusal to back down after our release in late 2013, helped encourage our fellow artists and musicians to get involved in politics. I’ve learned that, while change may not happen overnight, in time small actions can build to something lasting and profound: One by one, police officers can be reformed or replaced, until the day arrives when the death of an unarmed man, woman or nonbinary person at the hands of law enforcement becomes a thing of the past.
The tragic death on May 25, 2020, of George Floyd, while in police custody in Minneapolis, led to one of the biggest social movements in America’s history. It reignited the Black Lives Matter movement, with polls suggesting that 15 million to 26 million people in the United States participated in Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the weeks following Mr. Floyd’s death.
Black Lives Matter will have a profound influence on the way we view justice in 2021 and beyond. Justice must mean racial justice. It must also mean economic justice, gender justice and environmental justice. The mass social movements of 2020 taught us to think holistically and intersectionally, to ask big questions and imagine a better future.
This year we began to imagine very different paths for our civilization: What if we radically rethought public security? Could we benefit from less policing in our lives? Should we redirect police funds and resources to programs in marginalized communities, redistributing some law enforcement responsibilities to social workers? What if the police, an institution that has lost our trust, were to be dismantled, and another more accountable social organization were to take its place? Whom do police officers serve, and whom do they protect? Do they protect me? Do we still need to lock people up? Has the prison system rehabilitated anyone? Isn’t using practically free prison labor a form of slavery? Can we imagine a post-police, post-prison world?
Governments, especially those with autocratic sympathies, have reacted nervously to the courageously radical political imagination of their citizens. President Trump has labeled social justice activists as “terrorists” and said he wants to “dominate” them. Russian President Vladimir V. Putin believes that if you’re critical of him, you’re an enemy of the state and must be silenced.
In my country, Russia, the law enforcement system has been preoccupied for almost 10 years with arresting members of Pussy Riot. Our music videos focus on police violence, both at home and abroad, because we believe it’s a widespread problem that can only be solved by the combined efforts of activists around the world. In February 2015 we released our first English-language song “I Can’t Breathe” in memory of Eric Garner, who had died the previous summer after a New York City police officer put him in a chokehold.
In August, the Russian government attempted to murder the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, a friend of mine, by poisoning him with a nerve agent. At around the same time in Belarus, the regime of President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, Mr. Putin’s buddy, was overseeing the arrest, beating and torture of peaceful protesters — which only made them more determined. When governments react with excessive force, as they have throughout the world, when they fail to protect peaceful protesters, it rightfully sparks more resistance. During 2020, anti-government protests and mass movements against police violence broke out in Hong Kong, Chile, Lebanon, Mexico, Britain and France.
Covid-19 has exposed cracks in the world’s political leadership, and made us question the economic, racial and gender inequalities we all live with. The way our governments have handled the pandemic has left many of us struggling for our economic and physical survival. In the United States, millionaires and billionaires have received massive tax breaks from the government, while far too many ordinary people have been left without access to affordable health care or enough money to pay rent.
The virus has sometimes limited our ability to protest in the streets, but we’ve learned new ways to perform our civic duties and have become more effective digital activists. Keeping in mind the possible damage that social media can cause to our mental health, we’ve been working on something I call “internet hygiene,” the principled use of digital tools. Today, images and videos distributed online have an extraordinary ability to counter propaganda, fake news and the arrogance of those in power, with simple but telling visual facts. In Belarus, the Nexta channel on the popular messaging app, Telegram, plays a vital role in the resistance to Mr. Lukashenko’s autocracy. Pussy Riot’s media agency Mediazona and Mr. Navalny’s YouTube channel “Navalny Live” are changing the minds of millions of Russians by exposing the corruption, incompetence and cruelty of Mr. Putin’s political system.
Our future has yet to be written. When Pussy Riot writes new music, we ask ourselves: What will activist punk sound like in 2030? What will it talk about? In the spring of 2021, Pussy Riot will release its first studio album “RAGE.” The songs on the record reflect on global issues such as public security, mental health and the relationship of citizens to their government.
Sustained, organized, creative, peaceful and smart activism will bring us closer to realizing a fully democratic world in 2021, and in the years to come.
Nadya Tolokonnikova is an activist, artist and musician, and a founder of the feminist band and art collective Pussy Riot. She is the author of Read & Riot: A Pussy Riot Guide to Activism.