Pussy Riot Play Themselves In A New Episode Of ‘House Of Cards’ To Talk Shit About Vladimir Putin

First of all: don’t worry. I haven’t seen the third season of House of Cards yet either so I really have no spoilers to give. The most you’ll glean out of this is that the new episodes released yesterday feature a lot talk about Russia and — shocker — not all of it is positive.

If that’s too much information for you, I don’t think you have any place being on the internet right now. Goodbye, and good luck on your quest to become a hermit and devour 13 hours of television completely spoiler-free.

Now that they’re gone, let’s begin.

After bring spotted on the set in August last year, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot have made their House of Cards debut in the third episode of the new season which premiered on Netflix yesterday. Playing themselves, the pair attend a state dinner at the White House with both President Frank Underwood and a Russian leader named Victor Petrov who is the most incredibly thinly-veiled character you’ve ever seen in your life.

Naturally, it’s a little tense.

“To our Russian president, whose loyalty runs so deep he’s given his friends half of the country, who’s so open to criticism that most of his critics are in prison, the commander-in-chief who is not afraid of anyone except gays,” they say in translated English.

They then do this, which is surely the dinner party version of dropping the mic.

You can take the @pussyrrriot out of Russia, but they bring the Riot with them. pic.twitter.com/s5Rqep5CMP

— House of Cards (@HouseofCards) February 28, 2015

But it doesn’t stop there. Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina seem to garner support from President Frank Underwood — a title I still can’t help but shudder at — and are given the final word in the episode with a video for their brand new song ‘Don’t Cry Genocide’. The song was produced with Johanna Fateman and JD Samson from Le Tigre and, like all Pussy Riot work, it has a pretty clear political bent.

After being famously jailed for “hooliganism”, Pussy Riot have been tireless in their advocacy for free speech, feminism and LGBT rights; a cause which has won many supporters outside their native Russia. But this cameo in House of Cards is perhaps the first time the activists have broadened their efforts to mainstream pop culture.

“We still had some faith in the radical potential of a so-called sell-out moment,” their collaborator Johanna Fateman wrote in Art in America. “We’d never imagined that such disparate interests of ours — international feminism and binge TV — could merge in a single creative project.”

Of course, Pussy Riot aren’t just about feminism and their appearance on the show is representative of a much larger unrest happening in the (sort of) fictionalised country. This is made all the more clear by the fact the episodes premiered on the same day one of (real) leaders of the nation’s opposition leaders Boris Nemtsov was shot dead outside the Kremlin.

A grim reminder that the real world can be just as awful as the one Frank Underwood inhabits.

–

House of Cards was released yesterday on American Netflix, and will be available on Netflix AU when it launches in March.