No political leader enjoys being made to look foolish. Throughout history, authoritarian leaders have vigorously and often cruelly defended their dignity. To observers lucky enough to be beyond reach, their actions merely confirm their vulnerability. It may not look quite like that to the three members of the performance art outfit Pussy Riot, whose trial has just started in Moscow. They wanted to use art to undermine the power of Vladimir Putin. Instead, predictably, he has turned it on them. Beyond the border, he looks ridiculous. In Russia, the prosecution of these three young women who have been vilified in the media for months has become a trial of Mr Putin's very regime, one that he cannot afford to lose.
It began in the run-up to the elections in March where, amid widespread street protests in Moscow, Mr Putin was triumphantly returned to the presidency. Pussy Riot, loosely inspired by similar punk movements in the United States in the 1990s, describe themselves not only as feminists but variously as leftists, anarchists and advocates of civil society. They performed protest songs at various venues around Moscow, even in Red Square, before staging their act in church. Not any church, however, but the church of Christ the Saviour, a potent symbol of the tight relationship between the Russian Orthodox church and the post-Soviet leadership. Three weeks later, after being caught on video without the garishly coloured balaclavas which they regularly wear to disguise their identity, the three women were arrested. After four months on remand, they are now thin and pale, but resolute in their not-guilty plea against the church's charge of religious hatred.
Claims that this trial is a critical moment for the Putin regime may be overdone. But, even without the state's absurd over-reaction to a small feminist guerrilla movement that has committed no crime, it does reveal potentially catastrophic weaknesses. Pussy Riot is a creature of the internet. The video of the "prayer" has had 1.5m hits; its YouTube page is effectively its exhibition space. The anonymity of most of its performers, its flexible form and its capacity to organise and disappear again all illustrate, as Occupy has in the West, how a leaderless opposition movement is harder to keep hold of than a bar of wet soap.
Against this fleet-footed goad, the Russian state is wielding the full might of a court widely viewed as a creature of the Kremlin. If the Kremlin wills it, the three defendants – two of them with young children whom they have not seen since their arrest – face sentences of up to seven years. This is hardly the action of the confident, forward-looking state that Mr Putin would claim to lead; rather, it is the peevish response of slighted machismo that Pussy Riot exists to mock.
