In other quarters the verdict was welcomed. Andrey Isaev, first deputy chairman of the leading United Russia party’s General Council Presidium, thought the sentence was harsh, but he expected that the majority of Russians would support it as fair. He told government daily Rossiiskaya Gazeta that “it will serve as a lesson that the state ... will protect the rights of all religious organizations” in the country. Others considered the punishment “mild.” For example, political scientist Pavel Danilin told Nezavisimaya Gazeta that the sentence could have been longer, but “the main thing is that their actions were acknowledged as a crime.” In his opinion, their immoral behavior had to be met with real punishment, “especially since they showed no genuine remorse.” Aleksandr Tsipko of the Russian Academy of Sciences Economics Institute said he and others felt sorry for the families and children of the defendants, but “the judge had no other choice.” By their actions and then their behavior during the trial, the women had provoked such a verdict, he said. Tsipko explained that his generation, “which came of age under Stalin, doesn’t like all these jails, but ... these girls through their actions came to a deadlock with their own country, and the country had to defend itself.” Others like MK author Mikhail Rostovsky shared the view of the young women as disrespectful and destructive “Bolsheviks,” but argued that the authorities had turned the case into a “moral and political defeat” for themselves and society by their reaction. The authorities’ “emotion and the desire to give them a good thumping overshadowed everything else.” As a result, he said, the Western press had declared the women “Putin’s main opponents” and the “main force for good in Russia,” which Rostovsky called “rubbish.”
Reader responses included poetic calls to revolution and exasperation with “telephone justice,” with “Yurii” commenting in MK that the “punk prayer” had not been in vain: It had clearly demonstrated how a cynical and vengeful government was dictating to the courts and turning the people into zombies. However, a good number of readers were unsympathetic to the defendants. Liveinternet forum user Valerii Zvonov sought to “bring some fairness to the lovely media representation of the punk group,” which in his view did not correspond to reality. He reminded fellow readers that the women had been arrested before, after engaging in disruptive and obscene behavior in public. For this reason, one Kommersant reader said, “I don’t even want to try to forgive them. ... If they aren’t punished this time, then who knows what they might do next.” MK reader Vova stated that he was no fan of President Putin, but his “conscience wouldn’t allow [him] to support the convicted band members either.” Nor did he see this as a freedom of speech issue, because their “prayer” had been unintelligible anyway. Some commentators did not oppose political protest or criticism of the Russian Orthodox Church, but they questioned the punk group’s tactics: “The verdict is fair. They got what they asked for. I don’t care what people say abroad. If these women wanted to protest against the authorities, they should have gone to Red Square, not the cathedral.”
