Maria Alyokhina (l) and her partner Lucy Shtein. trying on their food courier disguises.

Leader of Pussy Riot escapes Russia: ‘Putin doesn’t scare me. He’s a nobody’

Maria Alyokhina / A punk poet against Putin

Maria Alyokhina, famous for her punk band’s human rights activism, told EL PAÍS from somewhere in Iceland that the Russian president is a ‘sick maniac’ who has been abetted for too long by the West

Laura Fernández

Barcelona, May 11, 2022

She dressed up as a food courier to get around the Moscow police, who had her under house arrest, and left Russia. Maria Alyokhina, better known as Masha, picked up the phone somewhere in Iceland to talk to EL PAÍS via the encrypted network Telegram. Alyokhina, a member of the Pussy Riot collective, the punk band that has been defying Vladimir Putin’s government since 2011, was afraid that Russian authorities might track her down. “I was arrested three days after the war with Ukraine started. I was in a labor camp again. When I was released, my friends had either left Russia or were in jail. Everything here is always that complicated and stupid,” she said. “They took away my passport. I am here thanks to the solidarity of other artists who helped me escape from Russia. Pussy Riot exists because of that solidarity, with which we will build something stronger than weapons.”

For this 33-year-old native of Moscow, nothing has been the same since August 17, 2012, when Pussy Riot burst into the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow wearing colorful balaclavas to ask the Mother of God to rid the world of Putin. The punk performance turned into the most effective act of activism against the Russian government to date, it upset Putin and also, she says, the West, “which continued to sell arms to Russia, and buy gas from it, without asking what was happening to the human rights of Russians. Suddenly, with Ukraine, it’s like they’ve opened their eyes. And they are doing things. What’s most effective is the gas embargo, and the embargo on the properties of oligarchs. They should be tougher there,” she said.

Following that 2012 performance, she was sentenced to two years in prison for hooliganism, her longest jail term, and released in December 2013. Alyokhina describes her time in prison as a gulag in which she did forced labor “for 12 hours a day.” She would later be arrested on numerous occasions for her activism. In April, after protesting against the Kremlin’s offensive in Ukraine, a court replaced her house arrest with 21 days in a penal colony.

Alyokhina held by police on July 27, 2019, at a rally demanding that independent and opposition candidates be allowed to run for office.KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV (AFP)

The call gets cut off. Does she think the line is tapped? “I don’t know and I don’t care. Putin doesn’t scare me. He’s a nobody. He’s just a guy who has held the presidency in Russia and built a totalitarian state pretending to be a new Stalin fighting the Nazis. He is not dangerous. The things he has at his disposal are dangerous. The atomic bombs, the missiles. But he himself is nobody. He has done nothing but ruin the country. In 22 years, he has built nothing. And the rest of the world knows it. And if you spend enough time in Russia and see how it works from the inside, you realize that there is nothing more stupid. That’s why you’re not afraid of him. Nobody is afraid of him anymore, it’s ridiculous,” she replied.

What is scary is what is happening in Ukraine, she said. That’s why Pussy Riot are risking going on tour.

Alyokhina spent over a week trying to cross into Belarus and then into Lithuania. Before her escape, she had been waiting to serve one of her countless sentences for her activism against the government. As she told The New York Times, border guards in Belarus held her for six hours on her first attempt to cross the border before sending her back to Russia. On the third attempt she made it, and once inside the country she was given a travel document that facilitated her arrival in a European Union country thanks to the mediation of the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson.

Their show, Riot Days, will allow fans to decide the price they pay for the tickets. The idea is to continue “opening eyes” to the world about what Putin, “that sick maniac,” is doing in Russia and Ukraine. “He is losing more than he thought he could ever lose. But because he is a maniac he is unpredictable. And that’s why this new Cold War is so dangerous. It’s much more serious and dangerous than the first one. Because Putin is crazy,” she said.

The show is a theatrical adaptation of Riot Days, the book in which Alyokhina denounced the mistreatment of women in Russian prisons. She said that feminism is making inroads all over the world except in Russia. “Russia is dystopian. It doesn’t even have a law against male violence. If I punch you in the street, I’m sure I’ll end up in jail. But if your husband hits you at home, he will be fined €50 and that’s it. And if you are raped, it will be your fault for dressing the way you did. Feminism, even as a word, is an enemy of the state in Russia. It is associated with the West, and with Evil,” she said.

Since arriving in Iceland, Alyokhina has kept up her activism, demonstrating in front of the Russian consulate in Reykjavik and using the network of artist solidarity to host other people who want to leave Russia. She described this experience as a stopover, and said her goal is to return to her country and continue fighting against President Putin through combative art.

EL PAÍS

 

LUIS GRAÑENA

Maria Alyokhina, a punk poet against Putin

Leader of Pussy Riot escapes Russia / ‘Putin doesn’t scare me. He’s a nobody’

The Russian activist, who fled to Iceland two weeks ago, has been defying the Russian leader since before she helped create Pussy Riot

Laura Fernández

May 27, 2022

The setting is the White House – or rather a set recreating the White House and inhabited by actors Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright in the TV show House of Cards. The year is 2015. Maria Alyokhina, better known as Masha, has already been jailed and released more than once. And she has begun to write her book, a Vonnegutesque memoir called Riot Days. The memoir tells the story behind Pussy Riot, the feminist punk collective that made Alyokhina the kind of star that is invited to make a provocative cameo in a hit TV show. It also depicts the author’s day-to-day life in prison, with special emphasis on the freezing cold, systematic mistreatment and forced labor – problems that seem not to have changed since Dostoevsky’s time. And it also recounts Alyokhina’s lifetime of defying tyranny.

In the third House of Cards episode of the show’s third season, Masha and fellow Pussy Riot activist Nadya Tolokonnikova refuse to toast Viktor Petrov, the Vladimir Putin of the series, played by Lars Mikkelsen. The women’s appearance on the show reflected the fact that they are recognized as major players in history –although Masha is not so sure. “As a teenager,” Masha recounts in Riot Days, “I used to do graffiti on one of the school walls.” The wall was painted with historical motifs depicting a Russia she hadn’t seen and didn’t believe in. “I liked seeing how the graffiti was gaining ground and began to mix with those historical episodes, giving shape to another truth, ours,” she writes. Even then, the teenage Masha thought like an activist.

Born in Moscow in 1988, Maria Alyokhina grew up in 1990s Russia, and she remembers “people lining up everywhere, lining up for food, clothes, vouchers.” That, she says, has not changed. “They tell us that the country has changed, but I keep seeing the lines.” Masha was raised by her mother, a programmer, and did not meet her math teacher father until she was 21. She hated the Russian educational system and changed schools four times. “They taught you not to think. They wanted us to just follow the rules. Obviously, I didn’t like it at all,” she once said. A poet, actress and mother, Masha studied journalism and creative writing and was a Greenpeace activist. She has long been inspired by the performance artist and political provocateur Aleksander Brener.

Pussy Riot’s first action took place in the same spot where Brener stood before the Kremlin with a pair of boxing gloves – the image of him dressed as a boxer became iconic – and asked the Russian president at the time, Boris Yeltsin, to come out and fight. “There were eight of us, like the eight dissidents in 1968″ who protested against the occupation of Czechoslovakia, she recalls. But the image that spread across the world, forever changing the West’s conception that Russia had left its Soviet past behind, occurred in the Moscow Cathedral. The action landed the collective in jail for the first time: the collective sang a song asking the Mother of God to become a feminist and free Russia from Putin. Masha dressed in green and wore a yellow balaclava. Lara Alcázar, the founder of the Spanish branch of the feminist activist group Femen, says that the action was significant because it “clicks in the mind of those who see it.”

“The protest seeks to arouse an opinion, a series of questions. It has always been necessary, but right now there is an emergency. It shows you the other side – in this case, where the oppressors and the oppressed are,” says Alcázar. Today, Masha is hiding somewhere in Iceland, after having fled Russia with her partner Lucy Shtein, both disguised as food couriers. Her life is in danger. Alcázar also points out that women who dedicate themselves to activism break many boundaries. As with Femen’s demonstrations, Pussy Riot’s protests are especially powerful because they consist of direct action and provocation, she says.

Carol Paris, editor of the Spanish-language version of Read & Riot: A Pussy Riot Guide to Activism, says that the most interesting thing about the collective is how they transcend the idea of individuality. “They show us how we can become active free agents. We should all be Pussy Riot.” And yet, as writer and translator Monika Zgustova points out, we cannot forget that Masha and the rest of the Pussy Riot “are in real danger, danger of being killed with a bullet to the forehead or a sophisticated poison, as has already happened to so many people who made the Kremlin uncomfortable.” That danger “gives value, weight and seriousness to their message,” a message that, as Nadya Tolokonnikov writes, they express through “barbaric and primitive political cabaret.”

EL PAÍS