You know Pussy Riot. Or, rather, you know of them. Images of them are now what you would term iconic in the truest sense, not the glib Instagram usage. In particular, pictures of them during their trial or wearing multi-coloured balaclavas while they performed their punk song ‘Virgin Mary, Mother of God, Expel Putin!’ as a ‘punk prayer’ in Moscow ‘s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour were disseminated around the world, marking a very particular point in protest against Putin and the Russian regime he fronts.
My attempt to meet with Pussy Riot isn’t going well. I’m due to speak with one-third of the group, Mariya Alyokhina, or Masha as her friends call her. First, she cancelled on me because her interview schedule was so packed out and she was very tired by the end of the day and then, I had to cancel on her because I came down with a nasty bout of tonsillitis.
When we finally meet it’s one all in the lateness stakes. I wait for her at her hotel on The Strand in London, just a stone’s throw away from her publisher Penguin’s London offices. Now she’s running late, very late. An hour late to be precise.
I’m about to leave when she comes through the doors in a flurry. I was looking for you, she says. I just went out to have a cigarette. As someone who runs 10-15 minutes late as standard, I’m sympathetic but irked, I try and fail to conceal my annoyance. ‘Let’s do this’ she says ‘come on’. We sit down, she orders an Americano with milk on the side.
She is too polite to say but I can tell that Masha isn’t particularly looking forward to our interview. She’s engaged and engaging but I get the sense she’s both exhausted and ever so slightly checked out when we start talking. Once we get going, though, that all changes. I tell her about my own activism and campaigning. My work as a housing campaigner has got nothing on Pussy Riot, of course, but I get the sense she’s more interested in our campaigning common ground than in answering questions about the dire conditions in Russia’s penal colonies for the 100th time in three days and, honestly, I don’t blame her. Being asked the same questions over and over again is boring as hell.
Her new book, also her first, Riot Days is refreshing. For once, it is a book written by a young woman (at 29 we’re exactly the same age) and it is categorically neither confessional nor memoir. ‘I decided to write this book because this is not one moment of choice but one hundred moments of my choice’ she says ‘and I believe that when you are making a choice to act or do and not to stay silent you change not only your life but the world. It’s almost three years since we were released and I’ve seen a lot of different things, somehow I wanted to tell this story to have more stories….’ She hopes that her story of resistance and protest will encourage and inspire others. Writing it, she says, she kept anonymous women she hasn’t met yet all over the world in her mind: ‘I was thinking of a 19-year-old girl from Argentina who doesn’t know anything about Putin or Pussy Riot or protest even. I want people to read it and do their own riot…wherever they are.’
The book starts at the beginning – with the creation of Pussy Riot and their early performances. It covers various stunts staged by the group, focusing on the now-infamous cathedral incident which landed them in court and Masha in jail. It talks of how she and the other two members of the group became fugitives before their trial and then covers the sentence Masha was given of 2 years in one of Russia’s Perm region prison colonies, located our near the Ural Mountains. Charged with ‘hooliganism motivated by religious hatred’, she served 21 months of the sentence over 2012 to 2013.
‘The penal colony they sent me to’ she tells me unflinchingly ‘was 3500km from Moscow and no woman had been sent to this colony from Moscow before.’ She doesn’t want to talk about her family or relationships but to contextualise this, you need to know that Masha has a son. His name is Filipp. When she went to prison he was 5 years old. ‘The transportation took a month’ she recalls, ‘and I didn’t know where I was going. When I got there I was shocked.’
Prison did not change Masha so to speak, rather she changed it. Once there, ever the activist, she took on the corrupt system she found herself confined within. ‘The Russian prison system is not like yours’ she says ‘it’s post-Soviet Union but the concept is a Soviet Union one in which you work. It’s legalised slavery, you’re sewing uniforms for the Russian army for 12 to 14 hours a day. You’re living in a barracks where 100 women sleep together in the same room. There is no medicine. It’s minus 35 degrees in the winter and women are working outside with no shawls, nothing to cover their heads.’
Masha’s initial reaction to all of this was to ask the other women prisoners ‘why they did not do a protest’. In reply, she says, they asked her to ‘do something’. She spoke to visiting human rights commissioners and told them of the conditions and says that after speaking to them for two hours ‘they left and told journalists that I’m fine and everything is fine which was a fucking lie.’
As well as the obvious human rights abuses detailed above Masha tells of the forced gynaecological exams the women in the prison were subjected to. ‘They were so-called gynaecological exams’ she corrects, ‘because there were no gloves, no results. They just did it. They don’t explain things, they just do. They said “oh it’s because we need to see what you’re hiding in there”, but it was about them showing their power over us in every way they could’.
She was angry and would not allow such corruption. She wrote about it and gave the text to her lawyer to be published. The horrors that followed are shocking. ‘They put me in solitary confinement for four or five months and started to draw up punishment papers for me, saying I had broken prison law.’ Masha is a true activist, in response to this she armed herself with the knowledge to take the system on. ‘I started to read prison law, it was my cell bible. I read everything. I knew the paragraphs and the punctuation off by heard. I found that it was, in fact, they who were breaking the law.’
She and her lawyer took the prison guards to court and they won. This was the first court case of its kind in the history of the penal colony. That, she says, was when ‘everything started to change. Eight prison guards were fired, they put up people’s salaries, they bought shawls and started to [renovate] the barracks. When you see all of that you understand that even in a prison uniform you can be a winner, not only for yourself and those who are with you but for everyone. It’s showing that there is an observer and that what they are doing will be noted.’
The overarching message in Riot Days and within Masha’s story is about the power of saying no. No to that which you know to be wrong. No to authority which is not legitimate. No to corruption. ‘It takes time and internal power to say no’ she says and that is the message she wants to spread across the world, ‘I wrote the book not to show how terrible prisons are in Russia but to express the very essence of protest, the sense of why you have to say no to fascism because it has many different faces.’
Is she talking about Donald Trump? Does she mean the ascendant, nascent far-right in Western Europe? ‘Look’ she says, sitting upright, ‘in Russia we have Stalin as a backdrop, but in Europe, you have a very specific background and you cannot forget that. In America…Donald Trump did not get elected because everyone in America is a fascist…it happened because people who thought they’d already achieved everything they needed to, that they had all of the freedom democracy and human rights they needed, forgot that it can go. It can always go’.
So, what is her message to Americans? ‘Almost half of the population of the United States didn’t vote’ she says ‘its important to understand why that happens and wake up.’
If I’ve ever met anyone who lives their life by the maxim that the personal is political, it’s Masha. ‘I do not believe in ideals’ she says ‘not in ideal systems’ but ‘I believe in personal revolution and personal bravery as a way of changing the world. Politics exists not just in the White Houses or Parliaments. It is everywhere. You should not think that only political systems, one party or another party is the answer. You can make choice anywhere and anyway – through art or music – come one this is the country of sex pistols – this is politics too.’
Why does she think so many people choose to do nothing? I tell her this is something I’ve pondered a lot because I do see doing nothing as a choice in the same way that doing something is an active choice. It is ‘because of the fear of losing something’ she says ‘but if you are not doing you are losing your future and if you are giving a responsibility of decisions to other people, searching for a leader or whatever – someone who will come and save you then it will be their change, not yours. Not everyone understands that but they should.’
I confess to her, embarrassed, that in my own activism I sometimes feel tired and drained. Our circumstances are in no way comparable. I have never ever faced prison, I mostly argue with politicians, letting agents in shiny suits and disgruntled landlords in formal, stale, carpeted rooms in Whitehall or at corporate conferences. Making a stand, for me, has never equated to danger but, still, it isn’t always easy I tell her, embarrassed. How does she keep doing? What drives her forwards? ‘It’s simple she says. ‘I don’t want to lose myself and I don’t want to be a prisoner. It’s not just about a literal prison which authorities build and put people in. This is about the prison we are building for ourselves if we do not act, whoever we are and wherever we are.’
Since her release from prison, Masha hasn’t stopped and I don’t think she ever will. At a Pussy Riot performance at the Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014 she was whipped by patrolling guards. Earlier this year she was detained in the Siberian city of Yakutsk after wearing a symbolic coloured balaclava and hanging a banner in protest at the imprisonment of Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov who is currently serving a 20-year sentence and is felt by many to be a political prisoner.
So, What’s next? She won’t tell me ‘I prefer to show the result and not talk about the plans.’ Will she stay in Russia? Has she ever thought about leaving? ‘I’m in a lot of places…I have the internet.’ She pauses and looks slightly caught off guard by the question ‘it’s my country. They force a lot of people to leave and I do not want to leave the country because even if it is only for history it is important to show that another Russia exists.’
We say goodbye and she leaves, late for a taxi that’s taking her to Heathrow so she can fly to Germany for two days. From there she will go home.
I make to leave and she turns to me and says: ‘I’m for the protest. That is, in itself, a result’.
Riot Days by Mariya Alyokhina is published by Allen Lane.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.