‘What happened in Russia can happen anywhere’: Pussy Riot interviewed

As she recalls a decade of infamy, Maria Alyokhina wanders one of the many anonymous apartments she has lived in since escaping Russia six months ago. ‘We didn’t expect a criminal case, we didn’t expect imprisonment, we didn’t expect international attention. We didn’t expect how many people would support Pussy Riot, would go to the street in balaclavas. We could never have predicted that.’

Alyokhina and Pussy Riot, a loose feminist collective who perform in brightly coloured balaclavas, came to international attention in February 2012 with their ‘punk prayer’, a guerilla music performance in Moscow’s orthodox Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

Plugging in an electric guitar to an amp, they moshed about the nave, evading security guards and shocked nuns as they belched out the chorus: ‘Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish Putin/ Banish Putin, Banish Putin!’. For this Alyokhina and her bandmate, Nadya Tolokonnikova, were imprisoned for two years, staging three hunger strikes to highlight the torturous conditions they were subjected to.

They have stayed in the limelight since, staging stunts similarly designed to troll the Putin regime, ranging from hanging rainbow flags outside government buildings on the President’s birthday, to a pitch invasion dressed as policewomen during Russia’s hosting of the World Cup in 2018. And despite further arrests, imprisonments, beatings and a colossal amount of intimidation, Alyokhina refused to leave Russia.

She says the invasion of Ukraine changed matters. ‘They created several new criminal articles to provide censorship for the invasion… it’s impossible to do or say anything.’ As Russian tanks rolled over the border, a sign was posted on her apartment door accusing her of being a traitor, and the authorities charged her with a newly created crime, ‘propaganda of Nazi symbolism’, relating to a 2015 social media post where swastikas accompanied an image of three women in hijabs.