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.
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