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Now Ukrainians don’t have houses at all.” Maybe politicians were afraid of their voters protesting that their houses were cold. In eight years, it would have been possible. I hear a lot of discussion in the west that it’s very hard and painful to stop buying oil and gas – well, you guys had eight years.

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“We were calling for a full embargo in 2014 and again in 2015. If there had been the sanctions there are now after Crimea and the subsequent invasion of the Donbas, Alyokhina is certain that we would not be in this mess today. ‘That was the first time we were beaten physically’ … Pussy Riot under attack from a Cossack militiaman in Sochi in 2014. In Russian activist circles, there are a lot of jokes about the west being deeply concerned: it means they are not going to do anything.” Everyone was ‘deeply concerned’, but nothing happened. I spoke at the European parliament, in your parliament, in the US Senate. A lot of capital from oligarchs went to Britain, especially to London. Germany was selling weapons to Putin’s regime, evading the weapon embargo. There were slight sanctions, but nations continued to deal with Russian businesses. “Especially shocking was the very weak reaction of the west. Two weeks later, Putin annexed Crimea – “the first point of no way back”, she says. That was the first moment that I understood: Russia was already worse than when we were imprisoned.”

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A month after our release, we made an action : ‘Putin will teach you how to love the motherland.’ That was at Sochi, the Olympic Games, and that was the first time we were beaten physically. Yet the substance of that, and the harsh consequences it had, was ignored in the service of everyone playing nice at international summits.Īlyokhina rolls her eyes, as if to say that is not the half of it: “We were released on 23 December 2013.

The protest was deadly serious: it was against Orthodox Church leaders’ support for Putin and the blind eye they were turning to his corruption and creeping totalitarianism. So, when three of them, including Alyokhina, were arrested for hooliganism in 2012 and sentenced to two years in jail, it didn’t leave much of a mark on Putin’s reputation, even though human rights organisations such as Amnesty International designated them political prisoners. In Russian activist circles, there are jokes about the west being ‘deeply concerned’: it means they are not going to do anything To the global media, they were just fun, racy rebels. Alyokhina’s targets are wide-ranging – the oppression of women, the savage homophobia of the Russian state, the climate crisis, Putin’s kleptocracy – but boil down to one cause: anti-authoritarianism. As well as writing protest songs, the band wore neon balaclavas and taped their mouths closed. Alyokhina was a student at the Institute of Journalism and Creative Writing in Moscow. When they started in 2011, they were a loose collection of female artists, writers, activists and anarchists. There is something instructive and depressing about the story of Pussy Riot and the world’s reaction. As a human, and especially as an artist, it’s very important to raise up our solidarity with Ukraine and our call to stop this war.” But I believe, as Russians, we can do something good. “We cannot balance the nightmare which the Russian army and Vladimir Putin have created. The proceeds from that – whether you understand NFTs or not, they can raise vast amounts of money – will be split between Ukrainian charities and Russian political prisoners.

‘I was arrested 100 times’ … Alyokhina was given a two-year prison sentence in 2012. The heads of the political Moscow police were quite often trying to go to my house, speak with my mother, catch me there.” She describes the trigger event for her departure: the news that she was about to be moved from house arrest to a prison. I was under a travel ban, I had a red flag on the border for two years, I had to find a way to tour.

“I was arrested, many times – and not just arrests. But she resists any phrases that dramatise her situation – persecution, flight, exile, escape – preferring a hard-boiled statement of the facts. She is no longer in Iceland, and speaks to me, as her fellow Pussy Riot member Nadya Tolokonnikova did earlier this year, from an unnamed location. She had been repeatedly arrested since early 2021, on specious charges – “violation of sanitary and epidemiological rules”, social media activity, attending a demonstration in support of the imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny. W hen Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina left Russia in April this year, she went to Iceland, essentially a political refugee.