After ordering her fourth cappuccino in 40 minutes, Mariya Alyokhina feels she owes an explanation.
“I have a limit. No more than eight cappuccinos a day,” says the activist and member of balaclava-wearing protest group Pussy Riot. “I used to drink more.”
Dressed only in black, despite the mid-August Moscow heat, Alyokhina, 29, doesn’t instantly strike you as someone who has enjoyed international celebrity status since her role in a 2012 “punk prayer” performance in Russia’s main cathedral.
The now infamous stunt saw five members of Pussy Riot perform their song, Virgin Mary, Mother of God, Expel Putin! in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour less than a fortnight before presidential elections won by Russian president Vladimir Putin. Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, both then aged 23, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, then 29, were subsequently charged with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” in a trial that divided Russian society and whose every twist was covered in the international press.
Alyokhina was sentenced by the judge to two years in prison in what her supporters condemned as a politically driven conviction. Following her release, she has devoted her time to human rights work, particularly attempts to reform Russia’s prison system, acting, travelling the world and looking after her young son, Filipp, who is 10. Now she has written a book, Riot Days.
“I haven’t written my memoirs. I wrote a story, almost like a fairytale. Only it’s all true,” she says, chain-smoking. “No one – especially us – knows what will happen in a month or in a few years. Whatever happens, happens. But history will live. Therefore, it is important.”
The book begins with the creation of the feminist punk band in the winter of 2011 and details some of their early performances, including on Red Square and outside a detention centre holding opposition activists in Moscow. It then details the group’s famous cathedral performance, a brief period as fugitives from the law and the Moscow trial of Alyokhina, Tolokonnikova and Samutsevich. The second half describes Alyokhina’s stints in prison colonies in Russia’s Perm region, near the Ural mountains, and in the Volga city of Nizhny Novgorod.
Alyokhina says she wants to tell the human story of Pussy Riot and correct some misconceptions: “In our case, the propaganda worked at full speed. They called us sacrilegious, whores and everything else.” But she also would like the book to be a call to action. “I want a 19-year-old girl from Argentina who doesn’t know anything about Putin, Russia, Pussy Riot or protest to be able to understand it,” she says. “Everyone has a choice, at every moment in their lives. This [book] is simply an example of how you make choices.”
The Russian language version is being unofficially distributed in the same way that so-called “samizdat” literature – banned writing – circulated in the Soviet Union. But Alyokhina wants the English version to inspire an international audience. She makes regular visits to Europe and the US, and believes the election of Donald Trump as US president has made her experience more relevant than ever.
“Political art is simply essential for life in the United States right now,” she says. “It’s not just about Trump. It’s about Nazi groups that are calling for people to be judged according to racial characteristics and so on. If you call someone dangerous then it means you are scared of them,” she argues. “You shouldn’t be scared, you need to act.”
People everywhere should be wary of putting too much faith in politicians, who need to be “poked in the backside”, according to Alyokhina. “Politics is not something that exists in one or another White House. It is our lives. The political process is happening all the time.”
Alyokhina has not stopped her political activism in Russia since she left prison. In 2014, she was whipped by patrolling Cossacks during a Pussy Riot performance at Russia’s Winter Olympics in Sochi. In August, she was briefly detained by police in the eastern Siberian city of Yakutsk after donning a coloured balaclava, lighting a flare and hanging a banner from a bridge calling for the release of Oleg Sentsov, a Ukrainian filmmaker currently serving a 20-year sentence in a nearby prison colony. Sentsov, who was opposed to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, said he was tortured after his arrest; international human rights organisations have said he is a political prisoner.
One of Alyokhina’s favourite sections in the book is an account of the week she spent in hiding with Samutsevich and Tolokonnikova before they were finally tracked down by police. They whiled away the time moving between the flats of friends and talking to journalists over Skype in cafe toilets. All the fugitives took a decision not to travel abroad or hide out somewhere far from Moscow. “It was the most interesting week,” says Alyokhina. “If I had gone into exile it would have been a choice for safety. That’s when you put conditions of personal comfort above your convictions. That’s not interesting for me.”
Though Pussy Riot continues to exist as a concept, its original members have parted ways. Alyokhina won’t talk about personal relationships, but she has confirmed that she no longer socialises or works with Tolokonnikova and Samutsevich.
Tolokonnikova has taken her own path. Last year, she starred in several music videos, including one attacking Trump and another that showed her bathing in blood and singing about the Russian security services. Earlier this month, she announced she was raising funds for a theatre project called Inside Pussy Riot to be staged in London. Samutsevich, who was freed by the court that handed prison sentences to Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova, rarely appears in public. In her last interview, in 2014, she said it was hard for her to get a job because of her links with Pussy Riot.
The conversation begun by Pussy Riot’s cathedral performance is still happening, according to Alyokhina, who says she retains a lot of anger against the Orthodox church hierarchy for their misogyny and support for Putin: “The face of the church is a group of thieving officials who are absolutely hypocritical and have nothing in common with Christian morals and morality. These are people who, under the flag of morality, justify war and political murder.”
But Alyokhina, who was baptised as a child, draws a distinction between the church hierarchy and Orthodox Christianity itself. She regularly visits churches and, in her book, describes an incident on the run from police when she went into a church and asked a priest what he thought of Pussy Riot. Not recognising her, the priest told her the group should be jailed. She says that since leaving prison, she has been kicked out of several churches, most recently one in central Moscow, which she visited after dropping her son off at school.
Earlier this year, Alyokhina took part in a stunt outside Russia’s justice ministry where she joined forces with a prominent Orthodox Christian activist to hold a Bible reading. “The New Testament is the most important book in my life,” she says. “Christianity belongs to us.”
For her, she says belief is a process. “Every day a person makes choices. It doesn’t happen that you suddenly understand something and become a different person just like that. It’s daily toil.”
The only still-functioning project that binds together the original members of Pussy Riot is Russian news website Mediazona, which Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova set up when they left prison. Mediazona reports about legal cases, the security services and Russia’s prison colonies. Alyokhina continues to fund the venture with money she makes from performances and public appearances, inspired by what she witnessed during her time in jail.
“All the girls in my prison colony said to me, and all the girls in Nadya [Tolokonnikova’s] prison colony said to her, that if we don’t talk about them then no one will. And they have a right to be heard,” she says.
Mediazona has become a popular source of news as a series of independent media outlets in Russia have been shuttered under state pressure. The number of politicised court cases also continues to tick upwards, fuelling interest. “Prison is a mirror of how, at a particular moment in time, the state interacts with people,” says Alyokhina. “It is a very accurate mirror.”
Last year, she joined the Belarus Free Theatre in London to act in Burning Doors, a play dramatising the experience of artists, including herself, imprisoned in Russia. The production explored torture and some of the more Byzantine practices of Russian institutions experienced by Alyokhina, including regular and obligatory gynaecological examinations for women in prison and the treatment of psychiatric patients with large doses of dangerous antipsychotic medicines.
While a fierce critic of the Kremlin, Alyokhina says she is not expecting imminent political change in Russia.
She says she respects prominent Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, but does not plan to help him in his campaign to run in presidential elections scheduled for next year. “To choose a leader means to delegate your own responsibility,” she says. “This is not what I want to do.”
Many of Pussy Riot’s songs singled out Putin as the cause of Russia’s ills, but Alyokhina cautions that no single politician can be held responsible for the country’s problems. “People say that it was Putin who sent us [Pussy Riot] to prison, but it’s very easy to say that. It’s easy to find one person who is responsible. Putin is just the face of this system,” she says.
In order to change Russian politics, Alyokhina says activists must change mindsets. “I am not the sort of person who sits around waiting for some sort of end. You have to keep acting whatever the conditions,” she says. “I fight against indifference and apathy … and for freedom and choice.”
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