After a daring escape from Moscow, Alyokhina has regrouped with the punk collective to ‘stand with Ukraine during the terrifying war that Putin started’
In January 2021, Maria “Masha” Alyokhina, the Russian activist and member of punk collective Pussy Riot, was arrested in Moscow for attending a nationwide protest in support of the jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Charged with “violation of sanitary and epidemiological rules”, Alyokhina was threatened with two years in jail – echoing the two years she served following her notorious 2012 performance inside a Moscow cathedral, alongside Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova, Diana Burkot, and Yekaterina Samutsevich.
In the end, Alyokhina was sentenced to a year of “restrictions” on her freedom, effectively putting her under house arrest. Even still, she’s been jailed several times since last year, spending stints of 15 days behind bars on exaggerated accusations of “extremist propaganda” related to years-old social media posts.
Alyokhina’s case isn’t an isolated incident, either. Over the course of the last year, several members of Pussy Riot have fled Russia to escape continuous arrests for “just existing”. A government crackdown on dissident voices has also seen members labelled “foreign agents”, a title that carries Soviet-era implications of spying. Of course, Russia’s authoritarian approach to political protest has only heightened since its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, with president Vladimir Putin seeking to stifle opposition.
Unlike her fellow artists and activists, however, Alyokhina remained in her Moscow apartment until April this year, when Russian authorities announced that her house arrest would be swapped for 21 days in a penal colony. This was when she decided it was time to leave her home country, but it wasn’t as simple as booking a flight and getting out of there, or driving to the border.
With Moscow police watching the apartment where she was staying, Alyokhina had to disguise herself as a food delivery person and leave her phone behind as a decoy. Like this, she managed to reach the Belarus border, and would later meet up with other members of Pussy Riot at the band’s tour van.
Speaking to Dazed, Alyokhina suggests that her escape was typical of the protest group’s usual methods. “At Pussy Riot we’ve used masking for a long time,” she says. “For our actions we’ve used community service workers’ uniforms, police uniforms… once I even escaped from the police inside a suitcase.” Then, of course, there are the iconic, neon-bright balaclavas worn by Pussy Riot from the start.
“This time I used a delivery uniform that was brought by my girlfriend,” Alyokhina adds. “She used it several times when she needed to go somewhere and our Moscow flat was surrounded by police.”
Besides the threat of internment in a penal colony, Alyokhina was motivated to finally escape Russia by the desire to record new music with Pussy Riot, and to “stand with Ukraine during the terrifying war that Putin started”, from beyond the country’s borders. This month, the collective announced that she was joining its first Riot Days tour since 2019, performing a “revolutionary electronic punk opera” based on her 2017 book of the same name.
A second book is also in the works, she says. Written during her recent criminal trial, it aims to illustrate how Russia has changed over the course of the last decade, and “how we came to be where we are” in 2022. Notably, for Pussy Riot, this means a significant shift in the atmosphere for artists and dissidents.
“Since the beginning of the war, four million people (via official statistics, unofficially [we] don’t know) left Russia for different reasons,” she explains. “It’s a lot of people who are afraid of mobilisation, that all the men will be recruited for the war. Also we have war censorship… it’s illegal to call the war the war, you can receive several years in prison for that.”
Russia has also threatened jail terms for those who share ‘fake news’ – including, Alyokhina says, images from the Ukrainian cities of Bucha and Mariupol – or call for sanctions against Putin’s regime and Russian oligarchs. In one case, she adds, a man was charged for carrying a banner that called for an end to fascism: “The court wrote an official statement with stamps and signatures that the slogan ‘No Fascism’ is discrediting the Russian Army.”
“Before the year 2022, they called us enemies of the people, and enemies of the state. Now they edit their Nazi words to raise up in the collective memory this concept of a great win in WWII” – Maria Alyokhina
The claims of “extremist propaganda” brought against Alyokhina for her (anti-fascist) Instagram posts in 2015 also feed into this dangerous narrative. But why is Putin so obsessed with calling everyone it opposes a Nazi?
“Putin’s state needs this permanent war with Nazis to justify the powers [it enacts]” and the low quality of life experienced by many Russians, Alyokhina suggests. In state media, these issues are pinned on “the guilty of the West” and the sanctions they’ve brought against Russia. All the while, Russia itself speaks about utilising sterilisation and concentration camps, and evokes the swastika with its use of the ubiquitous ‘Z’ symbol.
“Before the year 2022, they called us enemies of the people, and enemies of the state,” Alyokhina adds. “Now they edit their Nazi words to raise up in the collective memory this concept of a great win in WWII, and to provide the idea that Nazis are not gone. The level of propaganda is really high, and some of the people unfortunately believe [in Russia’s claims]. I think that all of the heads of propaganda offices and main propagandists are war criminals, and should be judged as war criminals in the future.”
Pussy Riot is currently in the middle of its month-long Riot Days tour. View the remaining European dates below.