Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot

ONE Nadya

HERE IS WHAT I was trying to figure out: how a miracle happens. A great work of art—something that makes people pay attention, return to the work again and again, and reexamine their assumptions, something that infuriates, hurts, and confronts—a great work of art is always a miracle.

The temporal borders of this miracle were fuzzy. Certainly it had begun earlier than the morning of February 21, 2012, when five young women entered the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in central Moscow to stage what they called a “punk prayer” against the backdrop of its over-the-top gaudy, gilded interiors. It had begun earlier even, I thought, than the fall of 2011, when a larger, ragged-edged group of women started to call themselves Pussy Riot and engage in punk rock performances. It had begun, in fact, years or even many years earlier.

To create, and to confront, one has to be an outcast. A constant state of discomfort is a necessary but insufficient condition for protest art, however. One also has to possess a sense that one can do something about it, the sense of being entitled to speak and to be heard. I asked Nadya where she got that.

Our communication was awkward: we had no more than a passing acquaintance before she was arrested (soon afterward I realized with a jolt of regret that she had “poked” me on Facebook—an attempt at communicating I had cavalierly ignored in part because I was unsure how one responds to being “poked”), and now I wrote to her in the penal colony, knowing that my letters as well as Nadya’s responses would be seen by the censors. “I am trying to understand the origins of the independence of your thinking and your ability to shape your own education…” It was not just the expectation of the censors’ eyes that made my writing feel stilted; it was also the fact that I was using a pseudonym, one suggested by Nadya in a rare note smuggled out past the censors. In it, she laid out the terms of our correspondence: never mention writing a book or any intention of publishing our correspondence; bear in mind that the letters will be read by censors; consider using a pseudonym—say, Martha Rosler. So I came to sign my letters with the name of a contemporary American feminist artist who I am sure had no awareness I was using her name as a cover-up.

Nadya’s writing, I assumed, was stilted for some of the same reasons as mine: she was writing for me, for the censors, and for eventual publication in a foreign language. She was also writing about things rarely discussed in Russian, at least rarely discussed with the earnestness that her work—and my enterprise—seemed to demand. In addition, there was something profoundly wrong with the power dynamics of our epistolary relationship. I wrote to her by e-mail, using a service called Native Connection (no hint of irony here either). When I sent a letter, I had the option of requesting a response and putting a page value on it. I asked for three pages the first time and it proved insufficient, so from that point on I always asked for five. Each page cost fifty rubles (roughly $1.70) and the amount for the requested number of pages was immediately deducted from my Native Connection account. In essence, I was giving Nadya writing assignments—and paying for them.

A few days after I sent my letter by e-mail, Nadya would receive a printout of it along with blank pages in the quantity I had requested. She would write her responses in longhand—her script got smaller and harder to decipher if she was running out of space or more sprawling if she was running out of things to say with a page or so still to go—and I would eventually receive scans through the Native Connection website. If Nadya chose not to fill a page at all, she would have to write “Opportunity to respond rejected” on the blank page—and I would receive a scan of that as well.

ANDREI SHARED NADYA’S IDEA that he had been the architect of her independence, her personality, and even her art. “I am an expert in the upbringing of girls,” he informed me. “I approach it as a total performance.” He added that he had “authored the words ‘holy shit,’” the refrain that had been the ostensible source of some of his daughter’s problems.

Andrei came out of the woods to talk to me. For more than a decade he had been living in a friend’s house about an hour outside of Moscow. He called it his lair, and he said he cleaned it once a year. Our interview fell between these annual cleanings, so he said a visit was out of the question. Instead, I picked him up by the side of the highway and we drove around looking for an eatery that had both heat and electricity: less than fifty miles from Moscow, we were on the disintegrating fringes of civilization.

Andrei was born at civilization’s true fringe, in the world’s northernmost large city (where large is defined as having a population over a hundred thousand). “Half the population is behind bars and the other half is guarding them,” Russians have said of their country since the times of Stalin. In Norilsk, this was literally true. Founded in the mid-1930s, the city served as the center of Norlag, the mining-and-metallurgy arm of the gulag. Though the number of prisoners decreased in the 1950s following Stalin’s death and the Norlag was officially dissolved, forced prisoner labor was used in the mines through the 1970s.

Andrei’s father had been on the guards’ side of the prison fence. He had landed in Norilsk after World War II as a Party worker. He was, according to Andrei, a well-known and roundly hated Norilsk character. The young Andrei hated everyone back. “When I was five, I remember seeing elderly intellectuals in the streets—former Norlag inmates. Then they all died off, of course, and all that was left was bydlo.” Dictionaries suggest translating that Russian slang word as “cattle,” but that word does not come close to conveying the concentration of disdain and disgust educated Russians pack into the epithet for their compatriots: it is “white trash” but more derogatory, “redneck” but more frightful.

Andrei was educated as a doctor (this did not require nearly as many years or as much effort as an American medical education—and in his case, very little effort indeed was expended), but he did not feel like working as a doctor or, really, working at all. He thought of himself as an artist, though he was not sure what kind of art he should be making. He finagled his way into the Arts Institute in Krasnoyarsk, the nearest truly large city, as a correspondence student in music; he pretended to play the piano. During one of his visits to the institute, he met Katya. She was, unlike him, “an actual musician,” he told me; she played piano. She would even go on to study at a conservatory, and then to teach music to schoolchildren. She was generally more serious and better grounded than Andrei, and this pronounced difference between them might have ended their marriage sooner or prevented it altogether had it not been for one thing: they were oblivious, because they drank. Everyone in the Soviet Union did, more drunks and more drinks with every passing year. In the early 1980s, Soviet rulers came and died in quick succession—Brezhnev died, then Chernenko, then Andropov—but not before promising to do something about the epidemic of alcoholism. Mikhail Gorbachev appeared in 1985 and launched an all-out war on the drink. Andrei and Katya, then newly in love, drank. And drank. And drank. And had Nadya.

She came as a surprise, conceived on a night of heavy drinking and arriving on Revolution Day, November 7, 1989, one of the most vodka-soaked days of the year. By then, Gorbachev’s war on alcoholism was at its peak, with the vineyards in the south razed and vodka rationed across the land. So for many Soviet citizens it was a day soaked in industrial alcohol, cologne, or, as was the case with Andrei, medical spirits. No one had been expecting Nadya. She was given the name Nadezhda, which means “hope,” and parked, for the next few years of her life, with Andrei’s mother, Vera, which means “faith.”

Vera lived in Krasnoyarsk. Katya lived in Norilsk. Andrei lived in various places; when Nadya was conceived and born, for example, he was living in a village outside of Arkhangelsk, in the very north of the European part of Russia. He had a gig as chief doctor at a rural hospital, unfettered access to medical spirits, and rare access to his wife. “That’s part of the reason we parted ways. I think that distance is important and a relationship works better when people take breaks from each other.” The distance in this case exceeded a thousand miles. “I guess Katya had a different opinion. She said I killed the woman in her. It’s a strange accusation, though I’m not a woman, so I wouldn’t know. And anyway, it’s not like she was wasting time herself.” All the more reason to be surprised by Nadya’s arrival.

Shipping the baby off to Krasnoyarsk was not an unusual arrangement: young Russian couples often placed their children with grandparents, who themselves had likely been raised by their parents’ parents. Katya showed up at regular intervals, while Andrei was always anything but regular: “I am a holiday. I was always highly prized—both because girls always privilege men and because I provide a contrast to the women’s strict ways.”

In the early 1990s, Andrei moved to Krasnoyarsk and Katya followed him. They had plans, a friend who had secured funding for a medical center, a view to making a home for their family. But the Soviet Union collapsed, and soon so did the friend’s funding scheme, and Andrei and Katya’s marriage. Andrei left for Moscow. Katya took the child and returned to Norilsk.

NORILSK WAS A DARK PLACE. Forty-five days out of the year the city fumbled in the pitch-blackness of polar night; for another six months the blackness took turns with a gray haze that was neither day nor night. And when polar day arrived in May, it exposed snowbanks hardened by the winter and blackened by the fine particles with which the metals plants showered the city year-round. As the snow melted, more blackness emerged—all the way to the banks of the Norilskaya River, where some natives swam despite temperatures that rarely exceeded fifty-five degrees, even in July. The banks were coarse sand and rocks filled with the metals that made Norilsk the mining mecca it is. And one of the ten most polluted places on the planet.

In the summers, Andrei yanked Nadya out of the darkness and transported her to hectic Moscow or the green leafy outskirts of Krasnoyarsk, where his mother still lived. Some summers, Katya finagled a ticket to a seaside summer camp in the Russian south and informed Andrei of its location so he could find a rental cot nearby and take Nadya out of camp for a few weeks. The colorful, warm, light-soaked environments in which Nadya spent time with Andrei no doubt enhanced the magical effect of father “the holiday.”

“She would come and see ducks [in a Moscow canal] and she wouldn’t just say, ‘Ducks!’ She would ask, ‘Are these real ducks?’ She lived at the end of the earth, her only image of duck was virtual, like a computer-generated sign,” Andrei told me. And then he would commence his performance. How did he do it? Andrei took the question very seriously: self-effacement does not run in the Tolokonnikov family. “A hypnosis teacher of mine used to say you have to aim your arrow low: all this talk of superego or social phenomena makes no sense; what makes a difference is the biological, reptilian, sleeping life of the brain. The trick is to awaken that sleeping volcano—that is where true creativity begins. That’s what I worked on. Of course, I might have gone overboard. She might have taken my instruction too literally. But we will see what happens when she is released from prison.” When Nadya returned from a visit with Andrei at the age of seven, Katya’s new husband, Misha, demanded to know what Andrei had done to the child: a wallflower had been transformed into a rebel.

For most of the dark majority of her year, Nadya studied. “She was a straight-A student,” Andrei told me without a hint of pride or admiration. “She would spend five or six hours a day studying at home. There is a picture of her sleeping at her computer. I don’t know where she got it: certainly not from me or her mother. And it’s not like her mother made her study. It may have been a way to escape from reality, by running not into the street or to bad company, but to textbooks.”

By her penultimate year of secondary school, Nadya had worked out an autodidact program she followed rigorously. “My education began the moment I came home from school,” she wrote to me. “I would sit down with alternative textbooks I had ordered from the library, books on literary criticism and books for the soul.” For the soul she read turn-of-the-century Russian existentialist philosophers Nikolai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov, as well as Sartre, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard. Whatever gave Nadya the idea she should be reading these books—I was never able to pin her down on this matter in our correspondence—the books gave her ideas. “During regular classes I was either dying from the emptiness of what was going on or actively fighting to impress upon the school administration the primacy of the critical impulse in education.”

Whatever ammunition Nadya used in this fight—this too she would not describe in detail, possibly for fear of arming her jailers with the means to assail her character in her endless court and disciplinary hearings—it led to conflict. One time she was directed to write an explanatory note to the school principal. Instead of the standard acknowledgment of wrongdoing and assurances of reform, Nadya wrote a paragraph on the importance of “crisis, watershed moments” in the development of young people. “I have devoted myself to creating such critical moments,” she wrote. “And I do this solely out of concern for the school, so it may develop faster and better.”

That particular incident centered on a jar of glue. The way Andrei remembered Nadya telling him about it, she had borrowed the glue from a classroom windowsill to use on a school project. The way a former teacher recalled it, still outraged, Nadya had taken a jar of linoleum glue being used by repair workers and moved it to a girls’ bathroom—“she was just testing the teachers, but technically it was theft and the policeman told us if we had filed a report she would have gotten two years.” I do not know what Nadya remembers of the glue taking because we could not correspond about something that could, however absurdly, be considered a crime.

The principal summoned Nadya to his office over the PA system. She took the opportunity to lecture him on her crisis-fosters-growth theory. “He didn’t understand a word of it but asked me angrily why I had signed my statement the way I did.” Rather than the customary juvenile “Nadya Tolokonnikova, grade 11A,” fifteen-year-old Nadya had signed “Tolokonnikova, Nadezhda Andreevna,” as an adult would have. The principal demanded she rewrite her statement and append a proper signature. “This is exactly the way my relationships with representatives of the state have developed ever since,” she wrote to me in a letter from her penal colony.

The books or Andrei or both—and something else too—gave Nadya the idea, rarely expressed in Russia, especially in Norilsk, that things could be different—and she demanded that they be so. When she was fifteen, she submitted an article to Zapolyarnaya Pravda (“The Truth Beyond the Arctic Circle”), the local daily, and the paper published it under the headline WHAT IS THIS WORLD COMING TO? It was a poorly organized, cliché-ridden rant that condemned Nadya’s contemporaries for being shallow and unmotivated, blamed this on all sorts of factors including the popularity of a transvestite singer on television, attributed Marx’s maxim that “social being determines consciousness” to the wisdom of Nadya’s mother, but concluded, incongruously, with a call to dare effect change because, after all, “It’s a wonderful life.” When I found the article, I was reassured to learn that Nadya had not come out of the womb quoting Theory, as I had at times suspected, but had been a haphazardly informed and typically judgmental adolescent—just an unusually active one.

The triumphant publication of the article—no Tolokonnikov had ever been in print before—gave either Nadya or Andrei or both the idea that she could be a journalist. Moscow State University’s journalism department preferred its applicants with a few publications to their name. Andrei and Nadya collaborated on several pieces they submitted to a Krasnoyarsk paper as Nadya’s. There might, however, have been more Andrei than Nadya in them, for the editor rejected them, saying that journalism dealt in fact, not fantasy—an assertion that still appeared to offend Andrei’s sensibilities when he recounted the story to me seven years later. Nadya would not be applying to the journalism department.

IN THE MID-1990S, the mining giant Norilsk Nickel, by far the city’s largest employer, was privatized by a pair of emerging oligarchs. In a few years, the junior partner, Mikhail Prokhorov, decided to become the hands-on manager of the plant and the man who would modernize not only production but the very lives of workers. He inserted himself into Norilsk housing construction, the planning of Norilsk leisure, and the city’s cultural life.

As it happened, Prokhorov was unusually close to his older sister, Irina, whose publishing enterprise he had started funding with some of the first money he made years earlier. Irina Prokhorova started and ran the country’s best and biggest intellectual publishing house, putting out books, a scholarly journal, and a more-popular intellectual magazine. In 2004, when Mikhail (who generally left the reading of books and other lofty pursuits to his sister) launched a culture foundation, he asked Irina to run it—and to bring the intellectual wealth of her publishing house to Norilsk. For years, when light started dawning in Norilsk, Irina would put together a large group of Moscow writers, artists, and photographers and airlift them to Norilsk for weeks of performances, lectures, and seminars. This was how Nadya saw Prigov. Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov was a visual artist, a performance artist, and a Conceptualist poet, and he sounded, looked, and moved like no one Nadya had ever seen before. He once explained, “I don’t produce text, I produce artistic behavior.” He wrote poems like:

He took turgid Soviet language, which Nadya had been unsuccessfully trying to use, and made it his own: he bent it, molded it, made it funny, and even more incredibly, made it poignant. This made Prigov and the Moscow Conceptualist school different from any writers Nadya had read or seen before: they did not turn up their noses or turn their faces away from official Soviet culture but, acknowledging its thoroughly false nature, made hay—that is, art—out of it. They reappropriated Soviet expressions like collective action—the Moscow Conceptualists staged a series of performances under that title in the 1980s—and other staples of Soviet officialdom, as Prigov had done with the bureaucratic habit of addressing people by their name and patronymic; he made it his artistic name.

Nadya added the Moscow Conceptualists to her extracurricular list of “reading for the soul.” And she decided to apply to the philosophy department of Moscow State University. “The philosophy department appeared to me as paradise,” she wrote to me from prison, “a place where everyone (or so I thought) was a researcher and an experimenter and everyone had his own little pocket Chernyshevsky, his own little critical thinker.” (Nikolay Chernyshevsky was a Russian materialist philosopher.) Nadya’s mother said the philosophy department would be hell. She started smoking in the apartment and having constant extremely loud telephone conversations to give Nadya a taste of life in a dormitory. In fact, after sixteen-year-old Nadya miraculously gained admission to the philosophy department despite having no connections in high places, she was assigned to a dorm room with two pious Russian Orthodox fourth-year students who made dorm life feel infinitely better than home. Otherwise, though, the philosophy department was hell.

It took a few letters back and forth to get Nadya to describe precisely what was wrong with the philosophy department—other than everything. It seemed a topic she found almost too distasteful to discuss. “I was flummoxed,” she finally wrote, “by the students’ immaturity, the irresponsibility of their worldview, their mediocrity, their constant readiness to act true to type, to stick to the norm, their lack of passion—of something that would be authentic, eccentric, outside the norm.” Nadya herself stuck to the philosophy department student norm for one semester. “I hate that time and I hate who I was during that time. And I cannot understand how people can spend five years out of their finite lives in such a talentless, slavish, bureaucratic manner.”

At the start of her second semester, Nadya met Petya. He was older—twenty—and in his fourth year in the philosophy department, and he was worldly in a real and almost unfathomable way. When he was a teenager, his parents had accepted an extraordinarily generous offer from friends in Toronto, who had suggested sending their troubled adolescent to stay with them and go to high school there. After two years, Petya spoke near-native English; then he spent a year in Japan, where his father was working at the time. He had actually seen the poststructuralist feminist philosopher Judith Butler give a talk on the University of Toronto campus. He used the phrase contemporary art—words that Nadya had held sacred ever since she first saw Prigov—as though they belonged to him. Or he to them.

Like anyone who ever met Nadya, Petya was struck first by her looks: she looked perfect—like a circle drawn with a compass looks perfectly round or a cut diamond placed on velvet looks perfect with the light falling directly on it. She was tall and taut and curvy in all the places that are theoretically appropriate for the qualities of tautness and curviness, and in practice she inhabited this perfection with perfect ease. She had long straight brown hair that shone as hair should shine, and she had a perfectly symmetrical face with large brown eyes and a striking, mesmerizing mouth with full, fleshy, exaggerated lips. Which she used to speak.

“What struck me—aside from the way she looked,” said Petya, acknowledging the obvious, “was that she was this girl from Norilsk, a first-year student, and she had an idea of who the Moscow Conceptualists were. You have to understand that as far as the aesthetics chair of the philosophy department was concerned, Andy Warhol was edgy.” Whereas Petya and Nadya knew that Andy Warhol was ancient history, Moscow Conceptualism was the past, and they were the future.

TWO War

“THEORY WRAPPED ME in an entire climate of description. Theory was simply, shoulder-shruggingly, the only thing that helped me to see what I was and where,” writes the American memoirist Marco Roth. “Part of what Theory promised was an idea that another world was still possible, not in some mythical afterlife, but on this earth, now, that the life around me did not have to be the only one. There was no fixed human nature except to take in and shape what was around us. And almost everything around us was now the result of some sort of human endeavor, like the soy formula I’d been nursed on. We were culture and artificiality and engineering all the way down. What was made could thus be unmade.”

I recognized that description. And this too: “Semiotics is the first thing that smacked of revolution. It drew a line; it created an elect; it was sophisticated and Continental; it dealt with provocative subjects, with torture, sadism, hermaphroditism—with sex and power.” This from Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel The Marriage Plot.

Nadya described it as “getting shivers.” This happened to her when she read the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Even in 2007, long after the generation of students who felt they had discovered Theory had grown old enough to write about it wistfully, and long after the humanities had been declared dead in the West, repeatedly, it made her feel like the world was becoming clearer and infinitely more complicated at the same time. It was exhilarating.

The world outside Moscow State University at the start of 2007 was just as stultifying as the world inside it. Vladimir Putin, once a low-level KGB staffer, was in his eighth year of running the country. His luck showed no sign of running out. The price of oil, which had grown nearly fourfold since 2000, had begun its steepest climb yet: it would nearly double in a year. Russia was flooded with money. Luxury boutiques could not keep goods in stock. Nor could the Bentley dealership that had opened up a block from the Kremlin: the country’s yearly quota of the latest model would be bought up in a matter of days—for cash. Russia’s most popular writers were a man and a woman who authored what barely passed for fiction about the lifestyles of the Russian rich. Each commanded a million dollars a book and they could not keep up with reader demand.

The liberal right wing—the economic reformers of the 1990s—had started out on and by Putin’s side, then a number of them broke ranks, tried to establish opposition parties, and failed. In the years it had taken them to change their minds, Putin had systematically disassembled the country’s electoral system and taken over all federal and most local television channels, so that there was little left for opposition politicians to work with, or for. The left-wing establishment—the Communist Party and its satellites—was firmly and comfortably in the Kremlin’s pocket. In 2005, chess champion Garry Kasparov, one of Russia’s most respected and beloved men, announced he was giving up chess to take up the cause of toppling the Putin regime. He found himself unable to rent a hall anywhere in the country. He did, however, succeed in hammering together a ragtag coalition that staged a series of street protests called the Marches of the Disagreeable. These dissipated in 2008 after the police started detaining known activists in the days leading up to scheduled protests.

In December 2006, at the end of Nadya’s first semester in Moscow, more than five thousand people showed up for a March of the Disagreeable, for which a permit had been denied by the authorities. They tried to force their way through a police cordon; more than a hundred people were detained. Four months later, as many as a thousand activists were detained as they left their homes to go to another banned march. Still, about five thousand people showed up and several hundred managed to break through a police cordon and march for about half a mile before the protest was broken up by police. To Petya and Nadya, who took part in some of these protests, it did not exactly feel like change was in the air but it was at least clear that they were not the only people in Russia who would speak out against the suffocating political uniformity, the overwhelming mediocrity, and the obsessive consumption of Putin’s Russia.

PETYA’S BEST FRIEND, Oleg Vorotnikov, a philosophy department graduate, had been trying on the role of contemporary artist. Oleg’s wife, Natalia Sokol, was a physicist turned photographer, and in 2005 they had formed what they called an art collective, though it appears to have comprised only the two of them and it is not entirely clear what kind of art they did—or, really, whether they did any. Now the two couples, Oleg and Natalia plus Petya and Nadya, would form a new art group. By February 2007, they settled on a name: Voina, or “War.”

There remained the question of what this art group was going to do. It was definitely not going to rebroadcast the message of the opposition, which was as stilted as any set of political clichés anywhere—it was a miracle this language had inspired anyone to come out into the streets. The small art scene hardly offered an alternative. The scene was dominated by commercial giants like AES+F, a four-person art group that represented Russia that year at the Venice Biennale with a video called “Last Riot,” in which planes collided without bursting into flames and gangs of staggeringly beautiful teens clashed without shedding blood. The art world’s emerging star was Victor Alimpiev, who created ethereal works that looked like traces of snow against a pleasantly gray sky and who emphasized that his work was in no way tied to current events or, more generally, to the place and time in which it was created. A group called the Blue Noses provided an alternative to the high gloss of the mainstream art scene; its work was all irony all the time, which basically meant it was a collection of caricatures.

It was not the artists’ or the politicians’ fault, this desolate state of affairs. To a large extent, it was the Soviet Union’s fault. In all societies, public rhetoric involves some measure of lying, and history—political history and art history—is made when someone effectively confronts the lie. But in really scary societies all public conversation is an exercise in using words to mean their opposites—in describing the brave as traitorous, the weak as frightening, and the good as bad—and confronting these lies is the most scary and lonely thing a person can do. These are the societies of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, which preceded it. In Zamyatin’s utopia, the guillotine was known as the Machine of the Benefactor, people were known as Numbers, and the power of words was well understood: “Whoever feels capable must consider it his duty to write treatises, poems, manifestos, odes, and other compositions on the greatness and beauty of the United State.” Zamyatin had based his dystopia on the Soviet state he witnessed being constructed. Half a century after his death, real words that corresponded to actual facts and feelings broke through in a sudden, catastrophic flood and brought down the Soviet Union. But that heady period of Russian history was winding down by the time Petya and Nadya were learning to talk. Voina faced a challenge that perhaps exceeded challenges faced by any other artist in history: they wanted to confront a language of lies that had once been effectively confronted but had since been reconstructed and reinforced, discrediting the language of confrontation itself. There were no words left.

A few other artists were struggling with the same issues. Petya had spent some months helping the performance artist Oleg Kulik mount a large collaborative show called I Believe. The show was preceded by a series of collective soul-searching sessions during which each participant strove to identify what he believed in. Petya found this approach unnervingly and embarrassingly modernist. Here was another complication: these philosophy students (and one physicist) wanted to use their intellectual tools to deconstruct what they were confronting, but the shifty and shifting language resisted deconstruction. In the summer of 2007, they went to see Prigov.

PRIGOV LIKED THEM—of course he did—and happily agreed to perform with them. This was to be Voina’s first real action, after six months of talking all the time, and once throwing cats (actual live stray cats) over the counter at McDonald’s in a joint action with the art group Bombily (“Gypsy Cabs”), which was really just Kulik’s stepson Anton Nikolaev, a former student who emailed me links to footage of Voina’s actions. Voina called him the Crazy One.

Prigov was going to get inside a fireproof metal safe and Voina members were to carry the safe with the poet up twenty-two floors in the main building in Moscow State University. The entire time, Prigov was to be in conversation with himself, presumably in his usual melodic, prayerlike manner. He wrote a piece to launch his monologue:

The piece was called Ascension and reflected the spirit of excessive symbolism with which Voina would imbue its first action. Moscow State University’s main building, one of seven Moscow skyscrapers modeled on the Manhattan Municipal Building in a blatant act of architectural plagiarism, is one of the city’s tallest buildings, sitting atop its highest hill. So the top of that building is truly as high as one could rise in the Russian capital. Several thousand gulag inmates were used in the construction of the building, and the twenty-second floor actually housed a temporary lagpunkt (labor camp unit) when work inside the building was under way. Although the philosophy department was located in a different building, the main building still symbolized all of the university—and all of Russian education, and all of Russian knowledge, and much of Russia’s ambition. And it would be by the tender, untrained hands of former and current Moscow State University students (not unlike the untrained hands of inmates who had built the university) that Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov would finally be installed at the pinnacle of Russian culture, albeit in a fireproof safe.

They could not find a fireproof safe. They decided to make do with an oak wardrobe—homey and not as heavy as a safe, but a solidly symbolic enclosure still. On July 6, 2007, Voina waited for Prigov in a Moscow bookstore café. Prigov was two hours late.

The he called, laughing: “I have somehow landed in a hospital. I’m in intensive care.” Voina went to see him. He seemed to think the whole thing was pretty funny, and so did the young people who crowded around his bed: they were willing to think whatever Prigov thought. Ten days later, Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov, aged sixty-six, died in the hospital.

Voina had a wake. Instead of ascending to the twenty-second floor, they descended into the Moscow Metro—another symbol of Soviet monumentalism and architectural gigantism. They boarded the circle line at the scarcely inhabited midnight hour and quickly set up red plastic picnic tables, which fit perfectly between the benches that run along each side of the subway car. They covered the tables with white tablecloths and rapidly distributed place settings, bottles of wine and vodka, and traditional Russian bitter and sweet wake fare. Anton the Crazy One approached other passengers to offer them food and drink (all declined). Oleg Vorotnikov recited an early Prigov poem:

“It was a total installation,” Petya told me, using a term coined by the émigré Russian artist Ilya Kabakov to describe installations that represent segments of a larger narrative. “It was our first experience of working with public space, intended to bring life into it. The Conceptualists pushed the boundaries of language and we pushed the boundaries of public space.”

The Wake, or The Feast, as Voina named it, is my favorite among their actions because it was heartbreaking. There were about a dozen people at the picnic tables. They were very young and amped up, like kids who are having a party while their parents are out of the house. They looked shaken, small, and alone—exactly the way people feel when someone they love has died. They succeeded in capturing the very essence of a Russian wake, a party of maudlin abandon. Or rather, they captured the spirit of the post-Soviet wake, which, like most post-Soviet rituals, combined a memory of Russian traditions with bits of Soviet officialdom. It was a perfect tribute to Prigov. It was also a perfect preview of the future of Voina, which would become best known for making the private public.

Voina videotaped the action and, as it would do with all its actions in the future, edited it into a short clip with an accompanying text narrative. The video made it into a show in Kiev, and Voina went there and even restaged The Feast on the Kiev Metro. They were a bona fide art group now.

ONCE THEY RETURNED FROM KIEV, they launched a series of actions that had the cumulative effect of making people feel as if Voina had been around for a while, commenting on Russian life and politics without mercy. On February 29, 2008, five couples had sex in the Biology Museum and videotaped it. The action was called Fuck for the Heir Puppy Bear, a play on Dmitry Medvedev’s last name, which derives from the Russian word for bear. Medvedev, a tiny man who looked like a cross between a third grader and his favorite stuffed toy, had been anointed Putin’s successor; the day after the action, he was elected to the office of president so he could keep the chair warm for Putin for four years. The location for the action was chosen for its animal associations, while the form was meant to communicate that Russian political life was like pornography: the commercialized imitation of passion.

In May, Voina staged The Humiliation of a Cop in His Home: pretending to be students delegated by local high schools, they entered police precincts and replaced portraits of Putin with ones of Medvedev. Policemen watched, mortified at having to witness what felt like an affront to the regime but unable to act because formally the “high school students” were doing the right thing: Medvedev was being inaugurated that very day.

In June, Oleg Vorotnikov donned the long black robe of a Russian Orthodox priest and a police officer’s hat, entered a supermarket, and left with a full cart of groceries but without paying—to demonstrate that both priests and cops were robbers. This was called Cop in a Priest’s Cassock.

In September, Voina staged one of its most loaded and confusing actions, which was also destined to be among its best remembered. Called In Memory of the Decembrists, the action referenced Russia’s nineteenth-century would-be revolutionaries in a decidedly obscure way. Five of the Decembrists had been hanged, so Voina staged the hanging of five men—three representing, in costume and makeup, migrant laborers and two representing homosexuals (one of whom was also Jewish in real life)—in the aisles of the Auchan hypermarket, which represented itself, unbridled consumerism, and a signature accomplishment of Moscow’s mayor, who was known for his xenophobic remarks. Auchan customers were handed “hunting licenses,” cards that purported to grant them the right to shoot migrant workers.

In November, on the anniversary of the October Revolution (which also happened to be Nadya’s nineteenth birthday), they staged their Storming of the White House. Voina smuggled a powerful laser projector into the attic of the Ukraine Hotel (another Stalin skyscraper) and used it to project an enormous skull-and-crossbones across the Moscow River onto the White House, seat of the Russian government.

They closed out the year on December 28 by welding shut the doors of Oprichnik, one of Moscow’s most ridiculously expensive restaurants, whose name referred to members of Ivan the Terrible’s shock troops. A message nailed to the door said: “For the security of our citizens the doors of the elite club Oprichnik have been reinforced.” Voina members had thought a New Year’s celebration was under way inside when they welded the club shut. In fact, Oprichnik was empty that night.

THEY PROVED TO BE TALENTED RECRUITERS. They would attend shows at Moscow’s Rodchenko School of Photography and invite gifted students to come and play—this was how a short, boyish young woman who called herself Kat became a regular participant. They would go to established artists for counsel and involve them as well: Kulik joined them occasionally, and a writer named Alexei Plutser-Sarno became the group’s quasi-official blogger and the leading source of information on their actions. A filmmaker named Tasya Krugovykh came to them when she needed a consult on shoplifting for a film she was planning—and they came back to her with a request for scripting one of their actions. She agreed.

Shoplifting was an essential part of the Voina ethos. They rejected consumption; more to the point, they had no money but liked to eat well and often—so they raised stealing food to an art form. They could hold forth for hours on the theory and practice of stealing to eat, including the finer details of stores’ unsuccessful shoplifting-prevention strategies.

Petya, Nadya, Oleg, Natalia, and a shifting number of other Voina members formed what amounted to a commune. They generally lived together—in a two-room apartment Petya was able to rent for a while, in Kulik’s basement studio where Anton the Crazy One lived, in a squat, in a rehearsal space. They traveled together when they had shows. They talked all the time, usually about art and politics. Eventually they tired one another out. In late 2009, they split acrimoniously—Oleg and Natalia and their allies on the one hand and Petya and Nadya and theirs on the other. Both groups continued to call themselves Voina. Oleg’s claim appeared to have more credence: his Voina continued to generate remarkable actions, including the group’s simplest and wittiest one, the laconic opposite of their early excesses. In June 2010, they painted the giant outline of a penis on half of a drawbridge outside the regional secret police headquarters in St. Petersburg. When the bridge was raised, the penis erected itself right into headquarters windows. The action was called Fuck the FSB. From this, Oleg’s Voina graduated to damaging and destroying police vehicles, then to getting arrested briefly, and finally to fleeing the country. Oleg and Natalia went into hiding in 2011 and eventually reemerged in Venice, Italy.

Nadya and Petya did not do anything as decisive or dramatic. They had had a baby: Gera happened to them much the way Nadya had happened to her own parents—Nadya was pregnant within months of meeting Petya. They scheduled a meeting with Andrei, Nadya’s father, in the Metro to tell him the news. He remembered sitting on a train pulling out of the station and realizing “there would be a baby and this character named Petya would now be a part of my life.” Once Nadya turned eighteen, she and Petya got a marriage license. Nadya was nine months pregnant when they “fucked for the heir puppy bear.” Gera was born four days later. The baby spent much of her time at Petya’s mother’s apartment while her parents were out making political art.

But by the time Gera was two, her parents—aged twenty and twenty-three—were a bit like art-world retirees. Their best or at least most dramatic work appeared to be behind them. Petya took to referring to Voina’s 2008 actions as “classics.” It seemed they had been a part of creating something much bigger than they had realized—and much bigger than they themselves were. But the moment in which that work had been created was over. The outrage was gone. The Marches of the Disagreeable had devolved into small protests in one of Moscow’s central squares, held every other month. The 2008 financial crisis had tamed Moscow’s consumerist extravagance. Medvedev kept spouting somewhat believable liberal rhetoric. What had been black and white turned an indecisive shade of gray—a color not conducive to making radical art.

Nadya studied. She looked for Russian translations of essential works of philosophy written during the last forty years; sometimes she found self-published or unpublished translations, and sometimes she found none at all and became a translator herself. Petya was restless.

THREE Kat

“MY CHILDHOOD WAS not particularly ordinary before it became ordinary.” Yekaterina Samutsevich had an indirect relationship to language; I had noticed this in spending time in her company even before we sat down for our first formal interview. She aimed to be precise, her word choice was always intentional, but she seemed unaware of images or associations that her words called forth in others, and as a result her speech often served to obscure rather than to illuminate. Now I had told her I wanted to hear her whole story from the beginning, and she started by saying her childhood had become ordinary after it had been extraordinary.

“It was extraordinary at first because I was always in hospitals, in some sort of institution, like an orphanage but actually a hospital. I must have had serious health problems of some sort, as I was told later. So when I was a child, I never saw my parents. I don’t remember how old I was when I first saw them—it’s hard to tell the age from the memory. I remember Mother and Father came. Mother was wearing a black fur coat—I remember that. I was told, ‘This woman and this man are your parents. They waited for you and now they have come to take you.’ And I remember that I had been in hospitals and also there were other women I didn’t know. I lived at a woman’s home once and she gave me treatment potions. I had been spending all my time with strangers. So the first time I was shown my mother and father, it made no impression on me: I didn’t care who they were. I was just sad I had to go to some strange place. And they took me to the apartment where I still live.”

“Did you ever ask your parents what was wrong with you?”

“Of course I did. They told me I was a biological child, I was not adopted, but I had been very seriously ill. I don’t know what it was—maybe there was something wrong with my heart. So they’d had to keep sending me away to make sure I could survive.”

Here was the only central character in this story to whom I could have unfettered access, and we seemed to have encountered a fundamental problem at the very beginning of its telling. From everything I could see, she had told me a classic adoption story, and now she was telling me it was not what it seemed. We all deal in personal and family myths and legends, we conspire to exaggerate and obliterate, but usually we make adjustments to the stories to make them believable (indeed, often true stories must be systematically altered in order to actually be believed). Never before had I been told a story that appeared to represent one event and been instructed to take it on faith that it actually represented another. This was going to happen again and again in my conversations with Yekaterina and her father.

Stanislav Samutsevich was a very tall man who looked younger than his seventy-four years. He also looked remarkably un-Russian: in a short-sleeved blue oxford shirt, gray belted slacks, and black loafers, he looked more like a retired American insurance salesman or midlevel IBM employee than a Russian engineer. We sat on a park bench in central Moscow; like many Russians his age, he had not adopted the Western habit of meeting in cafés.

“She had a problem with her kidneys,” he said when I asked him about Yekaterina’s early childhood. “She was in working condition by the time she was five, so that was when we collected her. It was possible to take care of her, and now she is a physically healthy child.”

He was talking about a thirty-year-old woman.

“Sure, she is physically underdeveloped,” he continued.

If I was able to stifle my reaction when Samutsevich called his grown daughter “a healthy child,” I must have failed now: he clearly noticed I had cringed at the word underdeveloped. Yekaterina was five feet tall and had broad hips that made her look stockier than she was. She had an angular way about her and could sometimes look awkward, but she was by no means “underdeveloped.”

“It’s just that everyone in my family is large,” explained Stanislav Samutsevich.

ONCE SHE WAS HOME, Yekaterina had an ordinary childhood. She was a lonely girl growing up in a lonely family of lonely people, a late-Soviet version of any American novel of suburban desolation. Her parents had an old-fashioned sort of mismatch: the father hailed from an educated and well-placed Moscow family, while the mother came from the Ukrainian countryside. He felt embarrassed by her and she felt oppressed by him. She spent her days teaching drawing at the school Yekaterina attended—a regular neighborhood school, like scores of other schools around Moscow—and her evenings and summers in the kitchen.

“She was brought up conservatively—that the woman’s place was in the kitchen,” Yekaterina told me. “And my mother really did work at home her whole life. I mean, she worked around the house. Always cooking, cleaning. My father never did a thing, from what I understand. And she was always resenting him for that. She would say, ‘He is an intellectual, what are you going to do.’ In the summers we lived at the dacha, and I would see it: the summer, the heat, and she and my aunt are always cooking. Making preserves too, and other strange things. I didn’t understand what it was all for. But she told me, ‘Your life is going to be like this. You’ll spend it in the kitchen.’ I looked at it all in horror. And I view it negatively now.”

Stanislav had other ideas for his only child: he steered Yekaterina toward his own field of computer programming. She graduated high school with a gold medal, given to straight-A students. “It was easy enough,” she told me. “I was surprised other people didn’t have gold medals.” She paused. “And then they started pressuring me to go to college.” The Moscow Institute of Power Engineering seemed as good a choice as any. It also took Yekaterina out of her dreary southeastern Moscow neighborhood for the first time since she landed there at the age of five; at least during the daytime hours she spent at the institute, she saw something other than the permanent traffic jam that had been the view from her apartment and school windows throughout her childhood.

The summer after her first year of college, Yekaterina lived at the dacha with her mother; her father worked, splitting his time between Moscow and the countryside. One day her mother, who was standing at the stove as usual, collapsed with a massive heart attack. Yekaterina called her father and her aunt and an ambulance, but by the time anyone came, her mother was dead. Yekaterina tried not to go to the dacha after that.

She spent six years at the institute, getting a master’s degree, and then left instead of pursuing a Ph.D. “I was disappointed to a certain extent. The department had outdated equipment, my adviser was ninety years old, and I didn’t think this was a very good sign. Naturally, he died soon, and there was no one left, literally, except for a single professor. The state just did not want to invest in attracting people to working in research. So I decided to get a job. And since I didn’t have any work experience, I just started going around from one research institute to another, looking for someplace willing to let a student in.” This was the mid-2000s; young Russians with Yekaterina’s credentials were getting jobs at Google, its hip Russian competitor Yandex, or any number of other high-tech firms that were actively recruiting engineers. But that was in a different, contemporary Moscow: Yekaterina was, like her father, still living in the Soviet city of her childhood, where engineers toiled at research institutes. Or rather, they usually worked at Ministry of Defense outfits behind the facades of research institutes—and that is exactly the kind of place where she found work.

The Agat Institute was a God- and state-forsaken outfit inhabited by dead souls and a few disoriented live ones like Yekaterina, who was put to work developing software for the weapons-control system of a nuclear submarine. This particular submarine had been under construction in fits and starts since Yekaterina was nine years old and the USSR still in existence. Now, ten years past its original deadline, it was earmarked to be leased by the Indian navy—if and when it was ever completed.

In 2007, construction of the submarine was largely finished and engineers were needed on site for the final adjustment and testing process, which was expected to last about a year and a half. Russian authorities were haggling with India—the price tag kept growing and the deadline kept getting pushed back—and the engineers were coming under pressure too. This was when Yekaterina quit.

“I was completely disappointed there too,” she told me. “For all the same reasons: corruption, the state’s lack of desire to invest in quality military equipment. Programmers got very low pay, while project leaders, who weren’t doing anything, just watching the security clearances, got a hundred thousand rubles [about three thousand dollars] a month. And the people who never showed up but were making sixty thousand. And you went to work and you didn’t know who you reported to or what you were supposed to do.”

What Yekaterina remembered as her first stern act of rebellion, her father remembered differently: “When she was supposed to go to the Far East for equipment testing, I wouldn’t let her go.”

“What do you mean, you wouldn’t let her go?”

“Well, would you have? She was twenty-five years old, a little girl—what kind of father would let a child go to the Far East for one and a half to two years? And I’ve served in the military myself. I have been to those parts—they are crawling with criminals. So I didn’t let her go. And a good thing I didn’t too.”

Yekaterina quit the defense institute and started taking on freelance software-writing assignments, or so her father thought. Her actual first act of rebellion was responding to an ad for a new school of photography, named for the Constructivist artist Alexander Rodchenko. The ad was a message from the other Moscow, a modern, cosmopolitan city Yekaterina had barely suspected existed. She had been to a couple of photo exhibits, and once she had been struck by the work of Boris Mikhailov, a Ukrainian-born photographer living in Berlin, one of a handful of living, world-renowned artists who hail from the former Soviet Union. Yekaterina saw a couple of pictures from his famous Red series, over-the-top romantic images flooded with Communist red. “I liked them. I didn’t know why.”

She had the summer to turn herself into a Rodchenko applicant. “I tried to make pictures that would be conceptual and not just pretty. I realized they were no good, they needed to be smarter. So I started studying books by photographers—I don’t remember who. And then, unexpectedly, I got in.” The school was free for those who were admitted on the basis of their portfolios, and Yekaterina decided not to tell her father about it. Every day she would slip out of the apartment and enter the world of contemporary art critics, curators, and photographers: the best of Moscow’s best taught at Rodchenko.

In November 2008, the fire-extinguishing system on the nuclear submarine on which Yekaterina had worked malfunctioned while the vessel was en route to a weapons-testing exercise. Twenty people aboard died, including seventeen civilian engineers. Stanislav Samutsevich felt his instincts had been good and his strictness had been vindicated; it was a good thing his daughter was a freelancer now.

WHEN YEKATERINA EVENTUALLY ADMITTED she was studying photography, Stanislav Samutsevich tried to be understanding and asked to see her work. “She was making pictures of abstract things, and I told her, ‘Take pictures of life around you and the way people live, and that way you will have psychology in your work.’ That went right over her head.”

In fact, she did take pictures of life around her. The class assignment for the 2007–2008 academic year was photographing elections. During the parliamentary election in December 2007, members of the class, armed with credentials issued by the mayor’s office, went to different polling stations—and got roughed up, detained, or chased away. At one point Yekaterina and her closest friend at the school, a tall, pale, skinny young woman named Natasha, decided to photograph Yekaterina voting at her own old school. Natasha shot her walking toward the building—and discovering that it was locked. “Then these people in civilian clothing showed up and said the election was over and the building was closed.” It was an hour before the polls were scheduled to close.

Yekaterina’s political education intensified in March, when she and Natasha set out to photograph the presidential election. Putin’s anointed successor, Dmitry Medvedev, was running essentially unopposed. From a list of polling stations, Yekaterina and Natasha picked an address that seemed odd to them. They found a psychiatric hospital—as it turned out, it was one of a number of ghost precincts created for the counting of dead-soul votes. They took pictures of themselves looking for a place to cast their votes inside a psychiatric ward—until they got kicked out.

That spring the Rodchenko School had a student show. When Yekaterina and Natasha arrived, someone told them a group of people was looking for Natasha—they had liked her video installation and asked to meet the artist. The two women found Petya, Nadya, Oleg, and Natalia standing by Natasha’s work. The visitors introduced themselves as Voina and were surprised to hear that Rodchenko students had discussed their work in class. They exchanged phone numbers. A month later, Voina called, and Natasha and Yekaterina joined. Yekaterina now called herself Kat. They took part in Humiliating a Cop in His Home and helped to prepare the Cop in a Priest’s Cassock, Storming the White House, and the hanging of the Decembrists in Auchon. More important, they became part of the fabric of Voina, the arguing, the organizing, and the endless purposeful hanging out. Toward the end of that year, the inherent tensions started getting the better of the group. Soon after Voina welded shut the empty Oprichnik restaurant, Natasha left in a huff. The remaining five people traveled to Kiev and broke up there.

Nadya, Petya, and Kat returned to Moscow intent on continuing Voina. This was when they called Tasya Krugovykh, the filmmaker they had instructed on shoplifting, and asked her to help them conceive and script an action. Tasya’s idea was, naturally, cinematic: she was fascinated with the idea of filming the stereotypes and fears resident in the collective unconscious. She scripted an action in which members of Voina hid out by the side of the highway where traffic policemen were stopping cars with the intention of extracting bribes. Once the cop had his potential victim with the window rolled down, Voina emerged from the shadows, impersonating the cop’s family. Kat would be wearing a housecoat and carrying a platter with a chicken on it (eight chickens had been shoplifted for the occasion). Nadya played a pouty teenager. All of them implored the cop to extract a larger amount. “Five hundred is not enough! Look at the number of mouths we have to feed! Get more!” The cops, mortified, would try to tell drivers that the group was not their real family.

It made a great roadside show—the visualization of a general stereotype and the well-known premise of many jokes, traffic cops extracting bribes in order to feed their large families and to keep their overbearing wives out of the workplace—and Voina staged it a number of times, But the resulting video clip, the ultimate product of their work, disappointed them. Their previous actions, captured on video, had been essentially one-liners. This one was a story, and it came across like a miniature movie, which lacked the Voina edge. It felt like they themselves lacked an edge now. The Moscow faction of Voina fizzled.

Kat and Nadya continued to spend a lot of time together. Natasha had gone home to Siberia, and Kat, who had found she was most comfortable next to someone more willful and driven than she was, became a sort of Sancho Panza to Nadya’s Don Quixote, who was obsessively trying to figure out how she was going to confront the world next.

“They were always in my apartment,” Stanislav Samutsevich complained on the park bench. “They were always in Yekaterina’s room. Doing girl stuff, I thought. I didn’t realize what they were up to until I got a phone call from the police.”

FOUR Wee Wee Riot

ON DECEMBER 5, 2011, Violetta Volkova and Nikolai Polozov met up a bit before seven. They had never met in person before—they had been following each other on Twitter for a couple of months, since Volkova’s teenage daughter dragged her mother into the era of social media by starting an account for her. Polozov and Volkova had exchanged a few messages because they seemed to have a couple of things in common: they were both in their late thirties, they both worked as criminal defense attorneys, and they both held, as Volkova put it a year and a half later, “views not in favor of the authorities.” This was an awkward but surprisingly precise definition; in a country where there was no political opposition, either in parliament or in the street, a few people discovered their commonality online because they produced similarly disaffected 140-character comments on the Russian government.

As criminal defense lawyers, Volkova and Polozov did not enjoy the kind of social status an American might associate with this profession. The Russian court system, never a sterling example of justice, fairness, or competition, had regressed in the Putin years—and Volkova and Polozov were too young to remember anything else. With an acquittal rate of less than one percent and judges drawn largely from the courts’ secretarial pool, the courts had turned into an arena for technocratic bargaining at best and systematic bribery at worst. Volkova’s and Polozov’s more ambitious law school classmates had gone into corporate or tax law and had over time come to imitate the style of their City of London counterparts—and to make a lot more money than they did. Volkova and Polozov, on the other hand, wore polyester suits and held as low an opinion of their profession as anyone else did.

But it had occurred to Volkova that they could do something important, or at least something different. Another man she had followed on Twitter had posted about a protest planned for this evening. Volkova had never gone to a protest, or even seen one anywhere but on TV—and that had been the protests in Cairo; it had been years since anything of any magnitude had happened in Moscow. But for some reason she felt moved to Tweet a response to the virtual acquaintance who had posted about the protest. She said she would be willing to help if anyone got arrested. Someone suggested she take up a watch post somewhere near the protest site. She found a café with a good view out a second-floor window. She figured she would spend at least a couple of hours there straining to see anything in the wintery darkness outside. She messaged Polozov, suggesting he keep her company.

Whatever it was that brought Volkova and Polozov out that night had worked on thousands of other people as well. In a city where for years no protest had drawn more than a few hundred people—not pensioners coming out against drastic cuts in benefits, nor journalists coming out to mourn their slain colleague Anna Politkovskaya, nor the varied crowd who came out to protest the continued imprisonment of a pregnant woman who had worked for jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky—suddenly, almost without warning, between seven thousand and ten thousand people took to the streets to protest yet another rigged election.

Nadya and Petya and Kat and many others had been waiting for this day for a long time. For Nadya and Petya, the waiting had commenced years earlier, when they dreamed that the Marches of the Disagreeable might lead to change. Kat had been waiting for four years—since the time she and Natasha were roughed up when they tried to take pictures at a polling station. Many Russians had been surprised and inspired in the summer of 2010, when scores of people led by a young woman named Yevgeniya Chirikova waged a battle to save the forest in Khimki, just outside Moscow, where a new toll road was to be built. Many others began waiting for Russian protests six months earlier, when they watched the Arab Spring explode in hope. And hundreds of thousands felt they could wait no longer when, on September 24, 2011, they watched Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev appear together to announce they had decided to swap seats again, with the former retaking the office of president and the latter becoming prime minister again, in a sham presidential election to be held in half a year’s time. They had announced this and blithely begun preparations for an equally bogus parliamentary election that was held on December 4. And on December 5, the people finally came out.

Nadya and Kat and some of their friends, old and new, had been preparing for this. They were ready. Sort of. Maybe. Almost.

IN THE COUPLE OF YEARS since Voina fizzled, they had occasionally tried to create actions. At one point Nadya and Kat asked Tasya Krugovykh, the filmmaker, to videotape them wrapping evidence tape around groups of trees; the imprint on the tape said STABILITY—the buzzword of the Putin years. Cinematically, however, the action once again turned out unimpressive and they never released it. After a while, they had another idea: they would kiss cops. They would kill them with kindness, smother them with love. The action was tied to another in a long line of President Medvedev’s symbolic but substanceless actions: he had ordered that the Russian police, which had since the early days of the Soviet Union been known as militsiya, or militia, be renamed politsiya, or police. As though that would magically render the police less corrupt and brutal, less likely to rape, pillage, and terrorize, and more likely to protect. As though it would magically make them human. To test this transformation, Nadya and assorted Rodchenko students they drafted would approach police officers and ask them for simple directions. If the officer responded helpfully, one of the actors would go into paroxysms of gratitude, culminating in a kiss—on the lips, when possible. The kisses, it was decided at the outset, should be same-sex. The reasoning behind this decision was, as often happened with Voina, opaque, but the organizing itself proved an interesting experiment: the men of Voina turned out to be no more capable of administering same-sex kisses than the men of militsiya/politsiya were of receiving them. They would abort the action a day or a few hours before it was planned, pleading exhaustion, ill health, or nothing at all. So it was by accident that Buss the Buzz became Voina’s first women-only action.

Or perhaps it was not entirely accidental. Nadya’s self-education course had taken her into feminist theory. During the production of Buss the Buzz, Nadya carried Julia Kristeva’s Revolt, She Said with her—to read on the Metro and, it turned out, to quote from when the unhappy object of an unwanted kiss searched her. “We are happy because we are revolting,” Nadya proclaimed, but the attempt to quote Kristeva fell flat, in part because the play on words was lost in translation, so it came out simply “rebelling,” or “rioting.”

Since Buss the Buzz had turned into a women-only action, it made sense to release the video clip on the eve of International Women’s Day, March 8, 2011. It went viral and was generally liked, though some people—I was among them—found the nonconsensual physical interaction disturbing. Two years later, Kat assured me there had been no force or coercion involved and only the choppy video editing had made it look like the women of Voina had forced themselves on unsuspecting cops. At the time of the action, though, Kat had sounded pretty aggressive: “A cop’s face is communal property, just like his or her nightstick or your personal belongings, of which he can conduct an illegal search,” she told a reporter. “A cop’s face, as long as he is wearing a uniform and a badge, is but a tool for communicating with citizens. He can use it to demand your documents and… to tell you to come to the precinct. And you have only one way of responding: ‘Yes, sir/ma’am, officer, I obey you and I am coming.’ We are proposing a new way of interacting with this tool, we are introducing variety into the relationship between the people and the police.”

Nadya’s message to the same reporter was simpler: “The decision to become a cop is a hugely serious decision, and it should be made responsibly… I say to her, ‘Madame Officer, have you heard your boss the mayor’s speech in which he said that ‘Moscow does not need gays’? No? That’s reason enough for me to suck your face.”

Queer theory and feminist theory was teaching Nadya, and Nadya was teaching Kat, that things should be done differently—not just differently from the way they were done in Russia but also differently from the way they had been done in Voina. It had been a group of men aided by their wives. It had also been a group in which the women had jealously watched their husbands. Both conditions now felt a bit embarrassing, as did the serious regard Voina accorded itself. The more Kat and Nadya and occasional others argued—this method of creating actions had remained unchanged—the more they agreed that their new strategy should not involve Art with a capital A; indeed, the fact that it was art should be concealed by a spirit of fun and mischief. Whatever they did should be easily understood, and if it was not, it should be simply explained. It should be as accessible as the Guerrilla Girls and as irreverent as Bikini Kill. If only Russia had something like these groups, or anything of Riot Grrrl culture, or, really, any legacy of twentieth-century feminism in its cultural background! But it did not. They had to make it up.

THE LAST WEEKEND of September 2011, Nadya was invited to speak at a conference called in the hopes of uniting the many small and disjointed Russian opposition groups. The organizers, who had met Nadya during the 2010 Khimki Forest protests, did not have much of an idea who she was or what they wanted her to say, but Nadya knew exactly what she wanted to tell them: She wanted to spread what she had been learning. She wanted to use her ninety minutes to compensate for Russia’s lack of a feminist movement, a body of social theory, or a Riot Grrrl legacy. She put together a set of thirty-seven slides.

Nadya and Kat sat in one of the front rows, by the projector, with their backs to the mostly male audience.

“Since our schools and universities do not yet have gender studies departments, we lack the opportunity to offer a complete theory course,” Nadya began. “Our presentation today will be fragmentary; it will contain a number of separate clips; it will be, essentially, an advertisement.”

They began with Bikini Kill, sped through 1970s feminist activism in the United States and Europe, described separatism without saying the word, paused to summarize Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, transitioned to the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle’s visual critique of the view of women as consisting only of their reproductive organs, and jumped back over to contemporary Russia, where Vladimir Putin had responded to a female speaker at a conference of his United Russia party by saying, “Natasha, I have only one wish: please do not forget about fulfilling your obligations with regards to solving our demographic issues.”

This got them as far as the 1980s in the United States; they talked about the Guerrilla Girls as a way of getting into issues of race in feminist art; described the Guerrilla Girls breaking into art museums wearing gorilla masks and eating bananas—and pointed out that “today the banana remains a preferred racist tool for insulting people; take, for instance, repeated instances of Russian soccer fans throwing bananas at black players.” While bell hooks, they explained, had shown people it was possible to be doubly oppressed, the Austrian artist Valie Export had demonstrated that the naked female body could not only please but also frighten and haunt. They showed a two-minute video about Valie Export’s work, including her 1968 Genital Panic, featuring her genitals and a machine gun in a Munich movie theater. This took them back to Russia, where a spokesman for the Russian Orthodox Church had suggested, recently and repeatedly, that a dress code be imposed on Russian women. They showed Cuban artist Ernesto Pujol’s The Nun, featuring a young man in a habit, and suggested a dress code for men might be in order. Over to French artist Orlan’s image Skai and Sky, featuring two crosses held by a woman wearing a black rubber habitlike dress, with her right breast exposed. Martha Rosler’s 1975 Semiotics of the Kitchen, a black-and-white send-up of cooking shows, followed. Cut to British artist Sarah Lucas in an armchair, denimed legs spread, a fried egg on each of her breasts. Her Get Off Your Horse and Drink Your Milk showed the (nearly prostrate) Russian men in the audience a naked man, for a change, holding between his legs a milk bottle in place of a penis and two cookies in place of testicles. But pictures of Russian artist Elena Kovylina were even more shocking: using hypodermic needles, she had affixed to her naked body pictures of girls cut out of magazines—and demanded that people attending the show in Moscow remove the pinups while she sat impassively until the last of the images was gone. And as though that were not enough, Nadya and Kat followed up with images from more of Kovylina’s works: Kovylina boxing, in red; Kovylina naked, lying immobile atop a grand piano interminably, symbolizing woman as we are used to seeing her in art.

After that, they headed back to the West and more theoretical work addressing obscure topics, which provided much-needed relief for the audience: the French performance artist Orlan’s work on plastic surgery and diatribes against stereotypes and fixed identities. To relax the viewers further, they introduced Marcel Duchamp’s gender-altered Mona Lisa, with the penciled-on mustache and beard, and Man Ray’s portrait of Duchamp as a female movie star. Duchamp’s urinal made it into the slide show too, possibly to provide the audience with at least one familiar image in addition to the Mona Lisa. Then there was Diane Arbus’s portrait of a transvestite, Yasumasa Morimura’s portrait of an Audrey Hepburn impersonator, and Morimura himself as the model in a Vermeer painting. And back to Russia, where the male artist Vladislav Mamyshev had made a career out of being Marilyn Monroe. Was that all that Russia had to offer to cap this tour of contemporary feminist art? A gay male artist who had risen to prominence twenty years earlier and had invented nothing new since?

They had probably given the audience as good an introduction to feminist art as any undergraduate seminar in feminist art might offer in a country where such seminars are offered. But the last thing Nadya and Kat wanted to do was deliver what amounted to a lecture on how things were done “over there.” They were, after all, activist artists at an activist conference, and that kind of abstract presentation makes bad activism and bad art.

The fact, though, was that feminism had never taken root in Russia. It had been part of Bolshevik ideology in the 1920s, when “revolutionary morality” replaced bourgeois morality, abolishing marriage and monogamy and introducing free love, communal children, and full gender equality. The USSR even introduced the world’s very first laws against sexual harassment in the workplace. But the egalitarian spirit did not last. Starting in the 1930s, laws against homosexual conduct were restored, as was marriage; abortion was banned (to be legalized a few decades later, and to become the country’s sole method of birth control); a child’s legitimacy once again became paramount in establishing social standing; and Communist Party organizations commenced close watch over the integrity and moral purity of families. “If he cheats on his wife, he will cheat on his country” became a catchphrase.

Bourgeois morality was, in other words, fully restored, but in keeping with the principle of calling things by the names of their opposites, it was called “Soviet morality” while feminist thought was branded bourgeois. Virtually all Soviet women held two full-time jobs—one for pay and one, at home, for nothing but hardship, which, in light of constant food shortages, could be extreme—and this was called “full gender equality.” Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, the tradition of reviling and ridiculing feminism proved surprisingly resilient. A few feminist organizations that appeared in the late 1980s, on the glasnost-and-perestroika wave, either stayed small or disappeared. Feminism was an academic pursuit, and an unpopular one. Combined with the general paucity of political content on the Russian art scene, that meant that Nadya and Kat had only Kovylina’s (problematically commercial) work to show. If they wanted to show something radical, feminist, independent, street-based, and Russian, they would have to make it up.

“It is worth noting,” Nadya said importantly, “that punk feminist art is being produced in Russia today. Here is an example. The Pisya Riot collective works in a great variety of genres, including both visual and musical compositions.”

Pisya is a kid’s word for genitals of either sex; it is most like wee-wee or pee-pee.

Nadya brought up a slide of Titian’s Madonna with Child and Saints, where the male saints had been replaced with a woman, a clothesline from which a variety of boxer shorts were hanging had been placed in the background, and piles of anachronistic dirty dishes occupied the foreground. The reproduction and the alteration were flawless. The audience observed respectfully.

Then Nadya pushed a button on a boom box. A sound like the scraping of a thousand rusty nails started up. Nadya and Kat rose and quickly but calmly left the audience alone with Pisya Riot’s first and only musical composition, “Kill the Sexist.”

BEING A FICTIONAL GROUP, Pisya Riot could not write its own music. Neither of the real-life members of the phantom group could; Nadya had taken music lessons as a child and had not done well, and Kat had no musical background. So they borrowed a track from the British punk group Cockney Rejects and used a handheld Dictaphone to record their lyrics over the sampling:

They found they liked being Pisya Riot. Maybe they even really wanted to be Pisya Riot. To become a punk rock group, though, they would need musicians. They thought of N, a woman Nadya’s age who had come to Voina with her boyfriend; they were both anarchists. Nadya sought her out. N was with another boyfriend now, a cool older guy who collected and fixed antique bicycles, and she was no longer an anarchist—she was making a living as a computer programmer and apparently maintaining a perfectly respectable middle-class existence, though she was still serious about her music. N found Nadya changed too: “In Voina, she had been this chubby-cheeked child, and now her cheeks had thinned and her voice took on a certainty. She had chosen her issues, and she may even have chosen them at random, but now she was serious and her topics were LGBT and feminism. And the choice had changed her: she no longer saw herself as an appendage to Petya and Vorotnikov, even if she had once been a willing appendage. It had still limited her. When you are with someone, you are not flying through the cosmos, because your soul always has its home in another person—you may need it sometimes, but it is limiting and it keeps you from taking flight. Nadya got this at some point and took flight.” Pisya Riot, on the other hand, seemed to N almost pure silliness, but she envied whatever it was Nadya felt. She took on the music.

They would need other participants too, but that did not seem like a big issue; what they had in mind could be done by three or five or seven or eleven people, and they had friends and the Rodchenko School had students to be recruited. They also needed a stage. At first, playgrounds, with their platforms and slides, looked pretty good. They had recorded “Kill the Sexist” at a playground. It was raining. It was also nighttime, which meant there were no children at the playground, but there were beer-drinking and cigarette-smoking young people, who grew concerned when they heard young women screaming their heads off about stinky socks.

They said, “What happened? Did someone hurt you? Do you need help?”

Nadya and Kat had said, “Don’t worry, we are just making a record.” But now that they were planning on making videos, they needed a different stage, something more spectacular, One day, as they got off the Metro, they spotted it: some stations had towers made of scaffolding, with platforms at the very top, for changing lightbulbs or painting ceilings, or performing punk rock, perhaps. Moscow Metro stations are, for the most part, grand architectural affairs, all marble and granite and ostentatiously spanning arches and dramatic lighting; they look like classical concert halls, and the crude scaffolding towers, viewed from the right angle, look very much like a punk affront of a stage.

They performed a number of reconnaissance missions and identified several stations where the towers were particularly tall and well placed, which is to say, placed close to the center of the hall. Then they began rehearsing. If they were going to be a feminist punk rock group, they were going to have to have instruments—Kat picked up a bass—and they were going to have to climb up the tower and unpack their instruments and mics and amplifier and take up positions fast, faster than the Metro police knew what was happening.

They practiced at playgrounds.

As they rehearsed, it became clear they needed staging and visuals and costumes. “Because if we just got up there and started screaming, everyone would think we were stupid,” Kat explained to me. “Stupid chicks just standing there screaming.” First they came up with wearing balaclavas, which would make them anonymous—but not like Russian special forces, who kept their identities hidden behind black knit face masks with slits for the eyes and mouth, but like the opposite of that: their balaclavas would be neon-colored. Then they would need dresses and multicolored stockings, to show that the whole getup was intentional. Bright, exaggerated makeup showed surprisingly well through the slits in the balaclavas. And the pillow—the pillow appeared because parliament members had begun talking about banning abortion and Putin kept talking about Russia’s so-called demographic problem, by which he meant that Russian women were not getting pregnant often enough, and so Nadya stuck a pillow under her green dress. And then she tried taking it out during the screaming, or the singing, and ripping it open. The feathers created a sort of snow effect, in addition to the birth effect and the abortion effect. That worked.

They spent a month filming their first clip. This was now a complicated production, and it opened the door for Petya—who had been itching to join them—to actually do so. Nadya was good at putting together lectures, Kat was good at helping her, N was good at the music, Tasya was good at filming, but all of them were a nightmare when it came to logistics—at which Petya, with his rare combination of manic energy and attention to detail, was incomparable. There was one time they climbed atop a Moscow electric bus and performed—it turned out the feather-letting worked outdoors as well—but mostly they filmed at Metro stations, as many as fifteen of them in all. A couple of times, they got detained. Once, Tasya, who was filming, got beaten up by police. This was before many Russians came to think of being beaten up by police as a regular part of their existence. There was the time when the police tried to beat up Petya, and Nadya wedged herself between him and them and literally shielded him with her body, and there was probably no one, not even Nadya, who appreciated the beauty of her doing this after screaming about stinky socks and penis envy.

And there was the time when the police called Stanislav Samutsevich. “They would not let me see them,” he recalled. “They were in a holding pen. I had a conversation with two interesting young men. They talked to me about contemporary art and activism. I asked them who they were, and they said, ‘We are art critics in civilian clothing.’” It was an unfunny joke that Stanislav Samutsevich did not get: art critic in civilian clothing was a term used to denote KGB agents whose job it was to inform on dissidents in the Soviet Union; just like their predecessors in the 1970s, Pisya Riot had developed a following among these “art critics” before the broader public ever heard of them. That is, the secret police had literally started following them around—there were more of them with each consecutive taping.

Stanislav Samutsevich would not have known, or wanted to know, anything about dissidents in the Soviet Union, or about those whose job it had been to spy on them or jail them. “So I shared with them my views on contemporary art.” What were they? “Well, I am an old man.” The ones in civilian clothing were more knowledgeable about contemporary art. “The girls had really wreaked havoc there and the police didn’t know what to do with them. Then a big police vehicle came for them and Yekaterina told me to go home. She came home later, on the last train. I had a talk with her after that, but I am a dinosaur and I don’t understand anything about anything, so that was the last time she ever told me anything.” From that point on, Stanislav Samutsevich learned about performances from the media—or from police. He did try to protect the girls from themselves. “One time they were in the hallway, painting posters of some sort, and I came out and said to them, ‘Look, you’ve already been to the police station once, and no one knows how things could end.’ Nadya stopped coming over to the house after that.”

After that particular detention, the media got wind of the tower climbing and the screaming and the feathers flying in the Metro. They assumed Voina was back in action. Petya and Nadya were invited to the studios of the lone independent cable television channel, Dozhd (“Rain”). They denied it had been a Voina action. They said they had been detained while attending a performance of a new, different art group. They said it was called Pussy Riot.

FIFTEEN SHOOTING DAYS, a month of organizing, rehearsing, and editing, one night spent at a police station, several police chases, and a few skirmishes later, Pussy Riot had its name, its identity, and its first video. On November 7, 2011, the ninety-fourth anniversary of the October Revolution and Nadya’s twenty-second birthday, Pussy Riot launched its blog with the publication of its first clip, “Free the Cobblestones.” The music was borrowed from the British punk rock band Angelic Upstarts and arranged by N, and the voices, now declaiming more than singing or screaming, were clearly pronouncing lyrics that no longer sounded like a caricature of what a feminist punk group might say if it existed in Russia but were making a serious attempt at what Pussy Riot would master in the next couple of months: painting a portrait of Russia in words that could mean nothing else:

The clip went viral. Pussy Riot got press. A typical item read, “It appears a new sort of urban nutcases are on the loose in the country. A feminist group calling itself Pussy Riot consists of five girls in face masks with bad voices that they use to shout out songs ‘about the tyranny of housework, a triple workday for women, contemporary trends in revolutions, and the right ways to subjugate men.’ And they perform their songs only in places where it is illegal, like on the roof of a bus or on the Metro.” Pussy Riot thought this was perfect.

Three weeks later, they produced their second clip. This time they focused on the Putin era’s obsession with luxury. Most of the performances that made up the clip were shot along Stoleshnikov Lane, a pedestrian street lined with designer boutiques. They stormed into these boutiques, unpacked their equipment, and performed until security guards got their bearings and removed them. One time, they climbed atop a glass display case surrounding a luxury car—or at least they thought it was a glass case; it turned out to be made of Plexiglas, which bowed perilously beneath their feet. They were terrified of falling in and onto the car, but that did not happen, and their fear and discomfort were not visible in the resulting video, which showed them strong and confident atop the display case, spraying from a fire extinguisher and screaming:

The song was called “Kropotkin-Vodka”: Kropotkin for Peter Kropotkin, Russia’s anarchist prince, and vodka for unbridled consumption. In the process of filming “Kropotkin-Vodka,” Pussy Riot got pretty good at talking to the police. They developed rules. Rule Number One: Do not give your real name. They found an old online database and memorized random names and addresses. It would turn out this was not the most brilliant idea ever—the database had been compiled by the police, and some of the people on the list were wanted for more than outstanding traffic tickets. In addition, Pussy Riot often could not manage to keep their stories, names, and addresses straight, and this infuriated the cops. Still, it was probably better than accumulating an arrest record. Rule Number Two: Tell a good story. The story was, they were applying to theater school and needed to make a clip and wanted something both original and brave in order to really stand out. It was not a particularly convincing story, but it seemed to work, and perhaps it worked precisely because it was so absurd. Neither the police nor any of the boutique owners ever pressed charges. And Pussy Riot never really damaged any property—except one time.

They crashed a fashion show. They had this idea of creating visual effects with white flour, which they sprinkled on the floor, and balloons, which they let float up off the floor. But after they had unpacked their equipment and started singing, the flour on the floor caught fire from candles that the show organizers had placed along the walls. Fire spread instantly along the floor and up the balloon strings, singeing and burning garments. Miraculously, no one was hurt. But everyone was terrified. Pussy Riot finished their song and ran out, with one of the show’s organizers in pursuit. “Stop them, stop them!” she yelled to the bouncers, who stood flabbergasted. Then she addressed Pussy Riot themselves: “What did you do? You just burned us down.”

“We are sorry,” Pussy Riot said.

“Who are you?” the woman screamed.

“Here, have a phone,” Pussy Riot said, pressing a cheap cell phone into her palm. They always bought these cell phones for actions: the devices had SIM cards that the security services did not have on file and presumably could not start tracking in the space of one night.

“All right,” the woman said, unaware, in her state, that the gadget was of no use or worth. Pussy Riot walked away, and then they pulled off their balaclavas and started running, up the street, then down, down, down, all the way into the Metro. On the train they started laughing.

“We are burning up!”

“Hot!”

“Let’s call this one ‘Pussy Riot Burns Down Putin’s Glamour’!”

They got off two stops later, at Kropotkinskaya—not because it was named for Peter Kropotkin but because this was where the Metro line turned and ran alongside the Moscow River away from the center, which created a kind of psychological boundary. It was dark, cold, unseasonably snowless, and damp, as it had been for days and would be for another couple of weeks. It was late—nearing midnight—but the area around Kropotkinskaya was full of people: tens, possibly hundreds of thousands standing quietly in line outside the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The people, most of them women, were waiting to see the Holy Girdle—that is, a fragment of what was said to have been the Virgin’s undergarment. The relic, which normally resided in a monastery in Greece, was winding up its tour of Russia. More than three million had come to see the Girdle as it toured the country, more than a million of them in Moscow, spending long days and nights in the freezing rain, waiting their turn.

What a strange city this was, with its alternating rituals of glitter and Girdle. And how in the world was Pussy Riot going to fit it all into their performances, finally to point up the frightful absurdity of the land? This was what they wanted to do, but now that the adrenaline from the run was ebbing, the task seemed just about impossible. Because the city, and the country as a whole, seemed endlessly willing to accept whatever it was handed: the enormous income discrepancy, the rampant corruption that fed both the boutiques and the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, and the lies that underlay it all.

UNTIL DECEMBER 5, that is. “Kropotkin-Vodka” was published on December 1. Three days later, there was the parliamentary election that was no less but also perhaps no more rigged than the ones four and eight years earlier, but it drew more attention from Russian citizens than any election in a decade and a half. They came out to vote and, more important, they signed up in droves to become independent election monitors. And on December 5 criminal defense attorneys Violetta Volkova and Nikolai Polozov sat drinking their cappuccinos in a second-floor café and watching as Russians came out into the street. The space allotted for a three-hundred-person rally, for which a city permit had been issued, filled up in a matter of minutes. And then they watched as ten times that many people arrived from every direction in the space of ten minutes. And, in another ten minutes, there were three times that many again. More than seven thousand in all, and perhaps as many as ten thousand. They watched prisoner transports pull up, and water cannons, and buses with special forces troops. They watched a peaceful rally proceed, as the police looked on without interfering. They watched the rally starting to break up and the police opening up only a very narrow passage in the direction of the Kremlin and secret police headquarters at Lubyanka. They saw several thousand leave easily, through wide passageways open in other directions, and they saw nearly half of those present squeezing into the bottleneck in the direction of the Kremlin.

“It’s going to start now,” said Volkova.

And it did.

The people who had turned toward the Kremlin tried to organize a march. The police started to sweep them up. More than five hundred were detained. Volkova and Polozov spent the night going from police precinct to police precinct to holding facility. They got scores of people released on the spot, and they met a lot of new people in addition to each other. In the morning, when it seemed they were done, Polozov told Volkova it was his birthday and went home to grab some sleep before his party. Just after he left, Volkova got a phone call—her number had gotten around through the night—asking her to come to a holding facility in northern Moscow, where several dozen prominent activists had been taken. She was slightly awestruck when she saw Boris Nemtsov, a former cabinet member now in opposition to Putin: he was there to deliver McDonald’s hamburgers to the high-profile detainees. “I had never seen him in person. Actually, I had never been interested in politics.” Volkova was not familiar with most of the names of her new clients, who had been separated from the rest of the night’s detainees because they had arrest records. A skinny bearded guy named Petya Verzilov was among them.

WHAT STARTED THAT NIGHT was the Russian protest movement, what came to be called the Snow Revolution; the name appeared the following day. A lot of patterns were set that night. People would be getting arrested in the coming months, almost every day. A small team of young men would be tracking the arrests and helping coordinate legal help (the tracking system was born that night at my apartment, near the protest site, when one of the young men came there to warm up and started Tweeting information about detentions—I watched it start but did not know what I was seeing). Volkova and Polozov would be the two lawyers at police stations at all hours, defending those who got detained. It did not matter that they had never done this before. Everyone in the protest movement was making it up as things developed. Including, of course, the women who had become the group they had made up a couple of months earlier. Now that the revolution had started, Pussy Riot would be heard.

FIVE Maria

“LAWLESSNESS, THE DENIAL OF RIGHTS, and forced mutual dependence that results from collective responsibility are all things to which we have become accustomed.” The courtroom was stuffy—and stuffed with people. Most of us had spent a day or so getting here: take the red-eye from Moscow to Perm; brush your teeth in the airport bathroom, where the chipped, muddy-colored tile and an entire collection of filled-to-bursting black trash bags were somehow made bearable by piped-in seventies disco music; then catch a transport to Berezniki—a four- to six-hour drive, depending on the snow—then line up outside the Civic Collegium of the People’s Court, one of dozens of identical gray five-story buildings on Five-Year-Plan Street in this city of scores of identical five-story buildings, which house all of its 150,000 residents and all the courts, polyclinics, and residential authorities that rule their lives.

IT WAS MINUS-TWENTY DEGREES CELSIUS (minus-four Fahrenheit) in Berezniki, the kind of weather against which any sort of clothing can provide protection for only minutes, not for a stationary wait of a couple of hours. The court marshals allowed journalists and activists into the building one at a time, conducting thorough searches of every frozen person. In the end, about a hundred people filed into the courtroom and another fifty or so had to stay in the lobby and watch the proceedings on a video monitor set up especially for this uniquely media-worthy occasion. The courthouse, or at least a part of it, had been given a fresh paint job and a glass-and-plastic aquarium to hold Maria Alyokhina in the courtroom. Her high-pitched voice bounced off its smooth new walls, so to the audience in the courtroom she sounded like a dodgy telephone connection, coming in loud and fading out.

All day, the court had been reviewing Alyokhina’s motion to postpone the serving of her prison sentence until her son turned fourteen—a measure sometimes applied in cases of nonviolent offenses, and, in cases of the well connected, not just the nonviolent ones. “This is our unfreedom, which, as we all recall, is worse than freedom,” said Alyokhina, referring to former president Dmitry Medvedev’s awkward declaration that “freedom is better than unfreedom.” He had been talking up his economic policy.

“This is the way we are forever serving life rather than living life. I want to live life. My freedom is this: Here I stand, I can do no other, as Martin Luther said. My cause may be hopeless, but I find my freedom in the responsibility I take on, and to retreat for me would be to die a little, to use the words of the students protesting at the Sorbonne in 1968.” I thought there were probably only three or four people in the crowded courtroom who got Maria’s references and appreciated their proximity to one another, and to Martin Heidegger, whom she had quoted earlier in the hearing. Two of those people were Petya and I.

MOST THINGS MARIA HAD SAID in her life were addressed to people who did not even try to understand them. Her mother, Natalya, had discovered the chasm that separated her way of thinking from her daughter’s when Maria was thirteen. “After seventh grade, I had her change schools to go to one with a concentration in mathematics,” Natalya told me, chain-smoking in an overpriced Moscow coffee shop. Here was another parent who would not receive me at home—it was too big a mess for visitors, she claimed. I found this easy to believe: Natalya had the air of someone who struggled, probably unsuccessfully, with the daily requirements of homemaking and family life. She was a software engineer who had always lived with her own mother—a perfectly normal pattern for Russian women of her generation—and had never married, which was unusual. She had given birth to Maria at thirty-five, an almost impossibly advanced age for first-time motherhood in Russia, even in 1988. Maria’s father was a mathematician who did not stick around to see the baby born—or show any other sign of life until Maria was a teenager, at which time Natalya shot down his sudden attempt to communicate with his daughter.

The daughter, meanwhile, had spent seven years at a decent school near their apartment building in the relatively scenic bedroom suburb of Kuntsevo (unlike most of noncentral Moscow, Kuntsevo had a variety of buildings—some brick and some concrete, some five and some nine stories tall). It was a boarding school with intensive instruction in English, and Maria was a day student, which meant she took all her meals at school and came home after seven o’clock in the evening. In grade school, she was a bit of a bully, regularly beating up her enemies and occasionally swinging at her friends. As she grew into a teenager, her aggressive streak vanished. And Natalya decided it was time to transfer to a math school, as she herself had done at that age—and as she thought only natural.

Maria rebelled. Natalya was surprised. “I don’t understand the word ‘humanities,’” she complained when she talked to me. She started a frantic search for a suitable new school. She finally placed Maria at a school where she knew the principal—but not before conceding that she would probably never understand what her only daughter said, read, or wanted. When it came time to look for a college, Natalya said, “I can’t give you any advice on this: I don’t even know anyone in the humanities.”

What might have made another child feel abandoned and misunderstood made Maria feel independent and respected. When I asked her to sketch her autobiography in a letter from the penal colony, she began as follows: “You might say I was raised at home: I never went to preschool, and I spent my time in the building’s yard. I loved climbing trees, getting to the very tops of oak trees and birch trees and looking down at the way their branches intertwined beneath my feet. I lived with my mother and grandmother and I was always treated like an adult; no one fussed over me, and actions were always discussed. Probably the most important thing about my childhood is the absence of unmotivated prohibitions. If something was not allowed in our family, the reason was always transparent. Independent opinions and actions were respected.”

Maria’s grandmother died when the girl was nine, leaving Natalya feeling helpless in the face of the challenges of keeping house and raising her daughter. “Our relationship was chilly ever since the incident with the math school,” she told me, and then corrected herself: “No, ever since my mother died. I guess it was my fault—it’s always the parents’ fault. I’m probably too aggressive when it comes to arguing. She always said, ‘I don’t want to argue with you.’” It seems once Maria got out of the habit of slugging her enemies and her friends, she developed a kind of private policy of nonconfrontation—as though, perhaps, she were saving her strength for fighting on a global scale. “It’s the strangest thing,” N, who was a lifelong friend, told me. “I can tell you anything at all about her because I just know she won’t take it the wrong way.”

EVEN AFTER ESCAPING from math school, Maria continued to perceive high school as an unfortunate obligation. When something caught her interest—usually this was a Russian literature lesson—she paid attention; the rest of the time she sat in a corner on the floor with a book, looking like a flower child out of place and out of time. Her reading list was unburdensome: Russian quasi-dissident science fiction that had been trendy in the seventies and mildly satirical popular fiction that had been trendy in the nineties. Her part-time job at a video rental store provided a slightly bigger intellectual challenge: there she watched her first David Lynch, Hitchcock, and Fellini films, as well as one movie each by Lars von Trier and Catherine Breillat. None of this made for common ground with her high school classmates—though once, when she ran into N in a pedestrian underpass near home, she told her about Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky’s grim movie about addiction, and this rekindled their friendship. Though as N grew more sophisticated in her tastes, she poked fun at Maria for falling for Aronofsky’s maudlin musings. Maria did not take offense.

Maria wandered to the Arbat, an historic area of Moscow that had served as the city’s lyrical heart, then its counterculture center, then its first modern tourist attraction, and, finally, a caricature of itself. In the sixties, singer-songwriter Bulat Okudzhava crooned, “Ah, Arbat, my Arbat, you are my calling, my joy, and my sorrow.” In the seventies, hippies would gather at the Gogol monument at the end of Arbat Street, where police would regularly sweep them up for loitering. In the late eighties, Arbat Street got a makeover as a pedestrian mall—just as the USSR was starting to lift the Iron Curtain. In the nineties, street vendors of everything from fur hats to handmade jewelry shared the street with street musicians, street artists, and fans of the once wildly popular singer Viktor Tsoi, who had died in a motorcycle crash in 1990 at the age of twenty-eight. The fans had constructed a tiled wall in the Arbat as a memorial to him and milled around it, mourning their idol 24/7, year after year. Tsoi’s most famous song was “Change!” “Our hearts demand change! / Our eyes demand change!” went the refrain.

By the naughts, the Arbat had turned into the tackiest street in Moscow, lined with overpriced cafés with bad food and stores selling counterfeit antiques. Of the street vendors, only the fur hatters remained. Tsoi’s wall drew a crowd only in August, on the anniversary of his death. The street musicians had gone on to get real educations and actual jobs as advertising executives, and the only trace of their existence were three or four men who continued to strum their guitars in “the Pipe,” the pedestrian underpass at one end of the Arbat. Their audience was a semipermanent group of inebriated adolescents who had been drawn to the Arbat by its old reputation, in search of the counterculture or perhaps even a cause (Tsoi had represented one) or meaning (Okudzhava had promised it). This was where Maria met Nikita in 2006.

Nikita was older—twenty-two to Maria’s seventeen—and had been drinking harder and longer. He had a backpack with his essential belongings, which included a slim volume of Immanuel Kant, and he had been wandering central Moscow for a few years, with only an occasional stopover at home, in the northern Moscow bedroom suburb of Otradnoye (“Delightful”), one of the most dreadfully gray and desolate areas in a city almost unremittingly gray and desolate around its edges. Maria and Nikita started wandering together. They were both slim, not very tall, and both had long, slightly frizzy chestnut hair. Perhaps together they felt like the ghosts of those long-ago Arbat hippies. “It was a marginal way of life,” Nikita told me over tea in Moscow’s first vegetarian café. “A megamarginal way of life.”

Whatever it was that Nikita had been seeking when he drifted to the Arbat, he had long since stopped looking. Maria barely managed to graduate from high school; getting into college was out of the question. “When she did something, she threw herself into it fully,” N told me. “And drinking was no exception.” Most people I asked about Maria tried to skirt around the drinking issue—it seemed inappropriate, and disloyal, to discuss her teenage binges while she was struggling in jail—but found it difficult to tell the story without this part of it. “Should I be talking to you about this?” N asked me. I admitted I was not sure how I was going to handle the drinking in the writing, but told her this: I had been a teenage alcoholic myself; I nearly flunked out of high school because I was always either drunk or hungover; and I had no real explanation for what it was that enabled me to stop drinking. Nor did anyone really understand what gave Maria the strength and vision to quit: Nikita thought it was the Art of Living, a prepackaged yoga outfit that provided her with daily exercises that anchored her better than daily drinking; N thought it was getting pregnant—which Maria did in the fall after she did not go to college. She was eighteen.

“We got very inspired when she got pregnant,” Nikita told me. “We started researching birth, going to classes. She made plans. She has this ecological bent, she tries to lead an ethical life without the killing of animals, so she wanted to give birth at home and we made plans.” A home birth would indeed have required planning, as well as money, and trying to make and keep either with an alcoholic is a lost cause, so when Philip was born in May 2007, it was on the gray sheets and within the yellow walls of a regular neighborhood “birthing home,” where giving birth is rough and free. The only item on Nikita and Maria’s to-do list that they could actually check off was putting up new wallpaper in one of the rooms in Natalya’s apartment in Kuntsevo, where all four of them were now resident. Maria and Nikita, though, maintained a regular schedule of breakups, so most of the time the Kuntsevo apartment housed only the child, his mother, and grandmother—just as it had two decades earlier.

Philip was not yet three months old when Maria and Nikita took him to Utrish, a national park in southern Russia. Nikita had been hitchhiking to camp there for many summers; Maria fell in love with the place her first time there.

I had asked Maria to tell me what had led her to become an activist, and the path stopped here. “Looking at this list of facts, neither you nor I can tell how I became an activist or why I continuously changed the focus of my activism,” she wrote. “I acted intuitively—I generally tend to trust myself when I take steps that I later realize were important. In 2008, when I was in my first or second year of college, I read the news that Utrish, one of the places I hold dearest in Russia, would be cut down. I found two telephone numbers and addresses on the Internet, packed a knapsack, and, straight from college, went to the offices of the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace. I met some of their staff members. The people at Greenpeace counseled me to start collecting signatures and printed out sign-up sheets for me.”

I could visualize this scene. Moscow nonprofits do not get a lot of foot traffic—they are usually staffed by seasoned activists, many of whom have spent time living, working, or studying abroad, in countries where one might get the idea to become an activist. The appearance of a starry-eyed young woman looking like a throwback to some imaginary 1970s—wearing a hand-sewn skirt, a wide-brimmed hat over frizzy long hair, and a backpack, as though she were planning to hike to battle without delay—and speaking (in the high-pitched voice that tends to crack when she is excited) of how much she loved Utrish was definitely odd and quite possibly comical. Handing her a stack of sign-up sheets may have been an attempt to test her or just to get rid of her.

“So this was all I had—a bunch of blank sign-up sheets and not a single activist among my friends. I collected forty-three hundred signatures in one week and met wonderful people: artists, students who belonged to the environmental group at Moscow State University—I can’t even list them all. Many people wanted to help.” Pretty soon Maria was in charge of the grassroots organizing effort for the defense of Utrish, though she modestly omitted that fact from her letter to me. She helped organize rallies and pickets and, when the illegal clear-cutting of the national forest began in November 2008, she joined dozens of activists who traveled to Utrish to shield the trees with their own bodies. “I did everything with my son in a sling. When it got cold, family members would take him while I was at rallies or pickets.” Five years later, at the hearing in Berezniki, having involved her toddler son in political activities would be cited as one of the reasons to deny her early release.

EVENTUALLY MARIA DID DECIDE to go to college, and the college she chose, the Institute of Journalism and Literature, was a tiny, almost quaint private undertaking, unknown to virtually anyone who did not study or teach there. I had been an editor actively recruiting young journalists in Moscow for years, and I had never heard of it, nor had anyone I asked. Its workshop-based system drew the kind of kids Maria had been: the ones who had spent their high school years sitting in a corner with a book. The institute offered a scheduling option perfectly suited to working people or young mothers: attending classes on weekends only. Maria spent the week with Philip and doing her activism, and the weekends, when her mother could take the baby, at seminars at the institute, only about a block from her old Arbat haunts. This was the first school where she actually made friends; by her second year there, a tight group had formed. They studied together and, in the evenings, attended any of the many readings that constituted Moscow’s poetry renaissance: by the mid-naughts, the city had more working, walking, and reading poets than it had had in decades. An annual poetry festival in May saw lines snaking down the block from any of several cafés that hosted readings. Most of the city, of course, was entirely unaware of the poetry or the poets: the reading and writing community was small but loyal and fiercely active. Maria and her friends represented a minority faction in the audience: people who were not poets themselves and did not know most of the poets personally.

Most members of the group planned a career in writing. One of Maria’s closest friends, a quiet, diminutive young woman named Olya Vinogradova, got a job writing book reviews for Moscow’s central children’s library. “I thought she would make a very good journalist writing about social issues,” Olya said of Maria. “She is very good at getting into places. But she really was undetermined, because—this would sound weird if not for what has transpired—she had this idea that she would change the world. She was always saying, ‘What is the point of all these prose exercises, how do they contribute to world change?’” Institute friends were sharply aware of Maria’s activism but foggy on its substance: Utrish seemed important but far away, and anyway, soon enough Maria seemed to start shifting focus. For all her passion and ability to “get into places,” she was no proselytizer, so aside from the fact that she was now concerned with both electoral politics and contemporary art, her institute friends knew almost nothing.

Maria had a bit more time now: when Philip was four or so, Nikita stopped drinking. He had had dry spells before, and she had always made use of them to get time for herself, but now he not only could pitch in with child care but craved time with Philip, because it turned out he was good at being the father of a small boy. They even went to a fitness club together three times a week: Nikita did yoga with the zeal of an addict, and Philip joined in kids’ activities. Nikita was not nearly as good at being a companion for Maria, nor did he really try: their relationship maintained its drifty rhythm, but the distance between them grew larger.

“She often tried to tell me something, but I wasn’t really interested,” Nikita told me with a kind of righteous evenness. “She had a lot of interests, while my internal resources were few. There was Utrish, then there were birds, some sort of ecocamp for migratory birds, then soap-making and anarchists. Then Putin showed up, and this really was incomprehensible. I mean, look at it from my point of view: I had only begun my recovery, and I was paying attention to my immediate surroundings—that would be Philip. Philip was real, while with Putin I wasn’t so sure. Maybe he was a doll of some sort. So by the time all those protests began, I had completely lost interest. And anyway, I didn’t know her friends, so it’s not like I listened to her when she told me where she was going and with whom.”

“I was always an outsider everywhere,” Maria wrote in her first letter to me, talking about the schools she had attended. By the time she was in her early twenties, she had, like many people who perpetually feel like outsiders, perfected the art of compartmentalizing her life. She made little effort to talk politics or literature to her mother or Nikita (Natalya and Nikita, meanwhile, had perfected the art of living as strangers under one roof). She kept politics largely out of conversations with her institute group: they discussed poetry. And she fell behind on her reading because it was not exactly compatible with her activism. “She had to cram Sartre when she needed to at the institute,” Olya told me, apparently ashamed to be disclosing her friend’s embarrassing circumstance. “She lacks the concentration necessary for reading: it’s easier for her to watch movies.” What was worse, N told me, Maria persisted in her unself-conscious admiration for Aronofsky’s sentimental Requiem for a Dream.

Maria found the time and concentration to catch up on her reading in jail. Which was part of how she came to be quoting Heidegger, Martin Luther, and French student activists to an indifferent court in the faceless town of Berezniki.