Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot

SIX A Punk Prayer

THE FLOODGATES OPENED after December 5. It was like everyone had found his long-lost family, like daylight had broken after years of polar night. Opposition groups that had hobbled along with a dozen members on a good day now found they had hundreds and even thousands of volunteers. An ad hoc coordinating committee sprang up and people from opposite sides of the political spectrum sat down at the same table to try to channel the wellspring of human energy. People who had never thought of themselves as activists joined them, and everyone used the informal pronoun to address everyone, because everyone felt part of one great big impending revolution.

Pussy Riot did not know where they fit in at first, but then very soon they did. The day after the big December 5 protest, they went out into the street to protest again—because what else would they do? Several hundred people gathered to protest the previous night’s arrests. Most of them got arrested. This was the first time Nadya and Kat spent the night at a police station. A huge room with school desks was filled with detainees. In the morning, they were released, and they would not even have to go to court: the courts were choking on administrative arrests.

By the time they left the police station, it was clear that their next action would be where the action now was, at Special Detention Center Number One, where several dozen mostly young men were serving ten- and fifteen-day sentences in the aftermath of the protest. They included anticorruption blogger Alexei Navalny and a couple of other high-profile activists as well as men like Petya, who had been in and around the fight for several years, and other men who had stepped into the street for the first time. Petya had called and asked for food and Nadya and Kat went and stood in line at Special Detention Center Number One with a care package for him, which was a bit pointless because by that time Navalny’s supporters had brought enough chocolate and tangerines to last the opposition all winter.

Inside Special Detention Center Number One, the revolution was in full swing. One large cell had set up a round-the-clock webcast of their detention, which was filled with passionate discussion of the future of protest and the motherland. Another cell was making banners out of bedsheets and hanging them out their grated windows. 15 DAYS OF FREEDOM read one, and to those looking from the outside, it did seem like the men had found liberty in their sentences.

Petya was in a cell with Navalny and many other men, and at one point someone—probably someone who had read memoirs of Stalin-era camps—suggested each of them deliver one lecture in his area of expertise; it would make the time go faster and each of them would come out of jail knowing more than he had going in. Lectures on business administration, tax law, and revolutionary philosophy went well, and then it was Petya’s turn. He would speak on contemporary art. He got a late start—bad luck, and supper was delivered late, and Petya always got a late start on everything—and as soon as he began, the entire cell fell asleep. Except Navalny: Navalny stayed up for the duration of Petya’s mistimed three-and-a-half-hour lecture, winning his political and personal support for all eternity.

Pussy Riot cased the joint. There was not much traffic behind the building, and there were garages there, low enough for the women to be able to climb up on the roof using the same ladder they had used for the “Kropotkin-Vodka” actions.

There were three of them on December 14. It so happened that no one except Kat and Nadya could make it that day, and they had left it pretty late—some of the men would be released the next day—but a woman came out of nowhere and said she could sing. She also said she was an anarchist, she would never tell them her real name, and she played the guitar. It was all true. They called her Seraphima.

When they mounted the garage, a traffic police car pulled up. An officer with a megaphone emerged and asked them to climb down. They pulled their ladder up onto the roof, threw off their coats to expose their neon-colored dresses, took out their microphones and their instruments, unfurled a large banner that said FREEDOM TO PROTEST, cast it over the fence so it hung on the barbed wire, lit three smoke bombs, and sang and shouted:

The windows of Special Detention Center Number One filled up with faces. The second time Pussy Riot called out “Death to the jails!” the building roared “Freedom to the protests!” in response. The men rattled the bars on their windows, and it looked like the special detention center was going to explode. The cops who had gathered by the garage turned their backs on the performers and went into the building, closing the door behind them. Singing in broad daylight, performing an entire song in one go, to an audience that was not only captive but receptive, Pussy Riot felt like performers for the first time. At the end, they joined the inmates in chanting “The people united will never be defeated!” Then they lowered their ladder and climbed down. No one tried to detain them; they put on their coats and went to their rehearsal space to edit the video.

They put up the clip that evening; the timing was good, but the clip itself was not. It felt raw, and not in a good way. It did not look like video art; it looked like an amateur video of three girls singing on a garage roof. At the end, their captive audience applauded and Kat, Nadya, and Seraphima took a deep, enjoyable bow and Kat blew a two-handed kiss. This was a performance rather than performance art. Maybe their mistake was in recording a single performance rather than a series before putting together a clip. Pussy Riot had declared seriality as one of its core principles, and at the age of two and a half months the group was too young to start screwing with its own foundation.

Truth be told, the crisis went deeper. In the space of two weeks, protest had gone mainstream in Russia, taking Pussy Riot with it. Creative direct action was not enough if everyone was doing it. And everyone was; there was even a clearinghouse for direct action now, with hundreds of people coming to weekly meetings to propose dozens of actions, find collaborators, and start to organize on the spot. (I started the Protest Workshop, as it was called, and facilitated its meetings from December 2011 through June 2012.) These included flashmobs on the Metro, performative acts of art, and small-scale, unsanctioned protests. What Pussy Riot had just done seemed to fit right in with the rest. Telling themselves they had been visionaries and had done it first seemed like cold comfort, and seriality alone was not going to save them from the predicament of having gone mainstream. Pussy Riot decided to take a creative hiatus until after the New Year.

WITH THE REVOLUTION UNDER WAY, people were finding their way to like-minded people. A woman who had taken part in a couple of Voina actions called; she was back after living abroad and was looking for work and calling everyone she knew to ask for leads. But she immediately agreed that an all-girl punk band sounded better than work. And when she came to a rehearsal, she said it felt right, it felt like her thing. They called her Seraphima because they had liked the first Seraphima, the anarchist who had never told them her name.

Petya met a woman at the Protest Workshop; they had both come to a meeting with their kids and struck up a conversation. The woman was smart, well educated, blond, and beautiful, and they decided her name would be Terminator.

N was around again, going by the nickname Morzh (“Seal”), and one day she brought her old school friend Maria, who everyone thought looked a little out of place with her hippie dresses and coquettish hats, but by the end of the conversation it was clear she would change the world.

There remained the question of how to change the world, or at least where to begin—or to resume—the process. With protests flaring up all over the city and administrative arrests becoming a daily occurrence, the location itself had to impress the imagination. Petya suggested the Duma, the Russian parliament. Then Terminator showed up and suggested the Duma. Like several other newly minted activists, she had just gotten a job as an unpaid aide to one of the opposition deputies, so she had a pass to the Duma and the ability to get more. The idea was to have Pussy Riot take up position in one of the press or spectator boxes in the main hall—they would get in posing as college students on a tour—then whip out climbing equipment and rappel down into the hall, their guitars strapped to their bodies, and singing. They did not know what they were going to sing, but at this point it mattered less than that everyone be trained in technical climbing. “I like being in a band,” they started saying. “You get to learn to climb mountains.”

Some women showed up and said they were also feminist artists. They suggested doing an action in Red Square. Pussy Riot thought that Red Square was overexposed; just about every Russian contemporary artist worthy of the title had done something there. Then again, if just about every Russian contemporary artist worthy of the title had done something there, why had Pussy Riot not done anything there? Pussy Riot became obsessed with Red Square.

The square contained a structure known as Lobnoye Mesto, a round stone platform about fourteen yards in diameter and eight feet high. Ivan the Terrible had used it to address Muscovites in 1547, and the czars’ decrees were read from it in subsequent centuries, but contrary to popular lore, it had not been used for public executions. It did, however, beg to be exposed as a stage. A dozen steps led up to the top of the platform, but they were covered with snow, as was the stage itself, and one suspected that under the snow there was ice. Pussy Riot figured out a way to position themselves so they could not be removed. A stone barrier ran most of the perimeter of the platform, about a foot wide and about three feet high. If they climbed on the barrier, they would be more than ten feet off the ground and it would be virtually impossible to remove them forcibly without risking killing them in the process.

There was, in fact, ice on the barrier, and they discussed the need to wear nonslippery boots. They also needed a ladder, smaller than their old one, to get up onto the barrier quickly, and they bought that at the Auchan hypermarket. And then they rehearsed—a lot, because they knew this one had to be fast. Now was not like the old times, a couple of months ago, when no one suspected them of anything unusual until an action was already under way: now the police expected protest everywhere, and in Red Square they expected it most of all.

WHEN PUSSY RIOT WOKE UP on the morning of January 20, 2012, the day they planned to sing on Lobnoye Mesto, they found out that three gay activists had been detained in Red Square for coming out with a placard that said HOLD A GAY PRIDE PARADE IN RED SQUARE. Pussy Riot joked that they had been announced, and they went to Red Square.

The Federal Guard—the presidential security service—surrounded Lobnoye Mesto as soon as the eight women started singing. But Pussy Riot’s idea worked: the men in civilian clothing dared not attempt to remove them, and just stood around watching as the women threw down their backpacks, which contained mostly warm clothing, sang, and even lit smoke bombs. It all took a while, and it was so cold it made some of the women wish the Federal Guard would move in on them just so they would not have to keep standing there with bare arms. Kat had worn her summer boots because they had a nonslip sole, and she was so cold that once the song was over, she started changing into her winter clothes right up there, on Ivan the Terrible’s stone platform. Then they climbed down and the patient men in civilian clothing said, “Come with us.”

They handed them over at the nearest police station. The cops leered at Pussy Riot’s outfits and then put the women in a cage. Pussy Riot gave their fake names. The cops lazily debated who they were: prostitutes, protesters, or perhaps even performers. A while later the men in civvies returned carrying pictures; they had been photographing during the action, and they had now made prints. Pussy Riot asked to see. They looked good: a red, a purple, a white, a dark green, a lighter green, a brighter red, a blue, and a yellow dress, perfectly mismatched balaclavas, cross-matched tights, snow, smoke from the smoke bombs, with candylike St. Basil’s Cathedral for their backdrop—they had never looked this good. There had never been so many of them either. They had waved a purple NO PASARAN flag with a fist in it. They had also had a portrait of Putin with Muammar Gaddafi, which Seraphima was supposed to douse with kerosene and set on fire, but she had bungled that part and failed to take out the portrait or to discover that kerosene is not particularly flammable—both the portrait and the liquid were in her backpack now. The portrait might have complicated the picture unduly. As it was, Pussy Riot had just performed its clearest and most spectacular action, and this was what they saw in the photographs.

It all felt almost friendly, so when the cops pressed them, seven of the eight women gave their real names. They were released, but Seraphima, who had the kerosene, insisted on her fake identity and the police kept her back. They browbeat, threatened, and cajoled her for about six hours. They emptied out her backpack, took her cigarettes, and ritually broke each of them in half. If this was their idea of scare tactics, she found it pretty funny. Then they gave up and even made like they believed her fake-name story. They reprimanded her for driving her Porsche Cayenne while drunk—this was apparently the offense that had landed her alias in the police database—and let her go. Seraphima had been given a mild preview of future Pussy Riot interrogations.

PUSSY RIOT WAS FAMOUS. Moscow magazines were interviewing them and commissioning photo shoots of their rehearsals. The world seemed to say it wanted to know what they would do next. So did Pussy Riot.

The problem with Red Square is that nothing can top it—except, perhaps, the Kremlin itself. But even getting much closer to the Kremlin than they had been at Lobnoye Mesto—about two hundred yards from an entrance to the Kremlin grounds—was most likely impossible. The Duma was proving to be difficult: Kat, Nadya, and Petya were denied temporary passes for a planned reconnaissance mission; apparently, they were on a list. In the end, they used fake student IDs to get in, but Terminator had gotten into trouble with her Duma deputy and all of this promised more trouble for the action. Plus, the Duma was no more than an approximation, a stand-in for the Kremlin, at whose pleasure it served.

The protest movement continued to snowball, making the Kremlin increasingly nervous. Putin had reshuffled his team, evidently marshaling the troops—including the Russian Orthodox Church, a reliable ally of Russian dictators through the centuries. On the eve of a large-scale opposition march planned for February 4, priests around the country instructed their parishioners to abstain from protesting. The patriarch himself addressed throngs gathered for a liturgy at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, that giant, gaudy structure where the Virgin’s Girdle had recently been displayed. “Orthodox people know not how to attend demonstrations,” said Patriarch Kirill. “They pray in the silence of monasteries, in their monks’ cells, in their homes, but their hearts are full of pain for the turmoil among our people today, so clearly similar to the desperate frenzy of the years immediately before the Revolution and the discord, disruption, and damage of the 1990s.” The patriarch, who, like many if not all highly placed clergy—and like the once and future president himself—had served in the KGB, was sending a two-part message. Putin, who became president in 2000, had brought the country back from the brink of disaster, and those who were rocking the boat now would put the country back on a path to destruction. It followed that true believers should not only refrain from attending protest marches but should also attend a counterprotest rally jointly organized by the Kremlin and the Church’s youth movements—and it went without saying that they should vote for Putin come March 4.

The following day—one of the coldest days of the year—more than fifty thousand people in Moscow came out to march against Putin. The protest movement was solidifying and becoming more clearly political; where earlier protests had called for fair elections, now people marched with explicit anti-Putin slogans. “Twelve more years?” asked one call-and-response chant. “No, thanks” was the answer. Another chant paraphrased a children’s rhyme: “A storm is gathering once, a storm is gathering twice, a storm is gathering thrice—time for Putin to prepare for prison.” Nadya marched with the rainbow flag contingent that day, and Petya tried, rather ineffectually, to help with organizing.

On February 8, Patriarch Kirill met with Putin. In the televised portion of their conversation, he described the flush aughts as “God’s miracle, greatly aided by the country’s leadership.” The message was clear again: Putin was next to God, and this was not just Putin’s election campaign—it was also the patriarch’s and that of the Church itself. And this meant that Pussy Riot’s next action should take place in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which was to the patriarch what the Kremlin was to Putin. It also represented the Putin era even better than the luxury boutiques did. This was where Putin and Medvedev came for holiday services, as seen on TV. It was a symbol of post-Soviet piousness, superficial and generously gilded. The cathedral was also home to some incongruous ventures, such as a luxury car wash and a banquet hall, the proceeds from which benefited the Cathedral of Christ the Savior Foundation, which had not been known for its charitable contributions, or for anything at all. And at the same time, the cathedral had attracted a million to see the Girdle, a sign of Russia’s ominous slide into the Dark Ages. Holding the next Pussy Riot action at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior was perfect and it was right.

AFTER LOBNOYE MESTO, Seraphima’s astrologer told her to leave the country. She did not make much of an argument. She did not say, “Leave the country or else you will go to jail” or “Leave the country before things get bad,” she just said, “Leave the country.” Seraphima trusted her astrologer, but this was ridiculous. Seraphima was in the right place and she was doing the right thing. She had never felt this more than when Pussy Riot gave her the name Seraphima: she had a mystical certainty—she was not crazy, and she knew other people did not share it, but this knowledge just lived inside of her—that the Russian people had a special place and a special mission in the world, and she could feel that now was a time of transformation, and when she was given the very old-world Russian name Seraphima, she knew she had a special role to play in this transformation. Lobnoye Mesto, and her particular role at Lobnoye Mesto—even though the portrait had never gone up in flames—had felt like a part of her mission, perhaps only the beginning of it. But then again, she trusted her astrologer. So when at the first post–Lobnoye Mesto rehearsal, as Pussy Riot called it, the subject of their next location came up, Seraphima said, “Let’s do it on an airplane. And leave the country at the same time.”

Nadya and Kat said, “Let’s do it in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.”

Terminator said, “Let’s do it at the Duma.”

Seraphima said, “We can’t do it in the cathedral. They’ll send us to jail.” She mentioned the arts curators who had been convicted of inciting religious enmity for organizing visual arts shows that were critical of the Church.

Still, none of the curators had actually gone to jail: their sentences were suspended. And that was before! Now was a time of change. Nadya and Kat dismissed the worry. “This is different,” said Kat. “And anyway, the authorities looked so bad in those cases, they know not to do that again.” Between them, they called this the “first-detention effect”: most women, after they were hauled into a police station for the first time, even if they were treated reasonably well and their alias was uncontested, would from that point on find a way to stay out of public actions. They would say things like “I’ll help with the rehearsals.” Seraphima was doing this now. She said, “I just can’t go to jail. I mean, no one, no human being, can go to a Russian jail.”

It was decided to hold the next action at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.

The following day, Seraphima bought a plane ticket to India and left the country. It felt sad: Pussy Riot had felt like home, and Seraphima had felt a sort of love for each of the girls. Nadya, whom she had known the longest, was crazy. Crazy was not bad, and in Nadya’s case it was definitely a light-filled kind of crazy, crazy as a force for good. Nadya was a born leader, but this also meant she had an inborn sense of self-importance, which made Serpahima weary. She took herself as seriously as Seraphima had been able to take only religion. Seraphima had been a devout Orthodox for a couple of years a sort of long time ago, and she thought this was why now she had such a clear vision of how this action would end: it would end with jail. Sometimes Seraphima suspected that Nadya and Kat actually wanted to go to jail. At least they wanted to be the kind of people who had gone to jail. That said, Seraphima liked Kat. Maybe Kat just lacked the imagination to see what it would be like; she could probably visualize the solutions to mathematical equations a lot better than she could conjure up the reactions of people who would be deeply hurt by her actions and who had the power to do something about it.

And then there was Maria. She was new and no one knew much about her. She and Seraphima usually walked to the bus stop together, and Seraphima found herself thinking, How did a girl like this end up with the likes of us? There was something preternaturally pure about Maria. She probably had no idea what she was getting herself into either.

Nadya and Kat and, occasionally, some of the others, including Petya, began preparing for the action. They cased the cathedral. They discovered that security saw men and women through different optics: if a woman went in carrying a guitar case, she was stopped; a man was just a hippie or a weirdo with a guitar going to the cathedral. They set some ground rules. One, they would not disrupt the service. Showing such disrespect for parishioners would detract from Pussy Riot’s message and expose them to unnecessary risk. They could be charged like those curators had been, and Pussy Riot did not want to risk arrest; in fact, they had grown pretty sick of detention. Sure, it would be spectacular to disrupt a service with a Pussy Riot action, but people just would not understand. But if Pussy Riot desecrated the space during hours when it was used solely for the activities of its corrupt foundation (and the car wash)—that is, when it was already being desecrated—the message would be clear.

Admittedly, this required compromise. The lights at the cathedral shone brightly—brightly enough to film—only during services; the rest of the time the place was dim. But they were adamant about not taking excessive risk, so they asked a couple of videographers and photographers to check the place out ahead of time and be sure to bring light-appropriate equipment. They chose the videographers carefully. This action had to be kept quiet.

There was a spot in the cathedral that looked like it had been created especially for Pussy Riot. They had no idea what it was called or what its purpose was, but it looked incongruously like a stage in the middle of the church. It was in front of and sort of beneath the altar—one could see it as forming part of its pedestal—but it did not seem to be protected like the altar. The altar had full-height gates that were locked in between services, and Pussy Riot noticed that no one went in casually. The platform had a low ornate fence around it, easily stepped over, and it seemed to inspire no particular piety; the cleaning lady marched up there with her equipment every day. Plus, it had a microphone on a stand, hooked up to easily visible amplifiers. Pussy Riot would most likely be unable to use this equipment, but the whole thing looked like somebody’s television-inspired idea of a parliamentary pulpit imposed on somebody’s television-inspired idea of a big official church. Pussy Riot laughed as they discussed this. Cathedral security gestured to them to stop laughing.

The fact was, there was a lot of security, burly guys, most of them without uniform but acting as they would in parliament, trailing anyone who seemed strange; this was, after all, the official church. Taking this in, Kat suggested the action would not work out: security would step in so soon, they would not even have time to set up.

The solution, once they hit on it, seemed simple enough: they would record the song ahead of time, then they would go to another, less central church and video-record there, and only then would they attempt an action at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Whatever they got at the cathedral—even if it was only a minute of footage—would be combined with previously recorded material to create a clip of an action at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, even if the action itself existed mostly in their imaginations.

They recalled a cathedral near the contemporary arts center they frequented. It was appropriately grand and at the same time appropriately quiet, almost obscure. In fact, the Cathedral of the Apparition was the senior Orthodox church in Moscow, and the patriarch led important services there on occasion, but Pussy Riot did not know this. They knew that it contained enough gilt and opulence that in a fast-paced clip, if they interspersed the footage, it would pass for the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, just shot from a different angle.

Six Pussy Riot members took a mic with a stand, a flood-light—they had this idea of creating an illuminated-stage effect—and a couple of videographers and went to the Cathedral of the Apparition. They set up, only now discovering that the battery for the floodlight was backbreakingly heavy. They performed the moves they had choreographed and rehearsed for this song: frenetic dancing with kicking and boxing moves for the fast parts, kneeling and frantic bowing for the liturgical-chant parts. A woman appeared out of nowhere and grabbed the floodlight; she seemed to think that taking it away would get Pussy Riot to stop. They wrestled for the light. Pussy Riot won and left.

It did not feel great; there was none of the exhilaration they had felt during their previous filming sessions. They told each other this had been a technical day and they had accomplished what they needed.

MORZH COULD NOT SLEEP. This felt like too much. “I had had conflicting feelings about this from the beginning,” she told me a year later, meaning Pussy Riot in general. “This was Nadya’s project. I wasn’t generating any ideas, I was just a participant—but the consequences could be serious.” The group required total commitment: to be Pussy Riot you really had to live Pussy Riot. Otherwise, you felt like an extra in Nadya’s show.

Plus, she did not really get this action. It seemed too simple somehow, more of a prank than art—and at the same time like they were protesting against the Church itself. In their early brainstorming sessions, they had discussed trying to fly the rainbow flag during the action—this had seemed fittingly spectacular and layered to Morzh—but Nadya had nixed the idea. So what was it about, then? Nadya had not made a very good case for needing to illuminate the obvious: the relationship between the Church and Putin. At eight in the morning, having slept not a wink, Morzh texted Nadya: “I can’t do it.” Nadya texted back: “Ok.”

THE REMAINING FIVE of them gathered at a café not far from the cathedral, drank coffee, and talked, with long uncomfortable pauses. Kat did what she always did, in summer or in winter: she ordered a cup of café glacé and ate the ice cream, leaving the cold, milky coffee. For no reason they could pinpoint, they talked about calling off the action. But since they could not have explained such a decision even to themselves, as it got closer to eleven o’clock, they settled the bill and walked over to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.

A high-pitched sound greeted them as they entered: eeeeeeeeeee. They all turned toward the source of the sound, which was just behind Nadya. “Whatever,” said Nadya, and nonchalantly took off her backpack, opened it, and turned off the amplifier that had turned itself on. She put the bag back on, and all of Pussy Riot turned their heads to survey the cathedral. Something was wrong.

In the middle of the vast space, a small crowd lingered; about twenty people, most of them with cameras. Videographers. But Pussy Riot had told only three or four trusted documenters about the action and had given them strict instructions to keep their cameras concealed until the performance began. These were not videographers; they were journalists. There had been a leak.

The good news was, the guitar was inside. Because they had discovered that a woman could not enter the cathedral carrying a guitar case, Pussy Riot had asked a male friend to carry it in and leave it lying on a bench. It was waiting for them now. Picking it up, Kat discovered that whoever had packed it had gone to great lengths to disguise the fact that the package contained a guitar; it would take a while to unwrap it. Still, once Kat picked it up, the countdown began. They were now five women with a guitar, and they did not have much time to make their move.

Pussy Riot approached the elevated platform. Two men suddenly emerged from behind the altar and started rolling up the rugs on the platform. A security guard looked on. Something was definitely wrong. “Should we call it off?” one of the group whispered. “What are we doing?” whispered another a few moments later.

And then the cathedral was empty. The men with the rugs disappeared. The security guard walked off. The journalists did not seem as numerous as they had before. It was dim and very very quiet. Pussy Riot moved in.

Nadya commanded Kat to go first because she had to unpack the guitar. She did as she was instructed, and she put it on, and then she felt someone grabbing her. He pulled off her red balaclava, and she looked up: it was the security guard from a few minutes earlier. He carried her out of the cathedral and planted her just outside the door. As they exited, Kat heard the music begin:

The “holy shit” line had been suggested by Andrei when his daughter told him they would be doing an action at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. He would be very proud of this for years to come.

SEVEN Unmasked

THIS ONE REQUIRED a longer wind-down period. Kat had lingered just outside the entrance to the cathedral, and when she heard the guards radioing for police, she thought she should leave. She saw one of the other women walking out, and they fell into step, followed by the others. They walked across the plaza in front of the cathedral, down a couple of steps to the sidewalk, then picked up the pace, ran across the street and on and down into the Metro. At the next stop, they met up with two of the videographers, who handed over their memory cards. The videographers trailed along with the group for another stop or two and then everyone got off and went to a café. They grumbled about how poorly the action had gone. Nadya was cursing. A couple of photographers showed up, making the women tense. If things had gone right, the photographers would have had no way of finding them right now.

Then someone saw a Tweet: “Pussy Riot had an action today, titled ‘Holy Shit.’” This had never happened: they had never been exposed before they were ready, never lost control over their timing and orchestration. It was particularly upsetting because it was already clear that they did not have enough quality footage to put together a clip. To try to regain control, they called Mitya Aleshkovsky, an activist photographer who had said he had decent still shots despite the bad light, and asked him to publish the photographs with the correct title of the piece: Mother of God, Get Rid of Putin. And since it was clear that they needed to do further damage control, Nadya, Kat, and Maria went to an apartment—a semi-abandoned flat they had come to consider their headquarters—to see what they could salvage of the video footage. And also, perhaps, because they felt the need to be with each other. Something felt off among them, and each of them sensed it, the way each partner in a romantic relationship senses when it has started to crack, even though neither can say what went wrong and when. Whatever they had had during the Red Square action, that sense of lightness and righteousness, had left them; a sour sort of anxiety had set in. And just like lovers sensing those cracks often do, in their anxiety they clung together.

Looking at the video footage did not make them feel any better. A couple of the videographers had violated a cardinal Pussy Riot rule: they kept filming even after Kat’s balaclava was off—which should have been their signal to turn their cameras off or away from her. Aside from the fact that Kat could be identified if an unedited copy of the video got out of Pussy Riot’s hands, this also meant that the operators had not been filming the other four women while their cameras were trained on the unmasked Kat—missing a chunk of the too-brief performance. Nadya grew progressively angrier and kept cursing. Maria shifted into her we-can-do-it mode and forced them to finish editing the video. They needed nearly two minutes of video to fit the entire song, and even with the footage filmed at the Cathedral of the Apparition, they had to use the same sequences several times over and resort to including bits where the guards were stopping them or church employees were waving their hands at the camera. They all agreed it was the worst video they had ever published.

Publish it they did, though, with some explanatory notes. “Last Sunday Seraphima returned from church and demanded that all the Pussy Riot soloists urgently learn Byzantian Znamenny chant,” they wrote, referring to a part of the Russian Orthodox liturgic tradition. “‘During Morning Prayer today, I realized what we need to ask of the Mother of God and how to do it so that something might finally change in our spiritually bereft land,’ Seraphima told us…” A detailed explication of the lyrics followed. “‘Since peaceful demonstrations give no immediate result despite being hundreds of thousands strong, we will address Mother of God herself before Easter and ask her to get rid of Putin as soon as possible,’ Seraphima, the most religious of the punk feminists, told the rest of the team as we headed toward the Cathedral on the cold February morning.”

The video was up just after 7 p.m. They waited for the storm. Moskovsky Komsomolets, a popular tabloid, called first. Pussy Riot answered a couple of questions and then the journalist said, “You did good, girls! Everyone is going to be on your case now, but we support you.” And for a little while, it felt better. Some more journalists called. Pussy Riot walked down to the corner to don their balaclavas and give a couple of on-camera interviews without giving up the exact location of their headquarters. Then they occupied themselves with getting their equipment—an amplifier, a guitar, and a microphone—out of captivity; security guards had taken them when they broke up the show and now they were apparently with the police. Pussy Riot hatched an insane plan. They forged a couple of loan contracts and dispatched a male friend to the police station to tell his tale: he had loaned the equipment to a virtual stranger, someone who had approached him on the Metro.

Absurdly, it worked. The police fingerprinted the man and then gave him the equipment. He brought it back to headquarters, and they celebrated. “We were euphoric,” Kat told me. “Despite the fact that the clip didn’t work out, this felt like a victory. And we even decided to set up some interviews for the next day.”

THE FOLLOWING DAY, they set up meetings at the Zverev Center of Contemporary Art, an off-the-beaten-path shared work and exhibit space. The journalists seemed interested in the group in general, asking only a couple of questions each about the latest action. It was just the three of them—Maria, Nadya, and Kat. Kat had brought food. Maria had brought a camp stove, which amused the journalists. They talked to the journalists and to one another and drank tea in their balaclavas. It felt normal, as long as one thinks that using a camp stove indoors is normal. In the afternoon, they went home.

Maria picked up Philip from Nikita and took him to a playground in the neighborhood. It was late February, and it still got dark early, so they didn’t stay long. They had barely stepped out of the tiny creaky elevator on their floor when they saw nine men crowded in the hallway, eight of them wearing civilian clothes and the ninth, her neighborhood cop, looking terrified.

“Please proceed with us. We need to talk with you,” said one of the suits.

“I am not proceeding anywhere,” Maria responded in her high-pitched voice. “I have my son with me. You’ll have to serve me with a summons.” And, back held straight, she marched into her apartment.

Nikita had gone to work. He had a job he loved now, working with predators at the Durov Center, an animal circus. He was not supposed to use his phone while he was feeding the tigers—if he did not want to be eaten himself, that is—but he did look at it when Maria’s message came in, and then he wished he had not. The message said she needed to go into hiding “possibly for as long as a month” and he would have to take care of Philip.

NADYA, KAT, MARIA, PETYA, and one of the other participants in the cathedral action gathered late that night. Petya said he knew a lawyer. Nikolai Polozov had given him his card in late December, when the authorities had attempted to have Petya forcibly drafted. Polozov had shown up at the draft office where Petya had been delivered but was not actually allowed to enter and help; Petya had fought off conscription on his own. Now Polozov entered. He was a paunchy, balding man with glasses and a beard—he looked like a lawyer, in other words, and he talked like one as well. He said they should lie low. He said no charges had apparently been filed. He said that if charges were filed, he would help. Meanwhile, they left town.

Sort of. They left Moscow city limits. They knew other people generally left the country if they were hiding from police—Kiev was a favored destination because you did not need a visa, you could get there by train, and people spoke Russian. But that was for serious people in real trouble, not for intellectual pranksters who presented themselves as silly young girls. For them, the Moscow suburbs—atavistically rural, eerily quiet, apparently cut off from civilization—would be enough. In other words, they came up with an escape plan that served the purpose of displacing Pussy Riot but didn’t necessarily get them out of sight of police and security services.

Which conducted a search of Nadya’s dorm room that night. She had not lived there since before Gera was born, and the room had gradually turned into a storage unit for everything from Voina props and rally banners to compact discs and underwear. In the roughly seven hours that the search team spent there, they managed to turn the varied contents of the room into an undifferentiated pile in the middle of the floor.

Petya would learn this seven months later, when he would finally be given access to the room, which had been sealed as evidence until then. For now, the five of them found themselves in the white expanse of Moscow suburbs. Petya was high on their predicament and overproducing ideas; he had talked to someone who said he could arrange safe haven for Pussy Riot members in the Perm region in the Urals. The women brushed him off and grew increasingly annoyed. They took long walks. They took turns sliding down a snowy hill. They semi-adopted a stray dog. If they were trying to make themselves feel like carefree kids, they failed; they felt ridiculous. There was no evidence that anyone was actually looking for them. All they had done was fail to stage a performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Why were they fooling themselves into thinking they needed to waste their time way out here?

Especially when stuff was going on in Moscow. The presidential election was less than two weeks away. On Sunday, February 26, protesters planned to come out onto the Garden Ring—the avenue that circles central Moscow—and form an unbroken “white ring” to symbolize their demand for fair elections. Members of Pussy Riot should be among them, not in this bland and silent snow-whiteness.

IT WAS IN THE EARLY MORNING HOURS OF FEBRUARY 26, the day known in the Orthodox tradition as Forgiveness Sunday, that charges were filed in the case of unnamed women who had attempted to stage a performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, thereby assaulting the feelings of Orthodox believers.

Maria texted Nikita from an unfamiliar number, giving him Polozov’s number and instructing him to get information by calling it. Nikita called and asked what was going on.

“Who are you?” asked Polozov.

“I’m freaking Nikita,” said Nikita.

“How do I know you are not the security services?” asked Polozov, reasonably enough.

Nikita texted Maria. Maria informed Polozov. Polozov called Nikita back and told him about the charges.

“What should we do?” asked Nikita. He meant himself and Philip, and he meant the question literally.

“Pray,” said Polozov.

THEY MOVED TO ANOTHER PLACE in the suburbs. They realized they had to, because one of them had forgotten to use TOR, an anonymity protocol, when logging on to a Russian social network. Or perhaps they just needed to feel like they were doing something in response to the news of the charges. Then the other participant who had come with them left, so it was just Nadya, Maria, and Kat. Petya was drifting in and out.

After a couple of days, they decided to reenter the city. It was a strange city now, one where they could not go home. They oscillated between feeling scared, paranoid, energized, and just plain silly. Who could still be looking for them a week after the action at the cathedral? And if they were still looking, how long would they keep at it? Another week? A month? Longer? Polozov had said they should lie low until the presidential election. That was scheduled for March 4, ten days after they went into hiding.

Journalists kept e-mailing Pussy Riot and asking for interviews. The three of them would go to cafés in the center of Moscow with their laptops, answer e-mails, and set up a secure Skype connection. Then they would go into the bathroom, a laptop and three balaclavas in hand, crowd around the toilet, put on their balaclavas, and answer questions.

“What is your ultimate goal?”

“We have several of them. For example, we demand freedom for political prisoners. We heard some officials called for our imprisonment after the performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. But we only wanted to stress there is far too much communication between the Church and the government. Our patriarch is not ashamed to wear a forty-thousand-dollar watch, and this is intolerable when so many families in Russia are on the edge of poverty.”

“What do you think needs to be changed immediately in Russia?”

“We must reform the judicial system first. Democracy is impossible without an independent judiciary. Education reform and cultural reform are also needed. Putin pays attention to anything but culture—museums, libraries, cultural centers are in awful condition.”

They sounded less like punks than like thousands of other members of the protest movement. It felt like the right line to take, with the election less than a week away and the anticipation of change stubbornly hanging in the air.

One time a waitress ran after them when they left a café. In her hands she had a balaclava they had left in the bathroom.

Evenings were the most difficult time. They were one another’s household for now, and they needed to negotiate when and where this household changed locations. Petya’s frequent appearances annoyed Kat, who felt he was careless about security; he kept his iPhone turned on all the time, while the women were religious about never using their old phones and switching cheap, effectively disposable ones every couple of days. But separating from one another felt unsafe as well, even if this fear itself felt absurd—and was illogical on the face of it. One evening Maria went to a reading given by one of her institute instructors, a neoromantic poet. Her friends already knew she was not living at home or using her phone. They went out for coffee after the reading, and she told them not to worry about her. They did not; they knew she could handle all sorts of frightening situations, like hitchhiking alone, for example.

The three of them went to stay at N’s, or Morzh’s, apartment. They discussed the issue of whether it was smart to stay with a Pussy Riot participant and decided that, since she had not been at the cathedral, it was all right. Perhaps they were just tired of strangers and strange homes: at N’s place they could pretend they were just staying over at a friend’s. It was a place out of time and space. On the eighth floor of a standard edge-of-Moscow concrete block, it had been remade with textured floors in zebra patterns, divided into sectors by pipes. A fur-lined corner in one room had an irregularly shaped built-in bed. N told Nadya she and Petya could take the bed and Kat and Maria could sleep on the floor in the same room, while N and her boyfriend slept in the smaller room, with the sound studio and all the vintage bicycles.

Petya was not there yet, and N put on a movie by Alexander Sokurov, a difficult Russian director; she was still working to reform Maria’s taste in film. Halfway through the movie, Petya arrived with the news that the editor of a radio station that had aired an interview with Pussy Riot had been visited by investigators who had tried to cajole and coerce him into disclosing what he knew of the group’s location. This was frightening. Really, it was the first truly scary sign since all those plainclothesmen had greeted Maria eight days before. (They did not yet know that Nadya’s dorm room had been searched, or that the police had come to Kat’s house as well—Kat had tried calling home once but no one had answered the phone.) They wondered if they should bolt. But then Petya said he had brought a napoleon cake, and they all crowded around the Formica table in the tiny kitchen, looking out over the black expanse of nighttime winter sky, pierced by tiny rectangles of illuminated windows, and they felt better.

THEY LEFT N’S HOUSE the next day. Petya had given them the keys to a friend’s apartment not far from the center of town. Of all the strange places they had stayed in the last week, this one was the strangest. It was in a pompous Stalin-era seven-story building with bay windows that looked across a busy avenue at the Moscow Hippodrome, a den of gambling, corruption, and horsiness that had miraculously survived there for nearly two centuries, through a succession of czars and other tyrants. With a quadriga atop the main building and a horse-topped weathervane on a tower, it looked like a slightly worn fairy-tale castle. The interior of the apartment, whose owner apparently lived abroad, was like nothing Nadya, Maria, or Kat had ever seen. It had an apparently endless number of rooms, two bathrooms, and a Jacuzzi. They spent the night there feeling lost in all the space.

The following day Petya arrived. His presence made Kat nervous again; his phone was on, and he was talking some kind of nonsense about celebrating Gera’s fourth birthday the following day and maybe bringing her here or taking Nadya to her, and it was obvious to Kat that he was going to get them caught. This was all the more upsetting because, if Polozov could be believed, this might be the last day Pussy Riot had to be hiding: the election was tomorrow. They fought, and then they tried to find solace in their laptops. But there was a problem with one of the external hard drives, and to everyone’s relief, Petya and Nadya resolved to go out to an electronics marketplace to try to get the thing fixed.

They stepped out. Begovaya (“Racing”) Street, usually one of the most congested in Moscow, was almost empty on a Saturday afternoon. They looked left: the television tower, miles away, was clearly visible, but otherwise, there was not a soul or a suspicious vehicle in sight. They looked right: all clear as well. They headed right, in the direction of Moscow City, five high-rise towers in various stages of construction with a stairway-shaped, copper-colored one rising above the rest.

They passed a bank with a mortgage center, an Apple-authorized computer-repair shop, an old-fashioned Soviet-style art gallery with a mixture of sculptures and gaudy decorative objects such as plates, vanity tables, table lamps, and dolls in the display window; cheap 1980s-style light fixtures visible behind the mess of objects made the place look comically confused. They passed a cell-phone store on the right and, on the left, a flower shop and a sex shop with an illuminated, red-heart-shaped “24” sign. A newly built office tower stood at the end of the block, where the street gave way to a highway. They entered a narrow passageway that separated the tower from the road. The highway rose, forming a barrier on the left, steel bars cordoned off the tower on the right, and an arched, semitransparent roof made the passageway almost fully enclosed. The path was semicircular, so Petya and Nadya could not see more than fifteen feet ahead or behind them; they seemed to be completely alone.

They heard the stampede before they saw anyone. It sounded like a herd of horses had escaped from the hippodrome. It turned out to be a herd of men in suits and dress coats. Petya had enough time to think the scene would look good in a spy movie before about half a dozen of the men grabbed him and carried him forward. While four of them lifted him off the ground, two others forced his head down toward his chest so he could not see what was happening to Nadya, though he guessed that what was happening to her was the same thing that was happening to him.

The two groups of men ran for about a hundred yards, holding Petya and Nadya aloft, into an underpass that led to the Metro. Petya and Nadya were thrown against a marble wall and held pressed to it for a couple of minutes before being carried again—this time into a glass enclosure in the Metro lobby. It said POLICE in yellow-on-blue block letters on this structure, and there were a couple of transit cops inside. The men in suits shoved their IDs under the cops’ noses, and the cops vanished.

There was a gray laminate desk in a corner, with two video screens sitting on top of it; three mismatched office armchairs; and an unusually deep but short bench that was bolted to the floor. Petya and Nadya were placed on the bench and the men in suits stuffed themselves into the space, which was large enough to accommodate perhaps six people comfortably.

They sat in silence for about twenty minutes. A man appeared, took a look at the detainees, and pronounced his verdict: “Verzilov and Tolokonnikova.” He left. The rest of them stayed another two or three hours. Outside the glass, a trickle of people was coming in and out of the Metro. Past the turnstiles, a decorative tableau was visible: two copper horses with jockeys, a group of spectators, and an inappropriately heroic-looking race caller with a flag that looked more like a shovel in his hand.

This new period in Petya’s, and Nadya’s lives—as well as the lives of Maria and Kat and their families—would be characterized by endless, helpless, and often useless waiting. They waited inside a police car for about four hours. More men in suits appeared once in a while, looked at Petya and Nadya, and nodded. It was midnight by the time they were taken to a police precinct in central Moscow, where they were led to a block of offices in the basement. The place was buzzing as though it were a weekday afternoon and not the wee hours of Sunday morning. Polozov arrived, bringing Violetta Volkova with him. More and more police detectives kept showing up. Petya and Nadya were taken into separate rooms, and then into different separate rooms, passing each other in the hallway a couple of times. They were asked the same asinine questions by a succession of men.

“Who is the group’s director?”

“Who is the group’s producer?”

“Who is its costume designer?”

They kept saying, “I don’t know.”

Petya was asked, “What kind of music does your wife like?” and “Have you heard her sing lately?” Petya pleaded Article 51 of the Russian constitution, which guarantees the right to refuse to testify against oneself or one’s immediate relatives. On one of the desks in one of the offices, he spotted a thick pile of documents showing that he had Canadian citizenship.

Around six in the morning, the police led both Petya and Nadya out into the hallway. Kat and Maria were there. One of the suits said Nadya and Maria were under arrest and Petya and Kat were free to go “for now.”

KAT AND MARIA HAD LEFT the apartment for no particular reason. They always just did; they would have taken the Metro a couple of stops into the center of town and then one of them would have suggested a café and the other would have agreed. When they were pushed up against the steel-bar fence in the same passageway where Petya and Nadya had been grabbed a couple of hours earlier, the men had asked Kat who she was. It appeared they had a visual ID on Maria and not on Kat. Coincidentally, Maria had her internal passport in her bag and Kat did not. So Kat said she was Irina Loktina, a name she had used during her previous detentions, and decided to pretend she did not know Maria. She stuck to her story at the police precinct, even when an investigator discovered a folder on her laptop called “Pussy Riot Songs.” She stuck to her story when one of the investigators threatened to rape her, and later, when he started twisting her arms. He stopped quickly, as if realizing the maneuver was absurd, and resumed threatening her with rape. Then he fell asleep, and she and Maria sat together in the basement hallway of the police precinct, listening to him snore.

In the end, the police kept the laptop and told Kat she was free to go—for now. Polozov drove her to the building across from the hippodrome.

“You have a choice,” said Polozov as he let her out of the car into the still-dark morning. “You can hide or not hide.”

“I’m not going to hide,” said Kat. “It doesn’t make sense anymore.”

“All right,” said Polozov. “Although if I were you, I’d hide.”

The polls were opening all around Moscow. Putin would be reelected president. Kat went upstairs to the most opulent apartment she had ever seen, retrieved the towel and change of clothes she had left there, stuffed them into her backpack, and went home. It was not that it no longer made sense to hide; if anything, now was exactly the time to stay away from the Samutsevich residence. It was just that she had no one to hide with. It would be the loneliest two weeks of her life.

EIGHT Detention

Maria meant that she was writing the response without having seen her friend’s original letter.

They had gone to the Genocide Museum in Vilnius together. The building had housed a succession of exterminating governments’ courts and police headquarters—the Russians, the Germans, the Soviets, the Nazis, and the Soviets again, with a KGB prison in the basement. The prison’s nineteen intact cells form part of the permanent exhibit; among them is a cell where the floor is a pool of freezing water and the prisoners had to balance on a tiny round platform in the middle until they nodded off and fell into the water.

Inmates had the right to correspond by e-mail—as long as family or friends initiated the correspondence and paid for their own letters and those they got in return; the rate was fifty rubles, or just under two dollars a page. E-mail was read by prison censors. The other way to correspond was to pass paper letters through the defense attorney; this was officially forbidden but tacitly tolerated, for the most part. Maria used this uncensored route to correspond intensively with Olya Vinogradova, her institute friend.

As soon as word of Nadya’s and Maria’s arrests got out, a spontaneous ragtag support group formed; it would stay together for much of the next couple of years, with friends and strangers collecting money, food, and paperwork to help the inmates. Once friends published the lists of foods the inmates needed, there was a rush on the pretrial detention facility’s online store, with people ordering food to be delivered to Maria’s and Nadya’s cells. It was particularly important in Maria’s case since she was a vegetarian and could not eat most of what was delivered to the cell from the kitchen.

“Half a year or a year” sounded unimaginable to Olya. Maria’s first arrest order was for two weeks, and this seemed like an impossibly long time. Then there was a hearing and the term of arrest was extended by a month, and this was shocking. In April, a judge ordered Pussy Riot held for another four months, and Olya started getting used to the idea that time behind bars could indeed be measured in months. By this time, the prosecution was talking about years.

Nadya had been reading the New Testament, which happened to be available to her and her cellmates. She found it helped in talking to people. This had always been easy for her. Even when teachers and other authority figures turned a deaf ear, she made her peers curious and receptive, and they worked to understand her. Only in jail did she encounter people for whom her language was foreign and threatening, as was she herself. But one time she sat on her bunk reading the New Testament and one of her cellmates sat on the bunk opposite reading the same book, and they started saying verses back and forth to each other. And they seemed to reach an understanding of sorts. Plus, “sin of gloom” turned out to be a useful concept.

KAT DID NOT SLEEP all night because the women were talking. There were ten of them in this transit cell, where Kat’s entire four-person quarantine cell had suddenly been transferred. Quarantine had hardly been comfortable, but with the exception of one woman, who was pregnant and went on and on about how she had taken the rap for her entire gypsy clan, her cellmates had kept quiet enough. In the transit cell, everyone talked. A Muslim woman kept praying, kneeling on her bunk. The rest chattered endlessly about the way things worked behind bars and, more generally, in their world. One of them had coffee grounds, but, this being a transit cell, there was no electric teakettle or portable water heater, so they made coffee with hot water from the tap and kept on and on talking about it. Then a couple of them started regaling the rest with the tale of a criminal case in which a young woman was raped repeatedly throughout the night and only in the morning light did it become clear that the victim was in the final stages of AIDS. “And then the guy who did the raping got really thin,” finished one of the storytellers, and her audience roared with laughter.

I guess this is supposed to be funny, thought Kat, and this was the first time she felt despair overtaking her. She tried to tune the women out as they kept talking, and to concentrate on thinking about what had happened to her and what would happen now.

Thinking back was easier. When she was released on March 4, with Nadya and Maria staying behind bars, she had been handed a summons to report to the investigator in a few days’ time; the summons was in Irina Loktina’s name—the alias she had given. She went home that day, and the first thing her father said to her was, “Those friends of yours have been arrested. What were you doing at the cathedral?”

“I guess you’ve seen the clip by now. You know what we were doing there.”

“The patriarch is despicable,” said Stanislav. “But you still shouldn’t have done what you did.”

Kat was in no mood to argue. She just told her father he should plead Article 51 when the investigators came, and went to sleep.

She woke up with the awareness that she needed to prepare to be arrested. She messaged other Pussy Riot members—she wanted to meet up and hand over passwords to their blog, e-mail, and social-networking accounts; she was now the only keeper of the passwords who was not behind bars. No one was eager to meet. She went to see the investigator at the appointed time, accompanied by Violetta Volkova. Petya was there too—he had been summoned for the same day—but the investigator was not; an assistant handed them summonses to report back in a week, on March 15.

Even a week had not been enough to make sure that more than one other member of Pussy Riot had all the necessary passwords.

Volkova, Petya, and Kat met again. Volkova said her car had just been searched. As she drove them to the police, they called their media contacts to talk up the car search. Petya was agitated and apparently happy, as he always was when something dramatic was happening and he got to tell the media about it. Kat felt the world closing in.

Petya was the first to enter the investigator’s office. He was out a few minutes later—“Another postponement, don’t worry”—and he ran down the stairs, phone in hand. Kat went in. Artyom Ranchenkov, the head investigator in the case, was seated at his desk. At thirty-four, he was already a lieutenant colonel. He had a meaty, unmemorable face that bore a permanent stamp of displeasure. Volkova was sitting in one of the visitors’ chairs in front of him.

“What is your name?” asked Ranchenkov.

“Irina Loktina.”

“Are you sure? I am asking you again.”

“Yes, I am sure.”

“You don’t want to tell me your real name?”

“It is my real name.”

“All right, we will have to have a lineup.” Two of the cathedral’s security guards would have to pick Kat out.

Volkova and Ranchenkov haggled over the lineup for a long time. Volkova objected to the other women who had been chosen for it; they were dressed in feminine office garb and had manicured nails and nicely done hair. It was hours before all of the women were arranged to Volkova’s satisfaction, with their stockinged legs and high-heeled shoes hidden behind desks, clothes concealed under identical police jackets, hands in pockets, and hair pulled back into ponytails, as Kat’s had been the morning of the punk prayer. It was nighttime by the time Ranchenkov informed Kat she was under arrest. He was still calling her “Irina Loktina.” Kat and Volkova stepped out into the hallway.

“Tell me your name,” said the lawyer.

“Yekaterina Samutsevich.”

“Where are your documents?”

Kat had left her internal passport with a friend so she could not be identified in her own home. She told Volkova the friend’s address. Marshals came and took Kat away. The following day, at the arrest hearing, Volkova disclosed Kat’s identity.

THE TRANSFER FROM THE transit cell in the basement to the special cell up on the first floor was just as abrupt as Kat’s first transfer had been. The hazing in the “spec” lasted a full month. Kat’s three cellmates would not talk to her except to scream about some offense, such as leaving a crumb of bread on the table. The monotony of hell was virtually unbroken: Volkova came to see Kat once, Polozov came twice, a strange lawyer she had never heard of came once, saying that her father wanted her to change attorneys—Kat sent him away—and her father came. In addition, every Monday Stanislav sent her food from the jail’s commissary. She told him she did not like the candy, but he kept sending it anyway. Anonymous Pussy Riot supporters sent the things Kat asked for—cottage cheese and milk, which she now discovered she liked. She had to admit, she actually liked the prison food itself. No one had cooked at her house since her mother died eleven years before, and this food was cooked—overcooked—and homey: porridge in the morning, soup—she especially liked the pea soup—and barley or porridgelike peas with Spam for lunch. She liked the walks in the courtyard as well, even though they caused more contention in the “spec”: Kat’s cellmates did not usually like to go out for walks, and the guards opposed splitting up the cells. Still, Kat almost always managed to claim her hour in the ersatz outdoors. Otherwise, life was unremittingly and boringly dire.

She decided to break it up by declaring a hunger strike. She had heard that if you went on hunger strike, you were transferred to solitary. She would like that. Otherwise, she had no particular demands. That is, she was demanding attention from another human being, be it her lawyer or her father, who could not keep her preferences in candy straight; she would even have settled for attention from the jail staff, but she could not state that as a demand, so she just declared a hunger strike. She got the solitary and the attention. Her father came on Monday to order food for her, and an officer told him, “She is on hunger strike, you cannot send her food.” Stanislav called the lawyers. Volkova came, bringing Mark Feigin, who had joined the defense team as Nadya’s lawyer and immediately claimed the position of leader.

“You should have told us,” the lawyers reproached her.

“How could I have told you if you don’t come to see me?” Kat reproached the lawyers.

She quit the strike after five days. She felt refreshed; it had been worth it. Back in the special cell, the other inmates actually seemed to have warmed up to her.

MARIA AND NADYA HAD GONE on a hunger strike when they were first arrested, and held it for ten days, when Moscow City Court rejected their appeal of their arrest. Their second hunger strike was a group one. On June 20, they were led into court in turn—first Nadya, then (after Nadya was taken out) Kat, and finally Maria. Wearing handcuffs, each in turn was placed in a metal cage, where each in turn made the claim that she needed more time to read the case against them—and heard the judge, a striking thirtyish blonde, reject the plea. Each of them then declared a hunger strike.

They had been “familiarizing” themselves with the case, as the process was officially called, for two weeks. The case consisted of seven volumes—piles of typing paper sewn together with thick white string. The volumes contained letters and transcripts and pictures and even discs—though the discs were in sealed white sleeves, and the defendants were apparently expected to familiarize themselves with their contents by reading descriptions: “The disc contains video footage of young women engaged in dance… A young woman, who in her appearance, movements, and voice resembles Tolokonnikova…” Kat was fascinated by the fact that the investigators created a record of watching their videos as they would have created a record of an apartment search: “In the presence of Such-and-Such and So-and-So as witnesses, the investigator clicked on the link…”

The case hardly made for a coherent narrative, but the reading process was further complicated because the staff shuffled the volumes as they saw fit and no one could be sure of being able to pick up where she had left off. The lawyers told them to take their time and hinted they should perhaps even stretch the “familiarization” process out, so they did not rush. Some days, Kat refused to leave her cell altogether, though for the most part she was grateful that the appearance of the seven volumes had finally broken up the monotony of her existence. Now, every day around lunchtime, an officer would come and fetch her to escort her to the investigative bloc, where she would be placed in a room with a pile of paper sewn together with white string.

One of the volumes contained her father’s testimony. Kat discovered Stanislav had spoken to Ranchenkov within days of her arrest. He had said things she knew could harm them. Worst of all, he had named Nadya. Kat choked with shame and fury.

When I asked Stanislav about this nearly a year later, he told me he had not realized he was giving testimony. He wanted to tell Ranchenkov that Kat had barely taken part in the action, and he also knew he needed Ranchenkov’s signature to be allowed to see Kat in jail, so he wanted to have a good, friendly talk with the investigator. And he felt he had one. “I told him she had always been a good student, and anyway, she had not been at the altar. I said, ‘Let’s watch the video—you will see that she had barely stepped on the soleas when two security guards in black grabbed her. While the others danced.’ But he said, ‘But it’s an Orthodox church! I have a hundred and fifty letters here from believers.’ But he could see I am a conservative man, an old-fashioned man, and this was why I was the first of the parents to get visitation rights. The others had to wait another month. But at the end of our conversation he asked me to sign the protocol, verifying that he had written everything down correctly. But I hadn’t said any of the things people usually say when they are interrogated. So I signed, I affirmed that he had written it all down right. And then they made me into a witness for the prosecution. And yes, I had told him I’d had a falling-out with Nadya because I felt they might all end up in jail if they kept going.”

Almost six months later, during the trial, Stanislav Samutsevich renounced his earlier testimony, claiming he had changed his opinion of the action and did not want to testify for the prosecution. But, to the extent anyone’s testimony in the trial mattered, his mattered a lot: he had essentially said that the defendants had engaged in a conspiracy—one that he had perceived as a criminal one.

NADYA AND MARIA ATE NOTHING for nineteen days. Maria grew so weak she could no longer walk; Nadya developed debilitating headaches. They gave up the strike on June 10. Kat held out for three more days. She felt great; she had gotten the second wind she had heard about from other inmates—when the weakness gives way to a new, light sort of energy. She was not even bothered by her cellmates—she was not moved to solitary this time—or by the smell of the food she had liked so much. But there seemed to be no point in holding out if Nadya and Maria were done. After that, perhaps to speed up the process, the three of them were taken to the courthouse to read the case together. They spent entire days in one another’s company. They read all about themselves. Mostly, they read their own blog, which the investigators had diligently printed out. They laughed their heads off. They had written very funny stuff.

NINE The Trial

TWO DAYS BEFORE THE TRIAL BEGAN, the British newspaper the Guardian came out with a huge story. “Pussy Riot aren’t just the coolest revolutionaries you’re ever likely to meet. They’re also the nicest,” gushed the writer, Carole Cadwalladr, who had reported the story during two packed days in Moscow. Her editor had dispatched her in a fit of sudden inspiration, after realizing something very big and very bizarre was about to unfold in Moscow. “They’re the daughters that any parent would be proud to have. Smart, funny, sensitive, not afraid to stand up for their beliefs. One of them makes a point of telling me how ‘kindness’ is an important part of their ideology. They have also done more to expose the moral bankruptcy of the Putin regime than probably anybody else. No politician, nor journalist, nor opposition figure, nor public personality has created quite this much fuss. Nor sparked such potentially significant debate. The most amazing thing of all, perhaps—more amazing even than calling themselves feminists in the land women’s rights forgot—is that they’ve done it with art.” Petya called everyone. He ran around clutching the paper, with a very large and very beautiful picture from the Red Square action. He sensed, correctly, that this was a first taste of true fame.

MOSCOW WAS HOT, sunny, and empty as it gets when vacation season sucks the crowds and traffic jams out of it. Political trials were best conducted with no one around, and political verdicts were best rendered in August or just before the New Year—as Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s second guilty verdict had been. Everything felt slowed down and unreal this time of year. The Muscovites called it “dead season.” To get to a verdict before “dead season” was over, though, this trial would have to be speeded up.

THE POLICE CORDONED OFF the Khamovnichesky Courthouse. It had seen its share of vigils—Khodorkovsky’s second trial had been held here—so the police knew how to keep the crowds dispersed, squeezed, and uncomfortable all at the same time. Only journalists were allowed to approach the courthouse, though few of them fit into the overcrowded courtroom. The prisoner transport pulled up to the back of the building, and the crowd behind the police cordon shouted as loud as they could to be heard half a block away: “Svobodu!” “Freedom!” Pussy Riot heard them; it sounded like a big crowd.

They had their own architecture within the sprawling four-story building. Before and after the hearing and during breaks, they were held in isolation rooms in the basement; to get to the courtroom on the second floor, they had to be taken up the back stairway to the top floor, which was entirely closed off for the occasion, cross over using the empty hallway, and descend two floors. There, they were placed inside what everyone called an aquarium—a Plexiglas enclosure equipped with microphones for addressing the court and a small horizontal window for passing papers back and forth to the defense attorneys. The defense sat at two desks in front of the enclosure, with their backs to it. The prosecution, and the lawyers for the victims of Pussy Riot’s alleged crime, sat facing the defense. The setup left room for benches to accommodate only about two dozen members of the public, including all the relatives and journalists. Petya sat in the front row closest to the enclosure. He wore a red-and-white-checked Ralph Lauren shirt; Nadya wore a purple-and-white-checked Ralph Lauren shirt, which looked like it was probably Petya’s. Several friends sat in the front row as well, as did Natalya Alyokhina, Maria’s mother; Stanislav Samutsevich sat just behind her.

A few minutes in, Violetta Volkova objected to the presence of witnesses in the courtroom. The judge, a woman in her midfifties with dyed brown hair, thin lips, and reading glasses, demanded to know whether there were any witnesses present, and none identified themselves. She then read out a roll call, and when she got to Stanislav Samutsevich, he stood up and said he was not aware of being a witness. “You are a witness for the prosecution,” said the judge. “Leave the room. You will be called.” He said something softly. “Leave,” she repeated. She sounded testy.

Nine people identified themselves as victims of Pussy Riot’s alleged act of hooliganism. Nadya, Maria, and Kat had seen them all at the probable-cause hearing, and they had recognized some of them from the cathedral. Among them were the security guards and the candle lady who had looked so shocked by the performance. Nadya, Maria, and Kat remembered their faces and their hands as well, as they had dragged and thrown the three of them out of the cathedral. Thinking of these people as victims was funny. The three defendants studied their ostensible victims from behind the Plexiglas that was apparently meant to safeguard the public from them, and them from the public, and laughed.

The prosecutor, a plump, prematurely balding red-haired man wearing a summer uniform—a light blue shirt with dark blue captain’s epaulets—cringed, demonstrating that the public really was afraid of them, he insisted. “In light of the heightened public attention to the case, we believe the lives of witnesses, members of the court, and the accused may be in danger,” he said. He moved to direct video operators to stop filming when victims and witnesses were testifying—apparently to protect them from attack by Pussy Riot’s crazed supporters. The judge agreed.

The judge went around the room collecting other pretrial motions. Maria asked to be provided with audio and video recordings that were described in the indictment but not actually included in the case. She also moved for a continuance because the defendants had not had time to consult with their attorneys. They had been promised a confidential meeting with them the previous Friday but it never happened—instead, they had been driven to the courthouse and around town and back to jail, returning after visiting hours. Maria spoke confidently, with clear references to relevant laws and rules; she had spent much of the last few months studying law books and was well on her way to becoming a classic jailhouse lawyer. Nadya and Kat seconded whatever she said.

And then things got weird.

Volkova motioned to have an expansive list of witnesses called, including the patriarch himself, “to shed light on economical issues of Russian Orthodoxy.” She said the word ekonomishesky (economical) several more times as she read out her motions; presumably, she was mispronouncing ekumenichesky (ecumenical). She said she also wanted to read out loud—and into the record—the defendants’ comments on the charges. For a second, the judge sounded more surprised than annoyed; the charges had not yet been read by the prosecution. Volkova pounced: “Do you have any basis for denying my motion?” And as the judge fumbled, she continued, “In that case I shall begin reading them into the record.”

She began with Nadya’s statement: “We believe that art should be accessible to the public, and for this reason we perform in a variety of venues. We never mean any disrespect to the audience at our concerts… The song ‘Mother of God, Chase Putin Out’ reflected the reaction of many of our fellow citizens to the patriarch’s call for believers to vote for Putin in the March 4 election. We share out compatriots’ dislike for the perfidy, treachery, hypocrisy, and bribery of which the current authorities are guilty… Our action was not motivated by hatred for Russian Orthodoxy, which prizes the same qualities we do: charity, mercy, forgiveness. We value the opinion of believers, and we want them on our side, in opposition to authoritarian rule… If our performance appeared offensive to anyone, we regret that very much… We believe we have fallen victim to a misunderstanding.”

Volkova had rushed to read the statements because she feared the judge might curtail videotaping at any point. Now the tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of people who were watching the live feed would at least hear Pussy Riot’s position. But they would hear it out of order—the words to which Nadya was responding in her statement had not been said in the courtroom yet. And Volkova looked and sounded as different from Nadya as a woman could. Obese and wearing a clingy brown floral-patterned dress and a large gold cross, she read monotonously and stumbled over so many words, sometimes asking her colleagues to help her decipher the defendants’ handwriting, that it seemed she might not fully comprehend what she was reading.

“I insist that the ethical and legal aspects of our case must be separated from each other,” she continued. “My own ethical appraisal of our action is as follows: we made a mistake by taking the genre we have been developing, that of a sudden political punk performance, into the cathedral. But we did not think at the time that our action could be offensive to anyone. We have performed in many venues in Moscow since September 2011: on the roof of a bus, in the Metro, in front of Special Detention Center Number One, in clothing stores—and we were received with humor everywhere. If anyone was offended by our performance at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, I am prepared to admit that we made an ethical mistake. But a mistake it was; we had no intent to offend… And I apologize for this mistake. But there is no criminal penalty for ethical mistakes of the sort we have committed… I shudder every time I read in the charges words to the effect that we came to the cathedral out of hatred and disdain for Orthodox believers. These are terribly strong words and terribly serious charges… Think about what hatred and enmity are. We did not have them in our heart. Claiming we did is bearing false witness. We are being libeled, and I cannot say it’s been easy to bear being tarred like this, having attributed to me feelings of hatred that I have never experienced toward any living thing on the planet. The prosecution claims we have concealed our true motives. But we do not lie; this is one of the principles of Pussy Riot… We have repeatedly been told by investigators that if we admitted our guilt, we would be released, and yet we have refused to tell that lie about ourselves. Truth is even more important to us than freedom.”

After barely a pause, Volkova began reading Maria’s statement, in the same monotonous manner: “I am Russian Orthodox… I always thought the Church loved its children, but it seems to love only the children who believe in Putin… I see the charges as nonsensical, as I am a citizen of a secular state, which is where I thought I lived… I ask the independent court to conduct an impartial investigation and draw conclusions. I have never had any hatred for Orthodox believers, nor do I feel any now.”

Kat’s statement tried to deconstruct the logic of the charges. The charges indicated that Pussy Riot’s guilt was proven by the fact that they rehearsed their performances. But did that fact prove the existence of hateful intent? It proved only the intent to perform, not the intent to perform a criminal act. “The prosecution knows that the main topic of our group’s work is not the Orthodox religion but the illegitimately elected parliament and the authoritarian rule of President Putin.”

It took Volkova nearly an hour to read all three statements. When she was finished, the judge read out a written motion Maria had submitted, asking that the case be returned to investigators because of numerous inaccuracies and omissions in the documents. The defense attorneys looked surprised; it seemed they did not know the motion was coming or indeed the extent to which Maria had been teaching herself law. Maria was doing the lawyerly thing in court while the lawyers made political speeches. None of this looked intentional; rather, it looked like an amateur production in which the actors had mixed up their lines, or been badly misdirected.

The prosecutor was quick to ridicule Volkova’s procedural irregularities as ignorance and a violation of both the defendant’s rights and the victims’ rights to due process. “Maybe they are just saying all these things to have them published on the Internet right now,” he said, suggesting the obvious. And then he pointed out what might be considered a major failing if the defense had actually been planning to mount a defense: “Anyway, it is now clear that the women sitting on the defendants’ bench do consider themselves members of this group.”

The judge denied all of the motions filed by the defense.

The prosecutor read out the charges in rapid fire. Sometime before February 17, 2012, Nadya had entered into a conspiracy with Maria, Kat, “and other persons unknown to the investigators for the purpose of rudely disrupting the social order in a manner that would express a clear lack of regard for societal norms, motivated by hatred and enmity, motivated by hatred for a particular social group, in the form of carrying out offensive actions inside a religious institution aimed at attracting the attention of a broad spectrum of citizen believers.” The conspirators had “distributed roles among themselves and purposefully acquired clothing to be worn, clothes that clearly contradicted church norms, discipline, rules, and regulations inside the church.” Being aware of the offensiveness of their attire “to the entire Russian Orthodox world” and “the criminality of their intent and the scale of the insult they planned to inflict,” they used balaclavas to disguise their identities and thus make it more difficult for them to be charged. “This increases the gravity of their deed and makes it look like a well-planned act of malicious intent, meant to denigrate the feelings and beliefs of the numerous disciples of the Orthodox faith and diminish the spiritual foundation of the state.”

“Do you understand the charges?” the judge asked, addressing Nadya.

“Yes.”

“Do you understand the charges?” she asked Maria.

“No.”

“What don’t you understand?”

“I would like to make it clear that—”

“What don’t you understand in the charges?” The judge was beginning to sound belligerent.

“I don’t understand the ideological aspect.” Now Maria sounded strident.

The judge was silent for a moment.

“I don’t understand on what basis the prosecution is making statements regarding my motives. And I don’t understand why I’m not allowed to explain this.”

“Don’t rush things.”

“I’m not rushing things.”

“You’ll have your say. Right now I’m asking you if you understand the charges.”

“I don’t.”

“The prosecutor just read out the charges. What you are being charged with.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What don’t you understand? Please clarify.”

“I just did.”

“Do it again.”

“I don’t understand the ideological aspect of the charges. Pertaining to my and—pertaining to our motives.”

“All right. Sit down. Samutsevich, do you understand the charges?”

“No, I don’t.”

“What don’t you understand?”

“I don’t really understand any of the charges. They strike me as unconvincing and unsubstantiated. It is not explained on what basis these assertions are made.”

“Prosecutor, can you explain it to them?”

“Your honor, the charges are clear.” He promised the basis for them would be laid out clear in the course of the court hearing. He then repeated the part about a rude disruption of the social order and hatred and enmity for a particular social group.

“Now do you understand?” the judge asked Maria.

“No, I do not understand, because the prosecutor has just read out a small excerpt out of more than a hundred and forty pages.”

“The prosecutor has just outlined the charges. All the evidence will be reviewed in the course of the court hearing.”

“I still don’t understand. I insist the entire indictment be read out.”

“The prosecutor has outlined the charges. He is not supposed to present evidence at this stage.”

“But I don’t understand what the charges are based on.”

“He’ll explain what they are based on in the course of the hearing.”

“That doesn’t help me understand.”

The lawyers laughed. They looked very pleased with themselves and their defendants. Feigin tightened his tie.

“The prosecutor has outlined the charges,” the judge repeated.

“I’ve said everything I had to say. I have nothing to add, I’m sorry.”

“The charges are not fully formulated,” said Kat, standing up.

“All right, so that’s what you think. Do you plead guilty? Tolokonnikova?”

“No, I do not plead guilty. Can I explain?”

“You’ll explain later.”

“But I want everyone to understand.”

“You have pled not guilty. Sit down. Samutsevich, do you plead guilty? Stand up and respond.”

“No, I do not.”

“Alyokhina, do you plead guilty to the charges?”

“I can’t plead, I don’t understand the charges.”

Pause.

“You are college-educated! You know Russian.”

“First of all, I have not yet finished college. Second, I am being educated as a journalist. I am not a lawyer. I don’t understand what I am being accused of. I can’t plead guilty or not guilty. I don’t understand.”

“Prosecutor, please be so kind as to outline the charges again. They don’t understand.”

“The defendants are being charged with committing an act of hooliganism, which is a rude disruption of the social order showing a clear disregard for society, committed for reasons of religious hatred and enmity, for reasons of hatred toward a particular social group, committed by a group of people as a result of a conspiracy…”

“The prosecutor has mentioned that I have three defense attorneys to help me understand the charges. But I was denied the opportunity to meet with them prior to trial. As a result, I do not understand. I insist that they be allowed to explain the charges to me.”

“Calm down, we are talking about something else.”

“This is very important for me to say.”

“Do you plead guilty to the charges?” the judge screamed.

“I don’t understand the charges.”

“The charges were perfectly clearly, eh, er, rendered. All right, please, Tolokonnikova, do you want to comment on the charges?”

Nadya quickly summarized the commentary Volkova had read into the record a couple of hours earlier. She said she felt no hatred for anyone. She also admitted she had been in the cathedral performing, but this had had nothing to do with hatred. “I do not really understand what I am doing in court, facing criminal charges.”

Kat followed suit, in her characteristically indirect way: “I admit the occurrences in the cathedral, and I admit that I participated,” she said, but she had never experienced hatred or enmity based on religion or membership in a social or ethnic group.

When the judge asked Maria whether she wanted to comment on the charges, Maria finally entered her plea:

“I plead not guilty to the crimes described in Article 213, Part 2. I also believe that in reviewing a case filed under this article, ideological aspects are as important as facts, because the arguments rest on motivation and the motives of our actions stem from our ideologies. The prosecution is trying to play down the political and creative components, which are in fact key here. I am also grateful to our lawyers for making sure our comments were sounded out here today. Contrary to what we have already been accused of, they were not written for the media. They were written so that believers, including those identified as victims here today, would hear us. I realize this is difficult within the framework of a court hearing, but there is something greater, and in the space of this greatness, where there is neither slave nor free, we shall hear one another.”

The judge surely did not hear Maria quoting Galatians, but she did hear her letting the court off the hook by pleading not guilty—not to the charges she claimed not to understand but to the crime described in the article of the criminal code that was holding her here: felony hooliganism.

The lawyers were much less articulate. Polozov said the charges were absurd. Feigin started saying the charges characterized their author as incompetent. The judge interrupted him, asking him to stick to the topic at hand. “Don’t tell me what to do,” said Feigin.

It was four in the afternoon on the first day of hearings, and the tone and pattern of the trial had been established: it would be a Soviet political trial repeated as farce. About a dozen trials of groups of Soviet dissidents took place from the early 1960s until the mid-1980s; the transcripts of these trials formed an important part of the dissident literary canon, and the experience of these trials was, for a long time, the Soviet Union’s only living memory of something that resembled public political debate.

Each participant in a Soviet political trial had a clearly defined role. It was the prosecutor’s job to present the state’s position, which amounted to creating a legal pretext for jailing people for exercising rights guaranteed to them by the Soviet constitution. For example, when seven people were tried for staging a demonstration in Red Square (in the very same spot where Pussy Riot performed forty-four years later), they were charged not with demonstrating—for the right to public assembly was guaranteed to Soviet citizens—but with disrupting traffic, no matter that it had been a Sunday, there had been no traffic, and Red Square had been closed off to cars that day anyway, to facilitate pedestrian access to the Lenin Mausoleum. So was Pussy Riot charged not with praying or even dancing in a church but with committing an act of hooliganism and hatred toward Orthodox believers.

The judge in a Soviet political trial played the role of a bureaucrat with a rubber stamp; his job was to facilitate a smooth and speedy hearing, denying most motions filed by the defense, and to issue a preordained verdict when the time came. There were trials the KGB wanted finished quickly, and in these cases, it was the judge’s job to stretch the workday, compress the cross-examinations, and eliminate as much of the procedure as his idea of process would allow. The role of the judge had not changed in half a century.

Defense attorneys in a Soviet political trial, if they did not want to be disbarred, had to distance themselves from their clients. Traditionally, in their closing arguments they would state that they did not share the defendants’ political views and condemned them as anti-Soviet and immature—while also arguing that the defendants should be acquitted and released. To this end, they made a close study of all the evidence and made painstaking legal arguments—despite knowing the sentence had been written before the trial ever began. The defendants themselves, on the other hand, had a choice to make: they could either engage with the court, making arguments and helping their lawyers poke momentarily satisfying but useless holes in the prosecution’s case, or they could refuse to recognize the court’s authority altogether and use the court hearing solely to try to make a political speech. Anatoly (Natan) Sharansky, given a chance to make a final statement to a Moscow court, turned to his brother and dictated a speech for distribution in samizdat, then turned back to the court to say, “And as for this court, I have nothing to say to it.”

The motivation of Pussy Riot and their lawyers was exactly the same as that of their predecessors half a century earlier: they aimed, on the one hand, to act as one would in a courtroom, and a country, where laws were meaningful and respected, and on the other hand, they wanted to use the forum of the court to make political declarations that would be heard. Except that, as if they had heard only a distorted account of the traditional division of labor in Soviet political trials, defense and defendants switched roles. By accident and as a result of poor communication rather than by prior arrangement, it was the lawyers who demonstratively refused to recognize the court, while Maria spent her time detailing exquisite if futile legal arguments.

IF THIS HAD BEEN A NORMAL TRIAL, the judge, having finished with the preliminaries at four in the afternoon, would have broken until the following morning. But this was not a normal trial; this was a fast one. The judge announced a thirty-minute break. Victims’ testimony would follow.

The first victim was Lyubov Sokologorskaya, a fifty-two-year-old woman with a tired, apologetic face. After eliciting her identifying information, the judge started the questioning rather than allowing the prosecution to proceed.

“Tell me, please, are you an Orthodox believer and an Orthodox Christian?” asked the judge.

“Yes,” Sokologorskaya said apologetically. “I try to observe all the rituals. I have been fasting as prescribed for several years.”

“Tell me, please, what in your understanding and in that of your religion, is God?”

The defendants gasped. Having read the prosecution’s case, they had realized that the trial would focus not on their actions but on their attitudes toward religion. And after the probable-cause hearing, they had a bad feeling about its likely trajectory and about their lawyers’ level of expertise. But nothing had prepared them for such an opening.

“In my religion, God is all that is, and we are all in His image and likeness,” responded the victim. “These are not idle thoughts on my part. I have examined myself and learned how a person can change for the better if he strives. I am deeply convinced that God the Lord is the source of all change.”

“The source of all change?” echoed the judge.

“Is God the Lord. I can explain.” She cleared her throat. “Where our Orthodox religion is concerned, God’s mercy is in the sacrament of repentance for all the sins we commit. This is the exact opposite of self-love. In other words, it’s being liberated of all the passions with which we are contaminated.”

“Tell me, what does the place where the sacrament happens mean to you?” Now it was the prosecutor speaking. “I don’t mean only the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.”

“We can’t hear the prosecutor at all!” Maria shouted. “We are behind bulletproof glass.”

No one seemed to hear what she said, though her words, carried by the microphone in their stall, were audible to everyone in the courtroom.

“What does the cathedral mean to you?” the prosecutor continued. “What do its walls mean to you as an Orthodox believer?”

“Actually, I would like to begin by stating that the Church, in our Orthodox religion, is the union that Jesus Christ led when He came onto this earth as God who was personified in the human image. This is the essence of Orthodox faith.” What she meant was not entirely clear, but this did not discourage the judge from questioning her further.

After some more theological fumbling, the judge finally asked Sokologorskaya to describe what happened on February 21. Sokologorskaya said she came to work that morning, performed her usual duties of lighting oil lamps and cleaning candle holders and other ritual objects, and saw visitors enter the cathedral starting around ten in the morning. Those who came in an hour later made her suspicious. She described seeing Nadya, Kat, and someone she could not identify forcing open a gate to the soleas, the elevated platform surrounding the sanctuary. “I especially would like to underscore that to open this gate they had to use their bodies—I will show this now here at the podium—like so, they had to shove aside the ark which housed part of the Lord’s robe. This is probably the first pain I felt. This ark had not been on display there for very long, and everyone approached it with reverence, one by one, and people would line up for the chance to pay their respects to it. So this was a show of disdain, at least for the Russian-speaking people, and every time I think about it, a bitterness wells up.”

Haltingly Sokologorskaya described seeing the group force open a second gate and run up on the soleas. “I finally went up to the barrier and rose on the first two steps—and then I could not take another step; I could not step onto the soleas. This may mean nothing to other people, but I was like a pillar on those steps.”

“God wouldn’t let her up there,” a chorus of whispers in the courtroom explained.

“Please tell me, did you try to use words to explain to them that parishioners of the female sex cannot go up on the soleas?” the judge asked helpfully.

“I told them, I begged them, I pleaded.”

“Did they listen to you or did they ignore you?”

The defense might have objected that the witness was being led, but it was the judge doing the leading.

“They absolutely ignored me. More than that, the actions they undertook after that showed just how much they ignored me.”

“Did you try to stop them physically? Did you try to use your hands or body to shield the sanctuary?”

“I had tried to do it at the first gate, but they closed it in front of me. I tried to grab them, tried not to let them in, but one of them slipped away, she waved me off, she was sly.”

“Please tell me, after this group of girls stepped onto the soleas, onto the pulpit, how did events develop and what was the reaction of other people present in the cathedral?” The judge continued calmly and with great care to steer her nervous witness.

“At the first moment my inner reaction was, ‘What are they planning to do next?’… The most frightening and unpleasant part of the situation was feeling, yes, that I was being held still by the Lord and I cannot raise my foot and take even a single step… The most frightening thing would be if, God forbid, they try to force their way into the sanctuary—well, then I wouldn’t just stand there! Let me explain something to you. The Lord’s gate, the gate to the Kingdom of the Lord, is the actual gate to the sanctuary. When a cathedral is built, the sanctuary is blessed first, along with everything inside it. In fact this is the place of Christ’s presence. And as far as we Orthodox Christians are concerned, Christ has risen… Moreover, at that moment the sanctuary housed a nail with which Christ had been nailed to the cross. And when people come to the cathedral, I tell them about this with special trepidation, I tell them that this is God’s trace on this earth. This very nail was used to nail the demigod who is everything and everyone for us Orthodox believers. So this was another relic. Plus there was the Lord’s robe, which had been given to us by a member of the Muslim faith. He had acquired it in his battles way back when and then he gave it to us in the seventeenth century, when the Romanov dynasty ascended to the throne.”

The defense appeared to be in a stupor while Sokologorskaya continued to cite random episodes of Russian history, returning periodically to the unremitting heartache caused by Pussy Riot’s action. Finally, when the victim seemed to run out of breath, the judge asked her to return to the story of what happened in the cathedral on February 21. Sokologorskaya looked confused.

“What were they wearing?” asked the prosecutor. “Was their clothing the sort that would be permissible in church?”

Sokologorskaya responded by telling the court the group apparently had a leader and she thought it was Tolokonnikova.

“The clothing that remained on them—how would you describe it?” The judge would not abandon her efforts to get the testimony she needed. “Was it modest, vulgar, permissible in a church?”

“The clothing they had on was not permissible for being in a church. It was vulgar. One of the unidentified persons even had a bare shoulder. I quickly thought, ‘Oh my God, make it so they don’t strip!’”

“Please tell us what they did then,” asked the judge.

“They began to don masks with slits for the eyes and mouth. I was caused further anxiety by the fact that a guitar was being taken out.”

“A regular guitar?”

“No no no, not a regular guitar. It was an electric guitar.”

“Were they standing still?”

“They began bodily movements and those shouts.”

“Please describe their bodily movements.”

“I am not going to look for a description now. As far as I am concerned, these were devilish jerkings.”

“Were they jumping and skipping?” asked the judge.

“They were jumping and skipping and making arm movements with their hands in fists. They raised their legs so high that you could practically see everything below the waist. Doing this in front of the sanctuary, at the Lord’s gate, at the pulpit, this sort of jumping—how can anyone say this was just a small ethical transgression? And I felt like they were showing off to one another, to see who can raise her leg higher.”

“Please tell us, were these actions accompanied by shouts of any sort that were of an offensive and sacrilegious nature with regards to the Orthodox faith, Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, the Russian Orthodox Church, and Russian saints?”

“That was their whole nature. It was offensive. There was no other nature to them.”

“Please tell us, did the actions of the defendants and of unidentified persons cause moral damage to you?”

“They caused huge moral damage to me. The pain will not go away.”

“In your opinion, did their video clip offend the feelings and souls of believers? Did it provoke them to retaliate in kind, and did it, as well, provoke those who are not Orthodox believers to view the Orthodox negatively?”

By Russian law, a witness or a victim of an alleged crime can testify only to the facts; witness opinions must be disallowed when offered and must never be solicited. But those who testified as witnesses against Soviet dissidents were often asked to render their opinions on the anti-Soviet nature of actions or materials attributed to defendants—and their opinions, scripted by the KGB, often made it into the wording of the courts’ verdicts.

“It did both,” Sokologorskaya obliged, adding that the impact was exacerbated by timing: it had been the week before Lent.

“And if we abstract ourselves from what happened in the cathedral, in your opinion, would this kind of behavior be acceptable from a moral standpoint in any other public space, or are these immoral acts of hooliganism?” the judge asked the candle lady.

“Naturally and without a doubt, this kind of behavior would be unacceptable anywhere. From my point of view, it is simply immoral.”

At length the judge, having preempted the role of the prosecution, invited the defense to cross-examine the witness.

“You said you heard what the participants said, but you cannot repeat it because of your religious convictions,” said Mark Feigin. “Is this correct?”

“Yes.”

“In that case, I am going to read out several phrases myself and you’ll tell me whether you heard them. Did you hear them sing ‘Mother of God, chase Putin out’?”

“No.”

“All right. Did they say, ‘Mother of God, become a feminist’?”

“It’s all mixed up with the video clip now. You know, I don’t remember.”

“Did they mention Patriarch Kirill’s last name?”

“I was standing there and praying as hard as I could so I wouldn’t hear these words. I definitely heard the word ‘patriarch.’ And we only have the one patriarch.”

“You said you were praying. When you pray, do you hear what other people are saying to you? Do you take in information, wholly or in part?”

“I didn’t say that and I won’t. I want to say that praying normally and praying in that setting are different things. It was enough that I heard the word ‘patriarch.’ I’m not going to tell you which grammatical case it was used in.”

“So you can’t say what you heard exactly?”

“No.”

“So you didn’t hear anything!”

“Sure I didn’t!”

“You keep asking the victim the same question,” said the judge. “She’s already answered. I’m disallowing it.”

“You mean the court doesn’t need to know what the victim heard?” asked Volkova.

“I said, I’m disallowing the question!” the judge squealed.

“Tell me then what kind of moral suffering you experienced when you heard their show,” said Feigin.

“I am disallowing the question!” the judge screamed again. “The victim already answered it. You should have been paying attention.”

“I didn’t get an answer.”

“But everyone else did,” said the judge.

“All right. Who told you that the young women you saw at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and the women in the clip you watched were the same people? They were wearing balaclavas.”

“I can put two and two together,” said Sokologorskaya. “I’m not the stupidest person there is.”

“You said the defendants performed bodily movements that you called ‘devilish jerkings.’ Could you explain what devilish jerkings are?”

“I am disallowing the question.”

“Why?” Volkova stood up again. “Is the court curtailing our rights?”

“No one is curtailing anything,” said the judge.

“The victim’s statement is part of the record,” insisted Volkova. “We would like to know what ‘devilish jerkings’ are. How does the victim know how the devil jerks? Has she seen the devil?”

“I demand respect for the victim,” said the judge. “I am reprimanding you.”

“We would like to know why the court is disallowing our questions. On what basis?”

“Continue the cross-examination,” said the judge.

The lawyers had run out of questions. The defendants themselves stepped in.

“We stand accused of publicly expressing hatred and enmity toward Orthodox believers,” said Maria. “I want to understand the difference between a personal insult and the public expression of hatred for believers.”

“I said that what happened in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior was a personal insult for everyone who came there with deep pain,” responded Sokologorskaya. “Your behavior showed that you want publicity, that’s all.”

“Do you believe a personal insult of that sort is a crime punishable by law?” asked Kat.

“I am disallowing the question,” said the judge.

“Was my clothing inappropriate for being in a church?” asked Kat.

“You had on the longest dress, and your shoulders were covered,” admitted Sokologorskaya. “But you had bright stripes and a mask.”

“I am aware that the cathedral’s internal rules dictate that women should cover their heads,” said Volkova, “but I don’t know that they say women can’t wear masks. Do they say that?”

“I am disallowing the question,” said the judge, visibly angry. “Stop this mockery!”

“What mockery? I insist that if this is part of the charges, then we need to see the rules that forbid it.”

“Continue with the cross-examination.”

Kat rose again. “I would like to know what you heard me say, if I said anything.”

“You are lucky that you were detained by security right away and didn’t have time to say anything!”

“Oh my God,” said Nikolai Polozov.

“So did Samutsevich say anything or not?” asked Volkova.

“At first they were all saying stuff and then I don’t remember,” said the victim.

“Why do you think that if I break the cathedral’s internal rules of behavior, that means I do it out of hatred and enmity toward believers?” Kat insisted. “What makes you say that?”

“I am disallowing the question!” said the judge.

“Still, I would like to know what you heard me say, if you think I was expressing hatred toward believers.”

“You are trying to force me to say bad words and curse words. I’m not going to do it.”

“By law they cannot be said in court,” added the judge.

“But unprintable words and ‘bad words’ are two different things,” said Volkova. “If we don’t know what she said, we cannot tell whether the charges are warranted.”

“The victim has already informed us that her religious convictions preclude her from saying these words,” said the judge. “She has that right. I have disallowed the question. Continue the cross-examination.”

“I have no more questions until I get answers to the ones I already asked,” said Kat.

“Is it only the defendants who are not allowed to be in the cathedral dressed like this?” asked Volkova. “Considering that the parts of the body that women tend to cover—they had those covered. And their dresses were below the knee.”

“But that is why they tried to raise their legs as high as possible—because their skirts weren’t short enough. Plus I’d like to note that the length of the dress is not the only criterion of appropriateness.”

“Not short enough?” Volkova said. “With all due respect to the court, I studied logic in college, and the responses we are getting today seem to me entirely unconnected to the questions. I want to know all the criteria of appropriateness, and I would also like to understand if other women, women who are not on trial today, are allowed to enter the Cathedral of Christ the Savior wearing a brightly colored dress. I am wearing a dress right now, and it has flowers on it. Would I be able to enter a church in it?”

“Now that you mention it, your dress is kind of like that color.” The brownness of Volkova’s dress notwithstanding, the exchange had already exceeded the limits of absurdity.

“You are being asked to define the criteria of appropriate dress,” said Polozov.

“I want to hear you address the length of every individual dress,” said Volkova. “You are not answering our questions.”

“Appropriateness of dress is determined by a set of criteria, including length and extent of exposure. I noticed that Alyokhina’s dress was a bit long as well, and this must be why she was trying to raise her legs so high.”

“Any other questions?” asked the judge.

The defense huddled for a minute.

“We have no more questions,” said Feigin, “because our clients require a break.”

“You have given them no food or water since five in the morning,” added Volkova.

“By international law, this constitutes torture,” said Polozov.

The journalists present scribbled furiously; this was the first quotable quote from the defense all afternoon. The judge called a break.

CALLING IT “TORTURE” was not an overstatement. They had been up at five; on days when they had hearings, inmates had to be dressed and ready before breakfast because the order to report to the door could come at any point in the morning. Some days, the call came before breakfast and this meant they got none. Once out of the building, they were placed in a prisoner transport equipped with what they called “glasses”—vertical enclosures about three feet square and five feet three inches high (that is, high enough for Kat and Maria but not for Nadya to stand up straight) that served to isolate them from one another. There were stools in the glasses to sit on, uncomfortably. Nadya, Maria, and Kat had food with them, if you could call it that, a plastic box that contained several packets of soup, tea bags, some crackers, and several plastic cups. During breaks, they could ask the marshals for hot water—and they did, and they ate the soups, but the soups turned out to be absurdly salty and they wanted to ask for water, but, mindful of the fact that the marshals did not always heed their requests to be taken to the bathroom, they thought better of it. So in the afternoon, they were dehydrated and still hungry.

Their aquarium was an airless stall; it had been built in retaliation after Khodorkovsky’s lawyers secured a European Court of Human Rights ruling that deemed holding defendants in steel cages inside courtrooms inhumane. For their second trial, Khodorkovsky and his codefendant got a shiny new unventilated Plexiglas cube. This was the very enclosure in which Pussy Riot sat now. It engulfed them like a nightmare; now the picture was clear and now it was obscured by the fogged-up walls of the aquarium, the heavy air inside, the haze of hunger and sleep deprivation, and the general sense that none of this could be real.

The judge denied their request for a break. “We’ll stay here until morning if we need to,” she declared. She called Denis Istomin to the stand. He was a tall handsome blond young man with a gym body. An activist of a Russian Orthodox nationalist movement, he had testified a couple of years earlier at the trial of a curator accused of organizing a show that offended the believers; Istomin had seen Nadya protesting during that trial, and his testimony had been essential to the women’s arrest. Now he testified that what he saw on February 21 had hurt his feelings so much that he cried. He said he had come to the cathedral that morning to buy a ring at the gift shop, but, happening upon the kerfuffle, had helped remove Maria from the cathedral.

“You said you were in a state of shock as a result of our performance. Tell me, what did you do after you handed me over to the police?” Maria said, likely meaning security.

“I went back inside the cathedral. I wanted to leave, because I had done a good deed, I’d helped clean up the cathedral, so I could leave, but there was a force holding me back. So I went inside and into the shop.”

“You were in a state of shock and you went into the shop. I see, thank you. One more question. Did you hear that after lunch today I apologized for our ethical violation?”

“Yes, I heard.” Istomin sighed. “But all things should be done in their time. As Stanislavsky used to say, I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you have repented.”

“Let’s discuss their apologies later,” said the judge. “Maybe they’ll find a more repentant way of saying them.”

After Istomin testified that he had found the words holy shit offensive and sacrilegious, Volkova asked him what else struck him the same way.

“The phrase ‘Mother of God, become a feminist.’ I believe this is unacceptable disparagement.”

“Disparagement of Jesus Christ?”

“Disparagement of Jesus Christ.”

It was after eight when Istomin finished testifying. The judge called a ten-minute break, enough to go to the bathroom but not enough to get anything to eat.

AT HALF-PAST EIGHT, the judge was livid. “I called a ten-minute break! Ten minutes! Why is everyone here except for the defense attorneys? What do they need, a special invitation?”

“Your honor, this kind of attitude is called contempt of court,” the prosecutor suggested helpfully.

“Let’s not talk about attitude,” said Volkova, the only defense attorney in the room. “We see who’s got attitude.”

“Where are your colleagues?” the judge demanded to know.

“And so we return to the scene of our disgrace,” said Polozov to Feigin as they walked in.

“I am reprimanding the defense,” said the judge. “Whom are you going to cross-examine now?”

“We are not going to cross-examine anyone,” said Volkova. “We are demanding that the judge recuse herself. The judge is clearly prejudiced against the defendants.”

An hour later, after everyone had weighed in on Volkova’s motion, the judge refused to recuse herself and called the next victim, Vasily Tsyganyuk, an altar man. He was wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with a large Dolce & Gabbana logo. He also testified that he had been deeply hurt by the performance and that he had heard no political statements, only sacrilegious and hateful ones. He stopped testifying at ten, the hour past which Russian law forbids conducting court hearings.

With the waiting in the basement isolation rooms, the requisite searches, and the circuitous routes prisoner transports always seemed to take, Nadya, Maria, and Kat would be back in their cells at two in the morning. Three hours later, they would need to be ready to begin a new day of their trial.

All the days would be similar to the first one. They would be interminable. The lawyers would veer from fumbling to speechifying, and there would be no time or opportunity to discuss, much less change, their defense strategy. Feigin, Polozov, and Volkova had decided they would focus their efforts only on drawing attention to the outrages of the trial and would not speak to the court on the court’s terms. Indeed, they would sometimes act in ways that exacerbated the travesty to make it that much more obvious. Months later, after things had gone wrong and then very wrong, they still believed they had chosen the right approach; there was, after all, no waging battle against a judge who clearly relished running a witch trial. The lawyers believed their public statements, endless Tweets, and tireless media work had mobilized unparalleled support for the women on trial, and this, in turn, gave them the best chance they had of going free.

“But what made you think the Russian authorities would listen to these people?” I asked them much later. “You’d seen them put Khodorkovsky away for ten years—and there had been a major international campaign to support him.”

“This was different,” said Polozov. “These were the very people they invite to sing at their parties!”

This was not entirely illogical; at least the Russian elite listened to these people when they sang.

Faith No More had invited Pussy Riot members to join them onstage during a July concert in Moscow—and five women in balaclavas did and lit sparklers and chanted that “Putin pissed himself.” The Red Hot Chili Peppers spoke out when they came to town three weeks later. Franz Ferdinand and Sting issued statements of support. Then came Radiohead, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, U2, Arcade Fire, Portishead, Björk, and hundreds of others. Never had the worldwide music industry mobilized on this scale and at this speed to support a colleague—especially colleagues who were not, in fact, musicians in any traditional sense.

Judge Syrova’s court plowed on. A small crowd continued to keep vigil in front of the courthouse. A middle-aged man in glasses stood at the entrance with a sign that read YOUR HONOR, WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR HONOR? Whenever Nadya, Maria, and Kat were delivered to the courthouse, the crowd managed to let them know they were there. When the victims walked in and out of the building, the crowd shouted, “Shame!” Some of the victims responded by making the sign of the cross toward the crowd.

On Day Two, altar man Tsyganyuk testified that Pussy Riot had acted as though they were possessed.

“Those who are possessed can act in a variety of ways,” he explained. “They can scream, thrash around on the floor, sometimes they jump.”

“Do they dance?” asked Polozov.

“Well, no.”

“That’s enough of this talk about who is possessed,” said the judge. “Tsyganyuk is not a medical doctor and is not qualified to render a diagnosis.”

Security guard Sergei Beloglazov testified he had been so traumatized by the performance that he had been unable to work for the last two months (almost six months had passed since the performance).

“But as far as myself, I forgive them,” he said. “I do not hold grudges. But as for God, the sanctuary, and other believers, I can’t decide that—that would be God’s will and the court’s decision.”

The court managed to fit all the victims into the first two days of hearings. Day Two even ended by nine, which meant Nadya, Maria, and Kat might be in their cells by midnight.

DAY THREE BEGAN with an ambulance. The hearing was scheduled to start at one, but Nadya, Maria, and Kat were installed in their basement rooms in the morning; such was the way of prison transports, which functioned a bit like buses, delivering inmates from various jails to different courts in the morning and taking them back in the evening. By midday, all three were close to fainting. Nadya was in her third day of debilitating headaches. Underweight Maria was simply depleted, as was Kat. They demanded a doctor repeatedly, until an ambulance was finally called. The doctors examined them and said they were fit to stand trial. Two hours later, Nadya moved for a continuance because she felt too ill to go on. The judge banged her gavel furiously and said the ambulance doctors had cleared them. It was so hot and stifling in the courtroom that day that at one point Volkova left the courtroom to get some air. In the late afternoon, ambulances were called again, this time for Volkova and the three defendants. In between, several witnesses for the prosecution testified that they had seen the defendants jumping, jerking, and insulting the Orthodox faith.

On Day Four, there was a bomb threat. The building was evacuated while the mine squad swept it, but Nadya, Maria, and Kat spent that time in the isolation rooms in the basement. Once the building was declared bomb-free, the court heard from the cathedral’s cleaning lady, who testified that Pussy Riot had danced to music that was “neither classical nor Orthodox.” Pressed by the defense, the cleaning lady admitted that she cleaned the soleas despite being female. The prosecutor grabbed his head with his hands. The judge directed the court marshals to remove anyone who laughed.

For its last witness, the prosecution called Stanislav Samutsevich. “I refuse to answer questions about my daughter,” he said immediately, but the judge did not let him leave the stand. The prosecutor badgered him. “Did she go to the Rodchenko School? Did she meet contemporary artists there? Did she share their views? Did Tolokonnikova get her involved in various groups?” Stanislav looked pained and refused to answer. The prosecutor read aloud the testimony Stanislav had given back in March: “Tolokonnikova got her involved in the feminist movement. I told Katya that women already had all the rights, but she would not listen to me… I have banned Tolokonnikova from our home. I believed it’s Tolokonnikova’s fault that Katya took part in the action at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior… Sometimes I felt like she was under a spell. She did not want to listen to logic, she lived in a made-up world. But I am sure my daughter did not use drugs or alcohol; she was under the influence of Tolokonnikova.”

“I was upset,” said Stanislav. “I wanted to make things better for my daughter… I said many things that aren’t true. Please don’t take my testimony into account.”

That evening the judge read aloud the conclusions of a committee of psychiatrists and psychologists who had examined the defendants. They had found them sane and fit for trial but had nonetheless diagnosed each with a personality disorder. Maria, they said, suffered from emotional distress brought on by her desire to protest. Nadya and Kat were both labeled with something called “mixed personality disorder.” Nadya’s symptoms were her “active position in life” and “heightened ambitions,” while Kat exhibited an abnormal “insistence on her own point of view.”

They left the courthouse at ten.

President Putin spent that day in London, meeting with the British prime minister and confronting questions, protests, and letters in support of Pussy Riot everywhere he went. He finally made a statement: “If those girls had defiled something in Israel, they’d have to deal with burly guys over there,” he said wistfully. “They wouldn’t have gotten out of there alive. Or if they’d gone to the Caucasus, even closer to home. We wouldn’t have even had time to arrest them. But I still don’t think they should be judged too harshly. I hope that they draw their own conclusions.” The more optimistic among Putin’s listeners concluded that Pussy Riot would get a suspended sentence; the more realistic thought this meant they might get less than the possible maximum of seven years.

ON DAY FIVE, the prosecutor began opening evidence boxes. He pulled out a yellow dress and a blue balaclava and then a black one. To show the court that the masks had slits, he pulled one of them onto his rubber-gloved hand. A journalist was removed from the courtroom for smiling.

That afternoon three men in balaclavas showed up on the roof of a storefront across the street, level with the courtroom window. They chanted, “Free Pussy Riot!” Three policemen climbed up there, but the roof was too small for them to risk a scuffle in trying to force the men down. While the policemen huddled at one end of the roof, trying to figure out what to do, the masked men began singing “Mother of God, chase Putin out.” Everyone in the courtroom was transfixed on the roof across the street. “If you want to look, leave the courtroom,” a marshal barked. But Nadya, Maria, and Kat stretched to get a better look; no one was going to kick them out of the courtroom for rubbernecking. They were smiling, too.

An hour and a half later, a crane finally took the men down.

That day, the defense called Maria and Kat’s professors to testify to their character. Both said they were wonderful young women who harbored no hatred toward the Russian Orthodox religion. The defense called Olya Vinogradova to the stand.

“We were going to school together,” said Olya. “We have been together for three years.” She smiled at her friend behind the Plexiglas.

“You’ll do your laughing when you leave here!” the judge shouted. “This is not a circus or a movie theater.”

“Don’t pressure the witness,” said Volkova.

“I am giving you a reprimand,” said the judge.

“I want one too!” said Feigin.

“Reprimands for all the defense lawyers,” said the judge. “Enter it into the record.”

Maria asked her friend to describe her political views: “What is my attitude toward the Putin regime?”

“I am disallowing the question,” said the judge.

“Why?” asked Maria.

“We are examining your character.”

“And my character can’t have an attitude toward Putin?”

“It can, but… ” said the judge and trailed off.

“Did I make any statements about any political figures, and if so, then what did I say?”

“There you go,” said the judge.

“I believe you made very negative statements about Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin,” said Olya.

This was the only point in the trial when the defense managed, for a moment, to focus attention on the political nature of Pussy Riot, if not on the political nature of the action itself. The rest of the time the court successfully obscured the content of the song, as though Pussy Riot had indeed defiled the cathedral by asking the Virgin Mary to become a feminist. Those who knew of Pussy Riot only from the trial or from state television could be forgiven for not knowing this had been an action against Vladimir Putin; the court had managed even to play the recording in such a way so as to skip the refrain every time so that the Mother of God was never asked to get rid of the president.

They left the courthouse after ten that evening.

SATURDAY AND SUNDAY in pretrial detention felt almost like a vacation. The routine resumed on Monday, Day Six of the trial: up by five, in the courtroom by ten, out at ten, in their cells at two. On Monday morning, Volkova tried to engage the court in a discussion of the term shoulder. The prosecution claimed Pussy Riot members’ shoulders had been exposed, but that would only be true of their shoulders in the anatomical sense, meaning the upper arms, and not shoulders in the vernacular sense, meaning the shoulder joint, anatomically speaking.

“If you look at me, your honor, I will show you what I mean.”

“I am not looking at you!” screamed the judge, who lost her composure repeatedly that day. It seemed that while the defendants had gotten their second wind, the judge’s nerves had been entirely worn out by the grueling hearing regimen.

The defense kept filing motions to call its witnesses; the judge kept shooting them down. Around eight in the evening, when yet another of these motions came up for discussion, Maria lashed out at the judge: “It seems to me you keep forgetting that this concerns us personally. We were brought here by force. And I have only one desire: I want to rest and I want to have a confidential meeting with my attorney, and I keep trying to ask for this for a week and a half. I absolutely cannot concentrate in order to write my closing statement. I have to write my testimony at night. I want to draw attention to this!”

“Are you done?” asked the judge.

“No! I also want to say that the things the prosecutor says make me suspect he is a provocateur. And I can’t even respond to him because I don’t have that right.”

“You want to talk about it?” asked the judge.

“Yes!” said Maria. “It hurts being unable to say anything!”

The judge said it was now Kat’s turn to speak.

ON DAY SEVEN, the prosecutor gave his summation.

“The defendants’ claims that their action was politically motivated are specious. Not a single politician’s name was pronounced in the cathedral. An analysis of the song showed that the phrase ‘Mother of God, chase Putin out!’ was inserted artificially and the true purpose of the lyrics was to insult the feelings of Orthodox believers. Putin’s last name was included for the sole purpose of creating a pretext for publicizing the action as a protest against the authorities.” He asked for three years behind bars for each of them.

“I am incredibly ashamed to be listening to the prosecutor’s speech,” said Volkova in her own summation. “It’s like we are not in Russia in the twenty-first century but have gone through the looking glass. It’s like all of this will fall apart and the three imprisoned girls will go home. In what legal book did the prosecutor find such terms as ‘blasphemy,’ ‘sacrilege,’ and ‘legs hiked up in a vulgar manner’?… The girls have been in jail for many months. They have not seen their families, their children, they have not seen the light of day, they have been tortured. And what are they accused of? They stood in the wrong place, they prayed the wrong way, they crossed themselves too fast and in the wrong direction, they turned their behinds to the sacred nail—and they ruined the foundation of foundations!”

“The girls are being asked not just to apologize—for they have apologized,” said Feigin. “They are being told to lick the judge’s boots, to humiliate themselves, to cry, to give the state the opportunity to rip them to shreds. Nothing has changed since the Soviet period: a defendant can hope for forgiveness, for humanity, only once he is destroyed.”

Polozov lectured the court on the Russian constitution, listing those of its articles that had been violated during the course of the trial, starting with Article 13—guaranteeing a variety of ideologies and banning a single, state-enforced ideology—and ending with Article 123, which guarantees equal treatment for both sides in court hearings.

That night, Madonna performed in Moscow. At one point, she turned her back to the audience and pulled off her jacket, exposing the word PUSSY over the black strap of her bra and the word RIOT beneath it. She then pulled on a balaclava. Petya and Tasya had VIP seats. Tasya was filming. “Imagine them getting real jail time after this,” said Petya. “Just imagine!” They both laughed so hard Tasya’s camera shook.

THEY HAD BEEN TALKING about their closing statements. Rather, Nadya and Maria had been talking—and writing. Nadya had spent at least several of their short nights writing. She showed Maria entire notebooks she had filled with theses and with passages she had copied out of the New Testament. Maria wrote right after returning from court but still tried to get some sleep. When Maria asked her if she had written much, Kat said, “Nah, just a few words.” She told herself she was not going to kill herself over the closing statement. She would write at night if she felt up to it, until sleep took over, or in the morning, in that no-man’s-land period after she was taken out of her cell but not yet placed in the transport.

Once, Kat heard Nadya rehearsing her speech. She found this odd and slightly irritating: Didn’t responding to this rigged, empty ritual so earnestly only validate it? Didn’t engaging the religious argument legitimize the very idea that religious issues could be taken up in court? But Nadya was determined to accomplish something for which she had never before striven: she wanted, desperately, to be understood.

On Day Eight, Nadya was the first to make her closing statement.[5] She was wearing a blue T-shirt emblazoned with a yellow fist and the words NO PASARAN.

The courtroom applauded. “Respected audience,” said the judge with uncharacteristic deference but with a familiar note of irritation in her voice. “You are not in a theater. Alyokhina, please, you have the floor.” Maria, who was wearing a black dress, made her closing statement.

The courtroom applauded again. A marshal blew up: “Keep your emotions to yourself! You were all told this.” Then came Kat.

The judge scheduled the sentencing for August 17, eight days later. Nadya, Maria, and Kat spent those days back in pretrial detention, going over all the signs. The prosecutor had asked for three years, but some of the victims’ lawyers had asked for a suspended sentence. Plus, Putin had said the sentence should not be too harsh. All of this pointed to a suspended sentence. On the other hand, Mark Feigin, who had grown glum right after the probable-cause hearing and never really recovered, had talked about a possible sentence of a year and a half. But he had also said he would petition to have the three women kept in pretrial detention if the sentence was that short—short?—and they could work in the same jail where they were now, perhaps in the kitchen or, better yet, the library. This seemed like a good option to Kat, though Maria and Nadya were thinking they might prefer a prison colony to the cramped monotony of jail. And then again, Volkova had mentioned that hooliganism was the kind of offense that, if you were found guilty, always got you three years of real time. That could happen too. It had clearly happened to a lot of other people.

THE CROWD GATHERED in front of the courthouse on August 17 looked happy. It was a sunny day, and the faces in the crowd were so good, so familiar, that it seemed nothing terrible could happen. Back when people used to come to the courthouse for arrest hearings, someone—perhaps it was Petya—had coined the term cultural festival to replace protest or vigil. It had been forgotten since, but now the atmosphere actually felt festive. There was music, some people held up witty signs, and an occasional balaclava could be glimpsed. Orthodox believers were there too, with their signs, but, being clearly outnumbered by Pussy Riot supporters, they looked like bad actors playing themselves and not at all scary.

The judge began reading the verdict just after three. It was “guilty,” which surprised no one, but, following the tradition of Russian courts, the judge would plow through a tedious recounting of most testimony heard and evidence reviewed in the course of the trial before announcing the sentence; it could take hours. Some of the people in the crowd tuned their phones to radio stations that had reporters in the courthouse and stuck earphones in their ears; clumps of people convened around these listeners, looking at them expectantly, as though something depended on being first to hear the news.

“In sum, and in light of the danger to society caused by the offense committed, as well as the circumstances of the crime and its goals and motives,” the judge said just before six in the evening, “the court believes that justice can be served and the defendants can be reformed only if they are sentenced to time behind bars and are ordered to actually serve this time.”

“Two years,” said the people with headphones throughout the crowd.

“Two years,” the entire crowd sighed at once.

A shadow fell over hundreds of faces. The festivities were over. The mood had darkened.

It was as though something had fallen with a loud bang. A retired woman in the building across the street from the courthouse heard the sound and called the police. They discovered the sound had come from the roof, where someone had dropped a padlock. The police found a young man on the roof, and a lot of equipment: microphones, amplifiers, and four speakers large enough to blast the sound through the neighborhood, certainly large enough to make sure the windows of the courtroom across the narrow street shook. The police also found rock-climbing equipment.

It would have been a spectacular action. Three women were going to descend the wall of the building, tethered to cables hung from the roof, wearing balaclavas and singing:

It had been a beautifully prepared action. The song had been mastered ahead of time, so it would blast from the speakers as the women descended the wall. The three women had trained with experienced rock climbers, practicing on abandoned buildings outside of Moscow. And they had hauled all that equipment up on the roof during the night. And Petya had told Pussy Riot’s international supporters to expect a big surprise after the sentencing, and his contact people had told everyone else. Some people thought this meant Pussy Riot would be released an hour or two after the sentencing.

But then someone had dropped a padlock.