Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot

TEN Kat

“THE DRIVE BACK after the sentencing was very strange. It was an open prisoner transport, the first time we had an open one.” Kat made it sound like they were taken back to jail in a convertible. It was just a prisoner transport with plain windows: no dark film, no curtains. It was a rambling old bus with the three of them and several special forces officers in riot gear inside. They could see the city and breathe its dusty summer air. Nadya was agitated, and one might have thought she felt happy. Maria had an emotionless air about her. She said, “That’s that,” as though she had expected this all along, which she had not. Kat felt angry. She cursed Putin and the patriarch. It was like she had nothing to lose—and neither did the special forces guys, who failed to reprimand her; one of them asked to have his picture taken with the three of them. They got to the jail. Nadya hugged Kat, then Maria, then Kat again. That was that.

All talk in the “spec” was now of life in penal colonies. This struck Kat as nothing more than a coincidence: one of her cellmates had also recently been sentenced, and another one would be sentenced imminently, so the only experienced one in the cell, a woman who called herself Irina Orlova, was telling them about life in the colonies morning to night now. To be more precise, she was telling them how awful it would be. She started with the hardships of the transport; some women spent grueling weeks going from train to transit jail back to train, lugging all their crap each time, facing hazing and sleepless nights at every step. “I don’t know if you’ll make it,” Orlova would say before moving on to the ways of the colonies. There would be hundreds of people to a barracks, she said. There would be work, unremitting, backbreaking slave labor. There would be no hot water, and the toilets would be outdoors. And the colony would likely be someplace where it was winter most of the year—with a break for a short scorching summer when the mosquitoes ate you alive and the smell spreading from the outdoor toilets knocked you over. The two less experienced inmates acted terrified. They sighed, perhaps cried a little; one of them kept repeating “I hope they don’t make me go” over and over again, and then asked for more detail.

The technique of placing an older, more experienced inmate in a cell to cow and pressure younger ones into a pliable state in which they might sign confessions and testify against themselves and others—in the usually unfounded hope of securing release—went back to at least the middle of the twentieth century. Kat did not wonder why Orlova was apparently doing everything she could to frighten her cellmates. She did not wonder if it was too much of a coincidence that three of the four of them faced sentencing at roughly the same time. And, of course, she did not wonder what Orlova or whoever might have sent her could possibly want from her; after all, the trial was over and Kat was about to be shipped off to a penal colony. She just hoped it would not be that far away and the toilets would be indoors. And she really worried about surviving the transport. Whatever Orlova might or might not have been trying to do was working.

Kat escaped the harping and the whining by thinking back over the trial, reviewing it in her head day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. It had all happened so fast. As she rewound and replayed her mental recording, she noticed new things—many new things—and they made her very angry. The defense attorneys had handled so many things so badly. There was the time Volkova ran out of the courtroom. The time Feigin snapped at the judge. The time Volkova read out the very long text of an expert opinion they had commissioned—it seemed to Kat that Volkova was simply unprepared and had nothing to say at the hearing that day. And anyway, how could she be prepared when she barely spoke to Kat? She rarely came to see her at the jail, and now, after the sentencing, with an appeal pending, she seemed to have disappeared altogether: friends were telling her they could not get hold of her.

She also suspected that the lawyers were in cahoots with Petya. They had bad-mouthed him to Kat, but this meant nothing, and anyway, they all seemed interested in the same thing: money. Petya wanted to trademark Pussy Riot, to produce a record, to have the group go on tour, and the lawyers were right there with him. They had even had Kat sign a document allowing them to register Pussy Riot the brand. This was what they discussed with her during their infrequent visits in jail—instead of talking about her defense strategy. In fact, they probably realized it was better, from the point of view of commerce, to have her and Nadya and Maria do time. It would make the story more compelling and the enterprise more profitable.

Some of the episodes Kat recalled had reasonable explanations of which she was not aware. For example, Volkova’s reading expert testimony out loud was an ingenious ploy to get it into the court record after the judge had refused to allow the expert’s opinion into evidence. Other incidents, such as the running out of the courtroom or the snapping at the judge, were true lapses that could only be explained by the lawyers’ lack of experience and the extreme stress they were under. Still others really were expressions of profit seeking and, to an even greater extent, vanity. For example, as Kat lay on her bunk day after day mentally sifting through evidence from the trial and her friends kept dialing Volkova and the other lawyers to no avail, the lawyers were in New York, helping Petya collect the LennonOno Grant for Peace on behalf of Pussy Riot; Petya had not asked for their help.

Could the women have gotten a lighter sentence if they had had different lawyers? Kat grew convinced that they could have. After all, their lawyers had been objectively terrible: unprepared, incoherent, in addition to being rude, disrespectful of the court, and just plain ugly and stupid. Was Kat supposed to believe that if she had had, say, a smart, professional, attractive, well-spoken, hardworking, well-prepared defense attorney, she would still have been sentenced to two years behind bars? Was she supposed to believe that having a lawyer made no difference whatsoever and you could dispense with the whole pretense of the trial and just wait for Putin to name his price? That is probably what the legal trio would want her to believe—that would conveniently absolve them of all responsibility past and future—but Kat refused to believe that nothing could have made any difference. And if the choice of lawyers mattered, then the fact that she had had the worst ones on earth had to matter. It was their fault she had been in jail for six months and was about to be shipped off to an overcrowded, freezing penal colony with outdoor toilets.

Orlova and the other two kept going over the same depressing details of penal colony life; it was like their conversation was stuck in an endless loop. But inside Kat, something was changing. Despair was giving way to a new feeling, a desire to act—a desire for vengeance. It was probably too late to do something about her sentence. But it was not too late to teach the lawyers a lesson. She would disgrace them by firing them from the biggest trial of their careers.

KAT KNEW SHE WAS RIGHT, but she also knew she should try to talk to Nadya and Maria about this. How, though? Ask one of the three lawyers to carry a note saying she wanted to fire them? They had offered their services before, saying they would deliver notes back and forth without looking at them, but Kat had never quite trusted their assurances—and she certainly did not now. She decided to write a note that suggested adding another lawyer to the team. Maybe that would get them thinking.

The ploy did not work. Volkova said she was searched on the way out of the jail that day and had to dispose of the note; communication between defenders in the same criminal case is strictly forbidden, and a lawyer can be disqualified for facilitating it. Kat did not believe Volkova; she was sure lawyers never got searched. (She was wrong; lawyers do get searched, though the law forbids this.)

Kat found herself agreeing to have her fortune told by Orlova. The senior cellmate had some technique: you had to have drunk a cup of coffee yourself and dumped the grounds on a napkin that preserved whatever picture they had formed at the bottom of the cup. Orlova told fortunes incessantly—mostly her own—and Kat the computer programmer, Kat who did not have a mystical bone in her body, looked upon this disdainfully. But Orlova kept offering, and as Kat found herself growing closer and closer to Orlova—she had to admit she had been warming to her since early in the summer, the woman was so consistently kind and attentive to her—she also found herself saying, “Yeah, whatever, go ahead, I don’t care.”

Orlova said, “I see space all around you buzzing. I see a man running toward you.” Kat thought maybe it was her new lawyer.

Two women from a human rights organization came to see Kat; they were the only people, aside from lawyers and immediate relatives, who could get visitation rights, and they had been coming occasionally. Kat had her doubts about whether she could trust them, but she decided to tell them she was firing her lawyers. They told her to be cautious, to think twice, to consider her own reputation, and Nadya’s and Maria’s. She told them she did not care. Once she convinced them of her resolve, one of them gave her detailed instructions about getting it done: make sure you have the motion in writing; tell the court you have a difference of opinions on your defense; and tell the court you already have a new lawyer—if you have no one to represent you, the court may deny your motion because then you will be lawyerless. Kat did not have a new lawyer. But by this time she was convinced that having no lawyer was better than having Volkova or the other two.

The next day one of the human rights women came back. “Don’t do it,” she told Kat. “It’s not going to help. You are still going to go to the penal colony, but your reputations will be ruined.” Kat objected. She said the lawyers were dishonest; she said they had been signing commercial contracts on the group’s behalf; she said they and Petya were in cahoots. “What does it all matter?” the woman said, exasperated. It mattered to Kat. Also, she was certain this woman, who claimed to be a human rights advocate, was doing the lawyers’ bidding. This only strengthened her resolve.

In fact, the human rights advocate had had virtually no contact with the lawyers. She was just sincerely convinced that, since Kat had no hope of changing her sentence, her firing the lawyers would be seen by the public as what it was: an act of vengeance. With so much attention still fixed on the trial, this seemed like an ill-chosen coda.

THE MORNING OF OCTOBER 1, when Pussy Riot’s appeal was scheduled to be heard in Moscow City Court, Orlova gave Kat a pill. She said it was for her nerves, something mild. Kat figured they wouldn’t have let her have a serious sedative in the cell. She took it, and she did not feel anything in particular.

Then they had their hair done. It was another misplaced act of goodwill; someone from the support group had paid for hair services for them, and the woman in charge of the jail’s so-called salon thought it would be a good idea to give each of them a wash and blow-dry the morning of the appeal. So six weeks after they were sentenced, Kat, Nadya, and Maria met at the hair place.

Kat started by broaching the subject of money and contracts the lawyers had apparently been signing on their behalf. Maria said she knew something about this and had asked Polozov to provide the documents.

“Why should you be asking him to provide stuff?” Kat was outraged. “He should be bringing all this stuff to you without being asked.”

“Why are you being so loud?” Nadya asked Kat.

“Because I’m irritated. I’m angry.”

“So I guess you’ll be firing them,” said Nadya.

“I’m firing them,” Kat confirmed.

“I’m not,” said Maria.

“I’m not either,” said Nadya. Then she said it was going to look bad. She said the lawyers were perceived as opposition lawyers and the firing would look like a split in the group, or even like they had broken Kat. She asked Kat to give it some more thought. Kat said she had given it all the thought it needed.

In the prisoner transport going to court, Kat threw up. It might have been that pill.

In court, things went just as the human rights activist had predicted: the judge tried to ignore Kat’s attempts to make a motion, then finally asked if she had it in written form, accepted it reluctantly, and, hearing that Kat already had another lawyer lined up but that the lawyer needed time to get acquainted with the case, granted the motion and continued the hearing until October 10. Then there were a lot of cameras clicking, most of them aimed at Kat for the first time since the trial began, and a lot of microphones and Dictaphones being pushed out of the way by the court marshals, and then they were back in the prisoner transport and back at the jail. Nadya and Maria did not seem to be angry at Kat; they even said that now, thanks to her, they could pressure their lawyers into working harder and being more attentive—lest they also get fired by the two of them.

THE NEXT DAY, a prison guard told Kat to come out of her cell “lightly.” That was the opposite of going “with your stuff.” If you are being transferred, or even going to court, you always go with your stuff—all your stuff, including soap and books and food—because you do not know if you are coming back to your cell. If you are told to come out “lightly,” you are just going for a talk, probably within the jail compound.

Kat was taken to see one of the female inspectors.

“I heard you fired your lawyers.”

“Yes.”

“They’ll probably be going after you now, trying to come see you, pressure you.”

Kat had no idea what this woman wanted.

“So just so you know, if one of the three of them comes, we are going to let you know and you can say you don’t want to see them. You should put it in writing, and then we can tell them to get lost.”

“Okay.”

They sat in silence for a minute.

“Can I go back to my cell now?” Kat asked.

“Wait, sit here awhile,” the officer said. She seemed sympathetic, and Kat felt, if not touched exactly, at least surprised by the concern she was showing. “I heard there is now a vodka called Pussy Riot,” the inspector continued. “Your old lawyers seem to have had something to do with it.”

Kat was surprised by her familiarity with Pussy Riot and its issues. She had never thought prison staff paid attention. But she had no desire to discuss this with her.

“Can I go back to my cell?” she asked again.

The inspector, apparently peeved, had her escorted back.

THE FOLLOWING DAY, they came for her again; again she had to come “lightly.”

“Your lawyer is here.”

“The old one?”

“The new one.”

The new lawyer was definitely not the man Orlova had seen in the coffee grounds. She was a diminutive blonde in her midthirties. She wore her hair in a ponytail. She handed Kat a letter from her closest friends in the support group; the letter said the lawyer’s name was Irina Khrunova, and she was “big guns.” She did not look like big guns, but she got right down to business.

“I want to know why you fired your lawyers,” she said. “I doubt you have enough information about the trial to have ‘a difference of opinions’ on the defense, so I’m assuming that’s just a phrase you used. What’s the real reason?”

Kat told her as much as she could of what she noticed as she had thought back over the trial, and the money stuff, the contracts, and even the vodka.

“I see,” said Khrunova. “That’s called loss of trust. I’ll be your lawyer, then.” And she said she had to go read the case and think about their next step.

Back in the cell, Orlova was reading Kat’s coffee grounds. “I see a lot of media attention,” she said. “I see the penal colony, with a tall fence around it. I don’t see you behind that fence. I don’t know why, but I don’t see you behind that colony fence.”

The new lawyer came back a few days later, two days before the next hearing. “I am pleased,” she said. “I have found a lot of mistakes.” She was going to tell the court what Volkova and the others had omitted: that Kat had not actually taken part in the actions for which the three of them were convicted of hooliganism.

The omission had been intentional: Volkova, Polozov, and Feigin had respected Pussy Riot’s commitment to anonymity in their defense. More important, they had pointedly refused to engage the court on charges they and their defendants considered absurd. But what might have been a coherent political stand looked absurd as a legal strategy, thought Khrunova. What she was doing was going back to the venerable tradition of defense attorneys who had represented Soviet dissidents: they had often had a clear division of roles with their clients. While the defendant objected to the charges as such and sometimes even claimed not to understand them, the lawyer would look for ways to lessen his client’s punishment within the existent legal framework. Khrunova would now do the same: while Kat as a person might choose not to be differentiated from her comrades who committed the sacrilege of lip-synching, Kat as her client should get the benefit of having bungled her way out of performing.

“What are my chances?” asked Kat.

“I don’t know,” said Khrunova. “You know how unpredictable it all is. All I can tell you is I see a legal mistake here and I am doing everything I can to correct it. But I can’t promise you anything.”

Kat felt she should talk to Nadya and Maria, so she decided to do something she had not dared to do in her six months in the jail: she would try to talk to Maria through one of the forbidden routes. She knew Maria was in the cell right above hers. Normally, that would open the way for passing notes and even simply talking through the open windows, but the first and second floors were separated by an additional horizontal barrier that extended out from the building’s outside wall; it made passing notes extremely difficult and it even got in the way of shouting.

So Kat decided to knock on the ceiling using a bucket. Orlova gave her blessing. If an inmate was caught communicating with other inmates, the entire cell was penalized, but Orlova said, “We see that you have to get in touch with her, so go ahead. We’ll cover for you.”

While one of her cellmates stood watch by the door to make sure no one was looking in from the hallway, Kat knocked. And knocked again. And again. Finally, she got a response: a single knock. What in the world could a single knock mean? For that matter, what could a series of knocks mean?

“Either you are really stupid and can’t figure out how to communicate, or something else is going on,” said Orlova. In fact, something else was going on: an inspection in Maria’s cell just as the knocking began—at the worst possible moment. Maria had simply stomped on the floor to try to get Kat to stop.

Orlova, meanwhile, let fly a series of curses and instructed Kat to try shouting out the window. Since sound would not carry over the horizontal barrier, Kat needed to ask a cell kitty-corner from hers but on the second floor to relay a message. Orlova had taught her she could not just stick her head out and ask for a favor; she had to make small talk first.

“Hey, two-oh-eight,” Kat shouted to the cell on the floor above. “How is it going? Any chance you can call out to two-ten?”

“All right, let’s see. Their windows are closed. Another time, then.”

But Kat hardly had any time. So a few hours later she knocked on the ceiling first and then opened the window and started screaming. She felt she was so loud the entire jail could hear her. “Two-ten!” she screamed until she was hoarse. “Two-ten!”

She finally heard Maria’s high-pitched voice.

“What’s up with the lawyers?” Kat screamed.

“Same old,” screamed Maria.

Kat tried screaming something else, or hearing something else, until she finally heard Maria shout: “Wait! I’ll write!”

Kat waited all night and then all morning. She stopped waiting only when an inspection started in her cell. In this weekly ritual, jail staff went through literally all their belongings, first laying them out as though on display, then examining them, sometimes confiscating them or disposing of them. Maria’s rope with the weighted sock at the end, with a letter inside the sock, made its appearance in the window at the worst possible moment: just as the inspectors appeared in the doorway. Orlova panicked and hissed at Kat—“Idiots”—but the inspectors, miraculously, noticed nothing. As soon as the door closed behind the inspectors, Kat ran for the window.

The sock dangled about four feet away; the horizontal barrier had pushed the rope out that far. Orlova grumbled but quickly fashioned the tool Kat should have made by now: a broomstick, or something like it, with a hook at the end, made of twisted pages torn from glossy magazines—someone had sent Kat a copy of the Russian edition of National Geographic, which she hated ripping up, but which made the best possible hook. She used the hook to pull the rope into the window and remove the sock. Soon she placed her response back in the same sock, tied it to the rope, gently guided it out the window with the help of the hook, and tugged on it to signal the upstairs cell to pull it up. Kat was terrible at working the hook, so Orlova did it for her.

Still, the fourth letter in the exchange—Kat’s response to Maria’s second note—broke off from the rope and tumbled down to the ground in its sock. For all their effort, they had barely managed to have a conversation. Maria wrote Kat a note about fund-raising efforts in the United States, but it assumed too much knowledge and Kat did not understand anything. Kat wrote back outlining her new defense and urging Maria to try to get a lawyer who would represent all three of them so they could at least communicate with one another. Maria wrote, “I’m sorry the lawyers have been saying horrible things about you. But don’t worry about that right now. I am worried about you. I don’t like the state you are in.” This hurt Kat’s feelings, but her response never made it upstairs. She had written, “If they’d been like that to you, I would have fired them.”

And there was no chance of communicating with Nadya at all; she was all the way up on the third floor. Anyway, Kat did not think there was a point to talking to her. Nadya always knew exactly what was going on.

THE MOOD IN THE PRISONER transport was all wrong. Kat did not know what to say, and so kept quiet. At one point Maria and Nadya started speaking to each other. But in the cage, when they saw Khrunova, they addressed Kat together, laughing: “So you got yourself a younger, better-looking lawyer!” Khrunova always wore tailored dresses to hearings, with a cardigan sobering up the outfit. She looked as different as a woman could look from the obese Volkova.

Kat was the first to make a statement. She said the action had been political. “We didn’t want to offend anyone. And if we did, we said we are sorry. But a punk prayer is not a crime.” She then switched from first-person plural to first-person singular and quickly muttered that she had not actually done anything at the cathedral.

Maria had prepared a long speech, in which she intended to reiterate what she had said during the trial. She had said in the prisoner transport that she would keep repeating her message as long as it took to get through to people. “We are serving time for our political beliefs, and even if we are sent to a prison colony, we are not going to keep quiet, no matter that you want us to,” she said, apparently addressing the court.

“Stick to the topic at hand,” said the judge.

“I’d like to address Putin’s statement regarding ‘slapping us with a two-ie.’”

The judge raised her voice. “Topic at hand!”

“I’m still going to say it. Unlike Putin, I can say the name of our group out loud. It’s called Pussy Riot. And that sounds and is a lot better than his calls for ‘snuffing the enemy out in the outhouse,’” she said, referring to a speech that first made Putin popular in Russia back in 1999. After this, the judge started shouting and people both inside and outside the courtroom started applauding, and no one could hear anything anymore.

Most of Nadya’s speech was drowned out by the screaming and the applause. She said the case had proven the repressive nature of the Russian state. “I demand a reversal of the verdict, and I want to warn you that Putin’s continued rule will drive the country to civil war.” She had raised her voice.

“This is not an election campaign!” screamed the judge, even louder.

The three old lawyers’ speeches turned into a shouting match between them and the judge, so ultimately only the words president, church, and demand could be distinguished.

But Khrunova addressed a hushed courtroom.

She said she did not think Nadya, Maria, and Kat had committed a crime. But, she added, Kat had not even taken part in the actions the court had deemed criminal: “She did not jump, pray, or sing.”

She spoke for no more than seven minutes, and then, almost immediately, she realized something was wrong. One after another, the so-called victims’ lawyers rose and said something good about her, her speech, and her position, even though they said they disagreed with it. They said she had made a great speech. They said it was a relief to hear legal arguments after a trial dominated by political speechifying. They said they respected her. Khrunova felt like she had stepped into a trap, though she could not figure out who had set it or for what purpose. Her best-case guess would be that everyone, including the other side, was so genuinely tired of the farce they had been witnessing instead of a trial that a plain, clear, decidedly legal speech seemed so refreshing that they were moved to praise her—in unison. Her worst-case guess would be that this was a setup in which Kat was either a willing participant or an unwitting pawn whose role it was to break ranks—and be rewarded for it.

THE JUDGE TOOK forty minutes to make a decision. Kat waited in a tiny room with a stranger, a defendant in a different case who could not stop talking. Kat was trying to think, though she was not sure what she was trying to think about; the woman kept interrupting her efforts, and Kat could not figure out what the woman wanted, though for some reason it appeared to be pity.

The judge read her decision: she left Nadya’s and Maria’s sentences unchanged but changed Kat’s to a suspended two-year sentence. “The defendant is to be released in the courtroom.”

Maria jumped up and started hugging Kat, squeezing her hard, trying to put into this hug all the joy that had washed over her. Nadya looked stricken and momentarily lost, and then she too stepped over to hug Kat. She seemed to be in a bad mood, but she had seemed to be in a bad mood on the way over to the court as well, and Kat thought this was perfectly understandable on the eve of her being shipped off to a penal colony.

The marshals opened the cage door. Nadya and Maria were led out in handcuffs, as usual. A marshal uncuffed Kat and told her to come with him. He took to her to a room downstairs and told her to wait for her papers and left her—left her alone in a room with no handcuffs, a window with no grates—and she paced the room like a free woman for half an hour as she waited for her papers. Out in the hallway, Stanislav Samutsevich teared up as he gave interviews and teared up again as he looked at Maria’s mother.

Kat finally got her papers and stepped out on the porch. There were many cameras—she had a sense that Orlova had mentioned seeing something like this in her coffee grounds—and many microphones, and Kat just stood on the porch for a few minutes, until two young men came up very close to her. She knew one of them—he had helped with some actions—and he said, “You can trust him” about the other, and they led her away from the courthouse. At one point one of them said, “Let’s run,” and they ran.

ELEVEN Maria

MARIA ARRIVED at Penal Colony Number 28 in early November. By the time she was out of “quarantine”—solitary confinement that launches the term of incarceration in the colony—snow had covered the grounds and blizzards were a daily occurrence. This was the colony about one hundred and twenty miles from Perm, in the town of Berezniki. One of Russia’s oldest industrial towns, with four large chemical plants dominating its economy and its difficult air, Berezniki had been completely rebuilt in the 1960s. It looked like scores of identical gray-brick five-story buildings had been airlifted and dropped in perfectly indistinguishable parallel and perpendicular rows.

Penal Colony 28, one of two colonies in the city, sat at the outskirts of Berezniki; a solid concrete fence topped with barbed wire surrounded a grouping of two-story buildings, sloppily assembled of the same gray brick. Each block housed two units, one per floor. The space available would accommodate around seventy people if inmates were housed in accordance with official instructions, but the administration managed to squeeze twice that number into the metal beds that formed a tight grid in the vast, unpartitioned bedroom space. Small wooden cubbies separated the beds, one for every two inmates. Any personal belongings that could not be concealed in this tiny space had to be packed into an enormous black bag stuffed, along with scores of other enormous black bags, into a storage space.

A unit’s quarters included, in addition to the giant bedroom, a kitchen with two tables, a refrigerator, a microwave oven, and a teakettle, for the minority whose relatives sent them food to store and reheat what could replace the inedible cafeteria fare; a “leisure room” equipped with a television set and a DVD player and benches and chairs for people who never materialized because inmates here were always either working or sleeping, dead tired from the monotonous, endless work; and a bathroom with three toilets and no partitions. Bathing was to be done one day a week, when inmates were marched to the colony bathhouse. At other times the women had to clean themselves using the toilets and the pair of sinks in plain view of the toilets; the process was so humiliating that none of the former inmates whom I interviewed would agree to describe it. Some, but not all, of the units had hot water in those bathrooms.

Before Maria was transferred from quarantine, Unit 11 underwent renovations. Some of the inmates were transferred out and distributed among other units, so the population of Unit 11 went down to the roughly seventy people its physical quarters could legally accommodate. Some of the walls got a paint job and hot water was piped into the bathroom. Later, when a high-profile human rights activist interviewed Maria in the colony, partitions went up between the toilets.

Maria had been readying herself for the transfer as well. She continued reading the Criminal Procedure Code and the Criminal Executive Code, which she had begun studying in pretrial detention. At first she felt her humanities-steeped brain might shatter under the weight of the dense language, but in court hearings she began to see that she knew more about what was going on from a legal standpoint than her codefendants, her lawyers, and, she suspected, the judge. Now, after a month in transit and two weeks of quarantine, Maria was more than conversant with the penal code: she felt it was her job to ensure that law as she had learned it was observed.

Maria talked to everyone, or tried to, as she always did. Most women were here on drug-related charges. Some were honest-to-goodness dealers, most were users who had unsuccessfully ventured into dealing, and some had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. They had sentences averaging seven years, the vast majority were under thirty, and few of them had contact with their families. The killers were different, older and with strong family ties, though most were serving roughly the same sentences as the drug offenders. A few women were in for fraud. Russian prosecutors often charged people with fraud—it was a wastebasket crime, and the best charge for extorting money or settling scores between business partners (one of whom would often pay off the prosecutor). Fraudsters were considered the intellectual and economic elite of the Russian prison population, and most of them were men; many managed to secure accommodations in city jails, so one did not encounter many inmates serving time for fraud in the penal colonies.

Lena Tkachenko was an exception. As a staff member at a real estate agency in Perm, she would rent an apartment for two days and then flip it ten times in twenty-four hours, conducting ten showings, signing ten contracts, handing out ten sets of keys, and collecting ten first month’s, last month’s, and security deposits. The new renters would then show up when the unsuspecting apartment owner returned, and it would be up to him to deal with the rage and the police. Lena had rules: she never fake-rented to people who looked to her like they could not stand to lose the equivalent of a few months’ rent or who looked like they needed the money more than she did. On the other hand, she needed the money a lot. Lena and her colleagues at the real estate agency got away with this scam for a year, until she got caught. At twenty, she was sentenced to seven years, and five of them had passed.

Lena liked to talk about music, and she was impressed when she heard that Maria had been in a band. She had heard of Pussy Riot and the trial, and though television news portrayed them as witches—or, rather, because of this—she figured they deserved her sympathy. Lena also liked to talk about a particular guard, a woman in her forties whom she had been courting for months, bringing her a flower every day in the summer and some other token of her affection in winter. The guard accepted the gifts, but, Lena complained, treated her like a child. For her part, she saw Maria as a bit of a child, a child who needed to be protected because she was too smart and too stubborn to be liked by others. Lena made sure she told Maria in detail how the place worked—she was good at systematizing, she was going to be a lawyer when she got out of here—and soon she was fielding questions she thought no one would ever ask.

Was it not against the rules, Maria was asking, to make inmates work twelve-hour shifts? The colony’s sewing factory worked around the clock, with half the inmates working the 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. shift and sleeping from nine thirty to five thirty while the other half worked evening to morning and were awakened at two in the afternoon. Yes, it was illegal to make them work twelve-hour shifts. Plus, local work such as lugging bricks for perennial construction projects was often added between the end of the work shift and lights-out. What was worse, said Lena, was that the penal colony secured huge sewing orders by undercutting regular manufacturers’ prices for everything from bedsheets to uniforms and then pocketed half or more of the supposed labor costs, so that inmates received only a few kopecks for every ruble to which they were entitled. This was slave labor—there was no other name for it—and Lena had been documenting violations for years, though she’d had no one to show this documentation to. But human rights activists and officials, inspectors, journalists—everyone—would be coming to see Maria at the colony, Lena thought, and this would allow her finally to expose these violations to the world.

THREE DAYS AFTER Maria was transferred to Unit 11, seven inmates showed up in the late afternoon, just as Lena was leaving to work the night shift. Lena had an idea of who these seven were: they were all known to do the administration’s dirty work. Now they were all in Unit 11, supposedly moving in, except all they had with them were their rolled-up mattresses. It was like they were here for a special-assignment sleepover. Maria had not yet been assigned a shift, so she would be here, in the unit, while Lena was at work. “Don’t talk to them,” Lena said quickly. “We’ll talk in the morning.” But even as she was leaving, she saw the seven women surround Maria. She heard them saying, “It’s your fault.”

When Lena came back from her shift, Maria was gone. Someone had seen her crying and signing some papers and the duty officer taking her away. She had asked to be moved to solitary for her own protection.

AS A CONVICTED FELON, Maria was entitled to one four-hour visit with up to two adults and one child every two months and one conjugal or family visit of three days every three months. Natalya Alyokhina and Olya Vinogradova visited in November. Nikita came in December. They talked mostly about Philip, who had looked so scared when Nikita brought him for a visit at the pretrial detention center. He had turned red and sat very straight, and Nikita had grown anxious and tried hurrying both him and Maria, who was tongue-tied: “Dudes, we don’t have much time, don’t just sit there.” Two subsequent visits went better—Nikita actually thought the third one was great, it was like talking to his mother behind a glass partition was natural for Philip now—and then Maria was transferred to the penal colony.

Nikita had told Philip what happened right away: “They’ve put Mama in jail.” It was hard to explain why, of course—not because Philip was a child, but because how could you explain it to anyone. Nikita said that Maria had gone into the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, and Philip had heard it as “the savior’s castle,” which seemed perfect to Nikita. So he said, yes, she had gone into the savior’s castle and sung a loud song, which you are not allowed to do there.

Maria filed an application to have her sentence deferred until Philip turned fourteen. There was precedent: a woman in Irkutsk had recently been convicted of vehicular homicide for running over three young women on a sidewalk and had had her sentence deferred. But that woman was a prosecutor’s daughter, and Maria realized that the court would not be so charitable to someone who had sung a loud song in the savior’s castle. Still, there was value in fighting for the sake of fighting. And there was value in getting out of her cell and into a courtroom where she would see familiar faces. And there was just a little bit of hope too.

The Civilian Collegium in Berezniki got a paint job in anticipation of all the media who would come for the hearing January 16. Petya had mounted a successful campaign to draw media attention—and to force the authorities to move the hearing from colony grounds to the town. A glass case was constructed in the courtroom, which had not, apparently, previously been equipped to host dangerous felons. The courtroom was filled with journalists and supporters—a ragtag group that had assembled around Petya over the last months—and an overflow of several dozen people were watching the proceedings in the lobby, on a monitor the court had installed for the occasion.

Maria and Nadya had both fired the lawyers who had represented them. In Moscow, they had been embarrassing, but once the women were transferred to colonies, the lawyers were simply absent. This time Maria was represented by a local attorney experienced in working with inmates, along with a former Soviet political prisoner from Moscow. The prosecutor and a representative of the penal colony, a copper-haired woman in a sky-blue uniform, argued that Maria did not deserve to have her sentence reduced because she had been racking up infractions in the colony. Twice she had failed to rise when awakened by a staff member at five thirty. Once she had been caught carrying notes to a meeting with her lawyer, and these were deemed to be correspondence that she was trying to smuggle out past the censors. And once she had refused to testify in a disciplinary hearing against herself—this too was an infraction.

The local lawyer badgered the penal colony’s representative with requests for documentation and a printed copy of the colony rules. The former dissident pointed out that all of these supposed violations were of the nuisance variety, the sort of thing a colony would normally ignore unless it was out to get an inmate. Maria said, “This is where one would mention Gogol, Kafka, and Orwell, but that seems redundant.”

After about six hours, the judge, an older woman with a kindly school principal’s way about her, retired to her chambers to write the decision. The support group sent a runner out for fast food. Journalists recharged their equipment and recorded stand-ups outside the courtroom. An hour and a half later, the journalists and assorted others were herded into a closed corridor off the lobby so Maria could be marched back into the courtroom without seeing any of us.

“It has been demonstrated that the child is harmed by his mother’s absence,” the judge read out. “However, said absence is the result of the mother’s committing a felony. Having a child did not keep Alyokhina from committing a felony. Furthermore, it is the court’s opinion that Alyokhina will not be reformed if she lives at home and concentrates on raising her child.”

These were not Maria’s only victories. She kept writing official complaints. She appealed all the infractions with which she had been charged. The court in Berezniki convened again on the last day of January to review the infractions, and a hearing that should have taken fifteen minutes went on for a week. This time the prison authority did not let her go to the courthouse in Berezniki. The journalists were there—not as many as two weeks earlier, but still at least a dozen people—and the support group was there, though her mother did not come this time, but Maria herself was only an image on a small flat-screen to the right of the double-headed eagle that is the symbol of Russia, and a voice in the loudspeakers.

“Maria Vladimirovna, can you see us?” asked the judge when the trial began.

“I can barely see you,” she answered, squinting on screen. “To me you are just a dark silhouette. And I can neither see nor hear the prosecution at all.”

“You can hear us,” stated the judge.

The hearing went on in fits and starts. Maria insisted on her rights—the right to be represented by counsel with whom she could consult in confidence, which would mean being in physical proximity—and the judge allowed the defense attorney to go to the penal colony and sit next to Maria on the screen. Maria also insisted on reviewing procedures and demanded paperwork from the colony. As the days dragged on, what began as a humiliating bureaucratic procedure turned into something resembling a court hearing. At the end, the judge did something perhaps no other Russian judge had ever done in such a situation: she struck down two of Maria’s supposed infractions and she ordered the penal colony to put its house in order.

In her final statement at that hearing, Maria said, “A philosopher named Heidegger once said that language is the house of being. And I have to tell you that being within the language of these secure objects and special-purpose objects and decrees and amendments and administrative orders and mandated procedures and transport is a nightmare. And I feel it during this hearing, I am dying here. I need to realize my potential, I need to work on what I believe I was born to do. And I would very much like to do it. I would like to get out as soon as possible and do my work. I believe that this all-out, all-around victimization of inmates will stop. And I assume that the decision in my case has already been made and it’s probably not in my favor, but this hearing this week has perhaps made the administration of the penal colony understand something. More than anything else I want them to understand that we are human beings and that their uniform and badge does not change that. We are human beings.”

After that hearing Maria stopped dying inside the language of legalese and started living in it. The administration, apparently realizing it could not get rid of her and could not keep her in solitary indefinitely without facing more complaints and legal sanctions, released her into the barracks. Lena Tkachenko was transferred to a different unit, but she and Maria found ways to meet and organize: Lena would pass Maria notes instructing her to go to the infirmary at a particular time and they would meet there as if by accident. Maria accumulated documentation of violations; everywhere she went, she carried a bulging folder. Many of the inmates at Penal Colony 28 started working eight hours a day instead of twelve.

TWELVE Nadya

NADYA LOOKED LIKE she was going to cry. “Gera is acting like I’m a stranger! Gera is being shy around me! But just you wait, I’ll get out.”

“That’s odd,” said Petya. “Gera is usually perfectly relaxed around strangers.” This did not help.

Gera had not seen her mother since the last family visit, two months ago. In the interim she had gone to the Montenegrin seaside and become very tan and a little grown-up and shy.

“You are not tan,” Petya said to Nadya. “Do you not get to be outside?”

“Oh, I get to be outside all right,” said Nadya. “Take yesterday, for example. We were lugging rocks. The rocks were in bags. Gera, I work on the factory floor. You know what a barn looks like?” There was no reason for her daughter to know what a barn looked like any more than she knew what a factory floor looked like. “It’s like a barn with very very many sewing machines in it. And very very many women. And on the factory floor, they are changing the floor. It used to be wooden and they are going to put down tile. And we are carrying rocks so they can put them down first and then cover them with tile. All right, I am going to read to you.”

Gera was still standing stiffly next to her mother. This four-hour visit was taking place in a tiny rectangular room that was cut up with tall desks. Nadya sat at the desk farthest from the door, with her back to the window. Petya and I sat about two yards from her, behind another desk, with our backs to the door. A penal colony officer sat in the space between us. After some consideration she had allowed Gera to cross over to Nadya’s side of the room.

“Have you learned to read yet? So I guess I’m going to have to come out of prison and teach you to read. Do you at least play the hedgehog game?” Nadya leaned into Gera’s neck and made sniffling sounds. Gera giggled uncomfortably. “You don’t play the hedgehog game? What do you do all day? Who is Andrei Usachev?” This was the name on the book of children’s poems Gera had with her. “Why aren’t you reading the classics? Do you read Kharms?”

Daniil Kharms was an absurdist poet who was killed in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. Petya had diligently memorized a Kharms poem with Gera, and he had even sent it to Nadya in a separate e-mail so they would all know the same poem, but this was months ago and Gera had forgotten most of it while she was in Montenegro. They all tried to recall it together now, but they started by putting the words in the first line in the wrong, too-obvious order, and this got them into trouble; it got them to where the bulldog’s bone had a wrinkly forehead. Gera finally laughed like a kid.

“Can you wrinkle your forehead? Since I’ve been in prison, I have gotten wrinkles on my forehead.” Nadya was now trying to draw a bulldog. She was too far away for us to see what she was doing, and the desks had odd little barriers that obscured whatever was there, but apparently she did not think the drawing was very good. “I know a woman here who can draw anything at all because she is a professional artist.”

Time was, Nadya had thought of herself as a professional artist. Petya called her on it now, and she laughed bitterly. At most, she said, she could convince people here that she was “creative,” which was just a fancy word for weird.

Petya tried to change the subject to something positive: “Did you make that smoothie yet?” Nadya had been dreaming of making one and had asked for bananas and cinnamon, which she planned to mix with milk, available from the colony concession.

“I haven’t had the time. There is no time here.”

“What about your two hours before lights-out?”

“It doesn’t exist. They keep giving us extra maintenance work.”

The colony was laying pipes underground: at the moment the gas, water, and sewage pipes were elevated. Endless ditches were now being dug and the dirt had to be removed. The inmates lugged it off using those all-purpose giant square bags.

“Don’t you have wheelbarrows?” I asked.

Nadya laughed an angry laugh.

“And we don’t have planes and trains either.”

“SOMEONE TOLD ME recently that I walk like the Terminator,” she said.

“You do have an unusual gait,” said Petya.

“What’s unusual about it? Verbalize. Oh my God, I can use that word!”

Petya thought for a long minute.

“If a person’s gait can express emotions, yours expresses anticipation. You hop.”

“That’s what they told me. That I hop and that I walk very confidently and that I hold my arms like so.” Nadya placed her hands on her hips and spread out her elbows. “And that I walk around as though I owned the world. So I’ve been trying to walk a bit more modestly, but I don’t seem to be very good at that yet.”

At the age of twenty-four, Nadya was confronting the idea that it is not always good to be noticed. She had been that very unusual kind of girl and young woman who always thought that standing out, being more beautiful, smarter, and louder than everyone else was a good thing. Even in prison it had seemed a good thing at first—or it just took her a long time to realize that it was not. Nadya’s relationships with other inmates seemed smooth at the beginning; she was too unusual to form the kinds of intense bonds that got Maria into instant trouble, and this same otherworldliness seemed to make her attitude of anthropological curiosity acceptable to others. She did not rack up violations like Maria—in fact, she was ambushed by her first violation for walking to the infirmary unescorted on March 2, the last day of her first year of incarceration, which happened to be the last day she could be slapped with a violation that would serve as an excuse to deny her parole. Soon waves of hostility started rolling through the penal colony: one day Nadya would approach an inmate in the factory with a work-related question and the inmate would hiss back, “Don’t talk to me.” Nadya would be ostracized for about a week and then things would normalize, only to flare up again a week or two or three later, for no apparent reason.

For the first time in her life, Nadya found herself in a setting where she did not know and could not intuit the rules. She would be reprimanded for not taking part in social activities such as the Miss Charm beauty contest or the singing contest, and she would sign up to sing and go to the clubhouse to rehearse only to be told that she was in violation for being in the clubhouse without an official permission slip. Though this requirement did not seem to apply to other inmates, Nadya needed an escort to walk from her barracks to the clubhouse. But while she waited for the escort, her permission slip expired. She never made it to the clubhouse and never took part in the contest.

Petya had a pile of legal paperwork with him. He had developed as great a passion for jailhouse lawyering as Maria had. Attorney Irina Khrunova, who was now representing both of the Pussy Riot inmates, called him the best lawyer’s assistant she had ever met. Now seemed like a good time to give Nadya some papers to sign; these were some legal motions Maria was testing, and Nadya could follow. She waved him off.

“I am not interested at all. I don’t believe in the courts.” Petya tried to convince her that Maria had succeeded in changing her own and other inmates’ lives for the better through legal means. Nadya did not have an argument to counter this and grew even more irritated. “Petya, we have a conjugal visit in two weeks, right? Can’t you bring it up then? You have nothing to talk to me about right now? What are you, going to burst?”

Petya showed no sign of being hurt. It was now an hour and forty minutes into the visit and Gera was finally comfortable in her mother’s lap.

“Gera, what is your favorite food now?”

Gera could not think of an answer.

“I am giving Petya an assignment, to find out what your favorite food is and send it to me here so I can taste it too.”

“You know, Maria doesn’t understand how it’s possible not to be fascinated with the intricacies of the law; she has immersed herself completely.”

“She is lucky. My excuse is that everyone has her own language. I am growing increasingly convinced that I am not interested in politics as such.”

“But this is the system’s bloodline. It allows you to see how the state really works.”

“You don’t think I have a good sense of how this state works? I have intimate knowledge now, and I really understand how bureaucrats work. And the more I learn, the less hope I have. It’s all based on a set of blind beliefs that are impossible to shake even using an individual approach. Their very concept of state power—they see it as a static structure that is unchangeable by its very nature. The same goes for the way the penal colony is constituted. And art. No one wants to listen; they tell me to go get lost. They are afraid of new information: ‘Tolokonnikova, stop it right now.’ Even though all I’m doing is trying to talk to them about art. Which I try to do all the time, because I’m an expert in that area. As opposed to sewing, for example.”

There was another reason she did not want to file any more complaints: she wanted time in the colony to go faster. “That’s all anyone here wants. And court hearings or anything else that breaks up the monotony doesn’t help because it slows time down.”

Petya was surprised. He would have thought that time in the colony dragged on, and interruptions would help speed it up. He clearly did not know the first thing about monotony.

On Sundays the inmates watched movies. “Last week they screened an hour-long American film about dental hygiene. It was dubbed. But the funniest one they showed us was about the need for leisure time. I was sitting next to women who work until one in the morning every day. And here they were telling us that when a person does not get any rest, he becomes a destructive member of society because of the elevated risk of accidents. The women were laughing so hard they fell off their chairs.”

WHAT NADYA REALLY wanted to see was Laurence Anyways, a film by Xavier Dolan. I had not heard of the film or the filmmaker. “He is a Canadian director,” she explained, “who’s made a movie about a man and a woman and the man decided to become a woman. The other thing that I’m interested in is that the director is twenty-four years old and he’s already made four movies and each one of them has been shown at Cannes. He was born the same year I was. It always touches me when someone my age does something. And it really hurts that I have to spend this time behind bars.”

Being behind bars was not only a waste of time; it was also an experience that had changed Nadya in ways from which she already feared she would not recover. “I know that when I get out of here I will be able to find people capable of understanding me and acting with me. But I realize that we will only ever be understood by a small circle of people. This is a crisis of sorts. I am not interested in classical art forms, but it is they that can be used to explain things to people. So I am facing the task of using the mechanics of pop to create something that’s mine. This is a complex technical challenge, so I am feeling a little stymied.”

“But that is a replay of the Soviet attitude, when you were only considered an accomplished poet if your books had press runs of three million,” said Petya, somewhat unfairly to Soviet-era poets.

“Say, War and Peace leaves me completely cold,” said Nadya, trying a different tack either to make herself understood or to understand what she was trying to formulate herself. “Whereas Tolstoy’s ridiculous attempts to educate and organize the masses inspire me.”

“Interesting that it was when Tolstoy tried to address the masses that he was noticed as problematic by the Church.” Petya was trying hard to hold up his end of the conversation, even if he had a difficult time grasping what Nadya meant.

“‘Being noticed’—I used to think that was a good thing,” said Nadya. She was not hearing Petya either.

I thought I might as well bring up something Nadya and I had been corresponding about: language. Pussy Riot had subverted Soviet-speak, which had perverted language. But how does one pull off that trick in a more traditional art form?

“I really feel the problems with the language in here,” said Nadya. “Yes, words being used to mean their opposites, and this is handed from the top down. And at every step, as they pass the word down, people feel that they are doing it but they still do it in order to keep the status they acquired through this use of upside-down language.”

“And this use of upside-down language is what you were referring to when you talked about sincerity in your closing statement in court?”

“I had a fit of absolutism then,” Nadya said, sounding a bit embarrassed. “I got overheated. I started talking about ‘the truth.’ Because this endless flow of lies—” Of course, talking about “the truth” in earnest would embarrass a twenty-four-year-old student of Theory.

“I always thought this was strange,” Petya chimed in. Apparently, they had not discussed Nadya’s closing statement, which had been translated into most of the world’s languages. “The truth is not a political concept at all.”

“So what that it’s not a political concept? I just wanted to be understood. I could have used constructions from contemporary philosophy that are better suited to describing this precisely, but I wanted to be understood.”

Petya persisted in his criticism, and he and I fell into an argument about whether Nadya had fallen into a modernist trap. Nadya and Gera tried singing a song about polar bears, but they could not remember the words.

“You look beautiful,” said Petya.

“It’s just the green color of the uniform,” Nadya responded. “When I danced in a green dress, that suited me too. Especially when a yellow mask used to cover my face.”