Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot

EPILOGUE

Activist Ambition sat on the second floor of a café near Chistye Prudy metro. She had no way of knowing it was the same table at which Violetta Volkova and Nikolai Polozov had met almost exactly a year earlier. She chose the table because it had a good view out the window. She was drinking wine. Activist Ambition—she did not remember exactly, but the nickname must have been coined by Petya when he recruited her for Voina near the end of that group’s active life—was in her late teens, which in Russia meant she was of drinking age. This did not change the fact that she was small and not a very experienced drinker: she felt the effects of the alcohol by the time she got to the bottom of her first glass, and on her second, she grew maudlin and sentimental. She started thinking of Pussy Riot.

No one had made her leave: she had decided herself, for all the right reasons. It was the time Pussy Riot was detained in the Metro for singing on the platform. Activist Ambition had been very clear with Kat and Nadya from the outset: she told them she only had three hours before her lecture, and unlike them she arrived not in Pussy Riot dress but in her school clothes—Kat had had to shield her while she changed. A few minutes later she was up at the top of the platform looking down. The song was over and police had surrounded the platform. She started throwing confetti at the police, and this did not make a difference. A train came: all she had to do now was climb down and jump on board the train before the police could grab her. She did—but the train did not move. Women in gray tried to force her back out through the open doors. Several men in black ran in and quickly grabbed her—and Kat and Nadya and Morzh, who she discovered were next to her—and twisted their arms behind their backs.

At the police station, while Nadya haggled with the cops and Tasya kept filming and Kat fretted that they had called her father, Activist Ambition realized something important: not only did none of them care that she had missed her lecture, but they would not have cared even if one of them had missed a lecture. They lived for the actions. She had been trying to be like them for several months. After the Feed the Road action, which had been her first, her father had stopped giving her pocket money, and she had been reduced to finding ways to ride public transit for free and to shoplifting, which she learned from Nadya and Petya and Kat. Now, at the police station, she realized that she had landed there not by accident but by design: the life they led had to include incarceration. And she was the only one in the group who cared.

They kept inviting her to actions after that, and she did help in filming one, but by the time the Cathedral of Christ the Savior happened, she learned about it from the media. While Maria, Nadya, and Kat were in hiding, they gathered several women in a safe space—it was some sort of cellar, which seemed fitting—and Activist Ambition went, of course. They talked about future actions. The feeling of being part of the group was elusive, it kept teasing her and dissipating, leaving a painful longing in its place.

Then the three women got arrested, and regret replaced the longing. She tried to help by joining in press events organized by Petya: several women would sit down in balaclavas and be interviewed on camera. The balaclavas were not foolproof: Activist Ambition’s boss recognized her and she was fired—for giving an interview to the television channel where she was interning. The worst part was, the interviews did nothing to help with the regret. She felt like an actress who had retired from the stage—she had enough irony to think of herself that way, but this did not help either. There is that moment in every action, when you have handed over your personal belongings to whoever is helping and you know exactly why you are there and you know what you are about to do and you feel that you can do anything at all and at the same time it is as though you could see yourself, so lithe, so young, so bright in every way, climbing up onto that platform—it was this moment she remembered when she brooded alone at a table on the second floor of a café overlooking a desolate autumn park.

She saw Kat. She knew Kat had been released from prison a few weeks earlier. She had been hoping to hear from her. Activist Ambition could have called Kat herself, but she wouldn’t have known what to say: she wanted Kat to need her, to call her to action. She slapped a few bills on the table and ran out of the café after the woman she thought might be Kat.

It was Kat. She was friendly in a flat way, as she always was—Activist Ambition thought Kat generally kept all her feelings and most of her thoughts inside—but she seemed happy enough to spend time talking. She talked about the lawyers. She said they had betrayed her and Nadya and Maria. She said the only way to get justice for everyone was to confront them, fight them, and expose them for the traitors they were. Activist Ambition agreed—how could she not agree—and tried to change the subject. She asked what new actions Kat was thinking about. Kat talked about the lawyers. And when Activist Ambition asked straight out—even though it seemed a little tactless and possibly illegal—what Pussy Riot was going to do, Kat talked about the lawyers.

Activist Ambition decided she was going to wait for Nadya to get out of prison. She knew that once she did, Nadya would start something—and Activist Ambition would feel that feeling again. She read all she could about Nadya to try to get a glimpse of what she might do next. Sometimes she even thought she could tell what it would be.

Kat was living back at the apartment with her father. For the first few weeks, maybe two months, she was a celebrity. She went to parties thrown by foreign journalists; she was recognized on public transport; people asked to have their pictures taken with her. She obliged—Kat usually did what people asked, if she could—but she was not sure she liked it. And they all wanted to know what she was going to do—what Pussy Riot was going to do. As though they did not realize that a suspended sentence meant she was on parole, and her sentence could be un-suspended at any moment.

Lest she forget, once a month she had to report to an office on the first floor of one of the yellow apartment towers not far from her home. It smelled of stale sweat, a faint reminder of the stench of the pretrial detention facility. She waited in a narrow corridor with her fellow paroled felons, then entered a small office where a squat policewoman shoved a piece of paper across a desk without looking and told her to sign it, using the condescending, familiar form of the imperative. The piece of paper certified that the officer had conducted an educational talk with Kat. She signed and got another piece of paper, instructing her to report back in another month.

Once, the police summoned her for questioning in the case of the cutting down of an Orthodox cross at a chapel outside of Moscow. It had been said that Pussy Riot might be responsible. Kat was questioned, said she had nothing to do with it, and was released.

If she could not be Pussy Riot in any visible, familiar way, Kat could at least get justice for Pussy Riot. If she could only prove that they had been denied proper legal representation, then the sentence could be overturned. To do that, she would have to expose the defense attorneys as the traitors they were. Irina Khrunova, the lawyer who had secured her release, slowly backed away from Kat’s case. “I can’t really claim that a thirty-year-old woman with a master’s degree did not understand the proceedings,” she told Kat, whose claim by that point more or less amounted to this. They agreed they would tell the larger world that Khrunova was too busy to handle Kat’s complaints. Kat found a lawyer on the Internet. She was doing most of the work herself by now, helped by a self-styled and self-taught legal expert, but she needed someone with a defense attorney’s license to sign her complaints. The new lawyer would meet her outside his apartment building in a suburb clear on the other end of Moscow and sign the papers she brought, using the trunk of a parked car as his desk. Then Kat would deliver the papers to the court—the guards at Khamovnichesky recognized her from when she’d been on trial there, and were nice to her—or to the Defense Attorneys Collegium, the rough equivalent of a bar association, where she also filed complaints. The collegium reviewed her long list and found only one clear violation of legal procedure among the many she had attempted to document: Violetta Volkova had failed to enter into a proper remunerative contract with her client, an offense under Russian regulations, which banned pro bono representation.

Kat still thought of herself as Pussy Riot, as did three other women who spent time with her. They were the two participants in the cathedral action who had not gone into hiding and had not gotten caught, and Natasha, Kat’s Rodchenko classmate and collaborator, who had participated in Voina but had not been living in Moscow during Pussy Riot’s brief period of activity before the arrests. They were quick to condemn as fake a tightly produced video that appeared in the summer of 2013, in which women in brightly colored dresses and tights and balaclavas belted lyrics—at least partly written by Nadya—that took aim at the unholy alliance between Putin and the oil industry. Among other things, Kat’s group felt that it did not correspond to Pussy Riot’s idea of serial performance: it consisted of several performances, but these, Kat’s group believed, had been staged solely for the purpose of producing the video rather than as independent actions. It was a subtle distinction, and a difficult argument to make given the group’s brief but varied history, but for Kat’s Pussy Riot, it was serious.

Arguably, serial performance—a months-long joint serial performance, unrehearsed and largely unscripted—was exactly what Nadya and Maria were engaged in. Their venues were the courtrooms of Berezniki and Perm in the Urals, Zubova Polyana and Saransk in Mordovia, and Nizhny Novgorod, where Maria was eventually transferred. Although, as convicted felons and coconspirators, they were banned from communicating with each other, they located their roles, as they always had, through a series of public performative experiments. They found ways of doing exactly what they had, in effect, promised to do in their closing statements in the Moscow court in August 2012.

Nadya had then said that it was the regime that was on trial and had pledged to continue to “act and live politically” to fight Russia’s overarching problems: “the use of force and coercion to regulate social processes” and the “forced civic passivity of the majority of the population as well as the total domination of the executive branch over the legislative and judicial ones.” That and the “scandalously low level of political culture… intentionally maintained by the state system and its helpers.” And the “scandalous weakness of horizontal links in society” and the “manipulation of public opinion, carried out with ease because the state controls the vast majority of media outlets.”

Maria had chosen the opposite approach in her closing argument, moving from the general to the specific. Like Nadya, she had addressed the sham nature of the trial, but it was the particulars that engaged her. She had talked about the psychiatric facility for children—in part because her visits there, of all her experiences before jail, had prepared her best for life behind bars, but also because the similarities between its specific horror and the insanity of the court proceedings served to highlight the absolute absurdity of the trial. Nadya, on the other hand, pointed to the trial as a small example of the larger travesty—of justice, decency, and reason—that Pussy Riot had been screaming about.

And Kat had spoken only of the results of the trial and conclusions from it.

Almost as soon as Nadya and Maria arrived in their penal colonies and arranged for new legal representation, both began filing all the appeals, complaints, and motions they and their lawyers—but mostly Maria with her legal books—found grounds to file. Petya shuttled back and forth between the colonies, the inmates, and the lawyers, collecting paperwork and delivering messages. Most important, he coordinated the ragtag support group, fashioning it into a working entity that distributed information, served as bodies—tweeting, texting, and videotaping bodies—at every hearing, and ultimately helped ensure that all hearings were open to the public and covered by the media. In late January, less than three months after leaving pretrial detention in Moscow, the Pussy Riot inmates commenced a regular schedule of court hearings, which also guaranteed them regular appearances in Russian and international media.

If Pussy Riot ever edited their court performances into a clip, its refrain would be “It seems that the court is denying my right to a defense.” (Indeed, the same might be claimed by any defendant in any court in Russia.) After a few hearings, Maria worked out her MO. She confronted the court to the point where the violations, and their routine nature, were exposed, obvious even to the clerks and court marshals, who had long ago stopped paying attention. At this point, the judge usually lost composure, along with the seemingly inherent sense of his or her own superiority. Judges snapped at Maria, screamed at her, and sometimes became belligerent. As soon as that happened—and it happened every time—Maria, whose own voice, by this point in the proceedings, had begun to crack traitorously, instantly regained her calm. And then she said, “It seems that the court is denying my right to a defense.”

After the very first hearing in Berezniki, the one where Maria had quoted Heidegger and Martin Luther and had merely mentioned Orwell and Kafka because quoting them would have been redundant, courts and prison authorities kept her out of the courtroom: she participated by a video uplink from the penal colony or another local facility. In late July 2013, the regional court in Perm took up her appeal of a denial of parole.

It started, as it usually did, looking like an actual court proceeding. The recently built regional courthouse, an eight-story structure of glass and concrete and modest but evident architectural ambition, would not have looked out of place in a medium-size U.S. city. The lobby was decorated with large glass panels engraved with Latin sayings of the Dura lex, sed lex variety, and the court’s press secretary was exceedingly polite and made sure everyone had a seat. The marshals manning the metal detectors did not do quite as well: one barked at Khrunova, “Lady, place your shopping bag in the metal detector!” Khrunova shot back, “I am not a lady, I’m a lawyer, and these are not shopping bags, this is the legal case.”

The large and well-ventilated wood-and-glass defendants’ box in the courtroom was empty: Maria was visible on two large flat-screen monitors in the courtroom. She had been delivered to a pretrial detention center in Perm, and there she sat in a metal cage. The camera was positioned outside the cage, so the court had a view of Maria through the grates.

The Perm judge lost his composure soon after lunch, when Maria requested, for the fourth or fifth time that day, a break in the proceedings to allow her to consult with counsel. Every time she did this, the video link had to be broken and rerouted to a separate office in the courthouse, where Khrunova could go to talk with Maria in confidence. Maria had mentioned, a time or two or ten, that this kind of conferring would have been carried out easily and without disrupting the proceedings if only she had been allowed to be physically present in court. In any event, now that the court was moving to the substantive part of her complaint, the moment had come when she needed to discuss with Khrunova their strategy for the remainder of the hearing.

“And what were you and your lawyer discussing before?” screamed the judge. He was tall and thin and he looked elegant in his long black robe. His fine-featured face, framed by salt-and-pepper hair, was handsome in a way that put one in mind of a mythic, refined, aristocratic Russia. Now this face was contorted in annoyance. “I mean if it’s not a secret, of course. You did not discuss your strategy for the remainder of the hearing?” Of course, it was a secret, by law.

“It seems that the court is denying my right to a defense,” said Maria, and it looked like she might be smiling a little up there on her screen in her cage.

After a short conference with Khrunova, Maria announced that she had decided not to take part in court proceedings where her right to a defense was being violated. She had done this once before, in May, when the Berezniki court heard her original motion for parole. Back then she had not only pulled out of the proceedings herself but forbade her defense team to participate. The judge had had something resembling a breakdown and ended up appointing an attorney to represent Maria, who had refused to be represented—or to meet with this court-appointed lawyer. Now the Perm judge was terrified he would find himself in a similar position.

Maria was kinder to him. She said she would allow Khrunova to continue to participate in the hearing on her behalf. And then she turned her back to the court. Literally—she was seated on a swiveling office chair in her cage, and she swiveled it around until all the court could see on its screens was the mane of slightly frizzy red hair that covered most of Maria’s back.

It took the judge a few minutes to realize he should order the video link cut.

If Pussy Riot put together a video clip of their court performances, it might cut from Maria’s back, turned to the court, to an April 2013 hearing in Zubova Polyana—the first time Nadya went to court after she left Moscow. The largest courtroom in Zubova Polyana was too small to fit all the journalists, cameras, and assorted supporters. The courtroom was sweltering, and the smell of human bodies hung heavier as the afternoon wore on. The judge, a prim middle-aged woman with a blond perm, tried to conduct an exemplary hearing in these trying circumstances. “I felt like I was in television court,” Khrunova told me later. “I’ve never seen a Russian judge act like that—asking the marshals to carry papers from the defense table to the bench, for example. Except on TV, of course.”

But in the late afternoon, something snapped: either the judge’s resources had run dry, or someone had called to tell her to wrap up the hearing, which was being broadcast live by every independent media outlet in Russia, and a couple of foreign ones too. And so the judge asked for the prosecution’s opinion, called a break in order to draft a verdict, and hurried out of the courtroom. Nadya stared out of her cage, her mouth slightly open. She had drafted a four-page speech to deliver at the end of the hearing. Khrunova looked like she was having a breakdown. Standing behind the defense desk, all five feet of her, she screamed hoarsely as the judge left: “In my fifteen years as a defense attorney, nothing like this has ever happened to me!”

Nadya made sure nothing like that ever happened to her again. Before every court hearing, she drafted several speeches of various lengths. She ranked them according to importance and started saying them, in turn, whenever and as soon as she had the opportunity to say anything in court.

Two days after Maria’s hearing in Perm, at Nadya’s own hearing on the appeal of her denial of parole, before the Supreme Court of Mordovia, she said her longest and most important speech at the first opening.

“I would like to discuss the very concept of correction,” she began, standing up in the steel cage in the court. “I have once again observed that the only true education possible in Russia is self-education. If you don’t teach yourself, no one will teach you. Or they’ll teach you who knows what.” She had been thinking about this at least since she wrote that turgid article titled “What’s the World Coming To” at the age of fourteen. Her life since then had been a series of confrontations and adaptations to educational institutions, of which IK-14 was the latest.

“I acknowledge that I have a great many stylistic disagreements with this regime, this aesthetic, and this ideology.” She was quoting Andrei Sinyavsky, a writer and literary critic, one of the Soviet Union’s first dissident political prisoners and one of the earliest political emigres of the post-Stalin era. He had said that his disagreements with the Soviet regime were “purely stylistic in nature.” Not that the judge or any other member of the court would recognize the quote, of course, but Nadya was not addressing the court: she was speaking to the public outside the courtroom and outside Mordovia, and to some of the public outside of Russia as well.

“So it stands to reason that a state institution that represents the dominant aesthetics would not see me as having been reformed,” she conceded.

“What can a state institution teach us? In what way can I be reformed by a penal colony and you by, say, Russian TV Channel 1? In his Nobel lecture, Joseph Brodsky said, ‘The more substantial an individual’s aesthetic experience is, the sounder his taste, the sharper his moral focus, the freer—though not necessarily the happier—he is.’ We in Russia once again find ourselves in a situation where resistance, especially aesthetic resistance, becomes the only viable moral choice as well as a civic duty.”

Nadya then lectured briefly on the origins of contemporary Russian aesthetics, which she called a combination of imperial Czarist aesthetics and “a faulty understanding of the aesthetics of socialist realism.” This, she said, was on display at IK-14. At the parole hearing in April, penal colony representatives had reproached her for not taking part in reformative activities such as the singing contest or the Miss Charm contest. “I assert that it is the principles in accordance with which I conduct my life—feminist, antipatriarchal, and aesthetically nonconformist principles—that are the basis for boycotting the Miss Charm contest. These principles—and mine alone, for they are certainly not shared by the guards who run the camp—lead me to study books and magazines, for which I have to wrestle time away from the colony’s stupefying daily schedule.”

When Nadya began detailing some of the infractions with which she had been charged—such as concealing her notes on life in the colony; failing to greet a member of the administration; being present at the clubhouse without a permission slip—and the system of aesthetic values that would view these as violations, the prosecutor interrupted her and asked to address “the substance of the case and not the Putin regime.”

The judge nodded kindly. “I will allow you to continue,” he said, “but please try to stick to the topic at hand. The question before the court is a little narrower.”

“But I am calling on you to take a wider view,” Nadya responded frankly, and continued reciting her prepared speech. “I know that as long as Russia is subjugated by Putin, I will not see early release. But I came here, to this courtroom, so that I could shed a light, once again, on the absurdity of oil-and-gas justice that condemns people to spend senseless years in jail based on the fact that they wrote a note or failed to cover their head.”

After a few procedural remarks by the prosecutor, the judge, and Khrunova, Nadya saw an opportunity to read her second prepared speech, a slightly shorter one.

“I am proud of everyone who is willing to make sacrifices for the sake of standing up for their principles. That is the only way to achieve large-scale change in politics, values, or aesthetics. I am proud of those who sacrificed their quotidian comfort on a summer evening and went out into the streets on July 18 to affirm their rights and defend their human dignity.” She was referring to the largest unsanctioned protest in contemporary Russian history. A week before, about ten thousand people had come out into the streets of Moscow after opposition leader Alexei Navalny was sentenced to five years in prison, and Navalny had been released the following day—all of which Petya had told Nadya the day before the hearing, when he visited her. “I know that our symbolic power, which grows out of conviction and courage, will eventually be converted to something greater. And that is when Putin and his cronies will lose state power.”

Not too much later, she found the opening for her third speech.

“I’ll be happy if I am released when my term runs out rather than slapped with an additional term, like Khodorkovsky was… The word ‘correction’ is one of those upside-down words characteristic of a totalitarian state that calls slavery ‘liberty.’”

Here the imaginary Pussy Riot clip might have come back to Maria turning her back to the court and saying, “It seems that the court is denying my right to a defense.”

Nadya’s, Maria’s, and Kat’s arrests had heralded a new Russian crackdown. In the months following, dozens of people were arrested on charges stemming from various kinds of peaceful protest. Twenty-eight people were facing trial in connection with police-instigated violence that broke out during a march to protest Putin’s inauguration in May 2012. Thirty more were facing piracy charges for being on a Greenpeace ship protesting oil and gas drilling in the Arctic. The courts had become Russia’s sole venue for political conversation, the only place where the individual and the state confronted each other. Not that most political defendants in Russia had a clear idea of how to use such a venue, or a language for speaking in it. But Maria and Nadya knew a stage when they saw one. In the old dissident drama, Maria was choosing the role of the person who fights the court on legal grounds and Nadya was refusing to recognize the court as such and choosing to use it only for the pulpit it offered.

They were doing what Pussy Riot had always done: illuminating the issues and proposing a conceptual framework for discussing them. As is often the case with great art, most people did not understand what they were doing. But eventually, Nadya and Maria knew, they would.

Maria had always been moved to activism by the events or circumstances of her own life—as when she became a defender of the Utrish national park after camping there with infant Philip. Now her home was a penal colony and other inmates were her family. She felt obligated to give voice to their experience and to use her place in the public eye to draw attention to the injustice they all faced. Nadya, on the other hand, had always been driven by theory rather than experience, and now she naturally separated her public, performing persona from the daily existence of an IK-14 inmate. She endeavored to either accept or ignore the circumstances of her daily life: as she told Petya during that June visit, she just wanted her time in captivity to pass quickly and uneventfully. That was also part of the reason she deflected attempts to elicit more details of colony life that day. That, and the fact that too detailed a description would have been both shameful and dangerous.

Some things were never talked about. Even Maria’s friend Lena Tkachenko, who described the violations in IK-28 with precision, driven by a natural aptitude for detail multiplied by five years of observation and by the will to tell as much as she could to help those she had left behind—even she would not talk to me about the particulars of what they called “personal hygiene,” or what might better be called a desperate quest to maintain dignity in the face of circumstances she was too ashamed to describe. Other things not only could be described but had to be publicized and fought. Maria did that by filing complaints on her own behalf, but more often on behalf of other inmates, against the systematic violations of inmates’ rights: the long work hours, the close quarters, the lack of hot water. The administration of IK-28 retaliated by restricting inmates’ freedom of movement further and stopping the movement of packages to inmates—closing off the prisoners’ lifeline. Maria responded by declaring a hunger strike. A war of nerves ensued. On Day Ten of her hunger strike in May 2013, Maria had to be hospitalized; she could no longer walk. On Day Eleven, the administration admitted defeat: locks that had been added to barracks apparently to teach Maria a lesson were removed and packages once again started being delivered. Petya was convinced that someone from Moscow had directed the administration to avoid at any cost having Maria die on them.

Khrunova was devastated: “They’ll never forgive her for this,” she told me. “They’ve caved in and they’ve now made it clear to the entire inmate population that it’s Maria Alyokhina who sets policy there. And they also know this will persist even after she leaves—inmates will know they can make the administration cave.” She was right: within weeks, IK-28 engineered Maria’s transfer to a colony in a different region. After the initial shock and a bit of outrage, everyone involved had to admit that everybody had won: IK-28 was now rid of Maria, Maria was in a colony with much better living and working conditions, and the inmates of her new colony now had the benefit of sharing their lives with Maria Alyokhina, who immediately commenced her jailhouse lawyering there.

A few months into Nadya and Maria’s sentences, the legal team had established a pattern of testing motions with Maria and following up with Nadya. After securing a judgment against IK-28 in a Berezniki court in the winter, in May they filed complaints against IK-14 in Mordovia. It backfired disastrously. Nadya woke up to discover she had become a pariah in the colony. Inmates would not speak to her. Brief moments of fun and camaraderie—like the times the inmates, finding themselves alone in the factory, would crank up a radio, climb right up on their sewing machines, and dance, moments worth living for—disappeared. For Nadya, they were replaced with humiliating experiences she was loath to describe to anyone. She concluded the complaints had been a mistake. She should not have picked this battle: the war for better conditions for Russian prison inmates was not her war. She reached for monotony, but monotony was now elusive. Things kept getting worse.

Petya pinged me in the middle of the night of September 23. “Nadya is declaring a hunger strike tomorrow morning,” he wrote. He sent me an open letter Nadya had written over the preceding few days, as her decision had gelled. Some paragraphs were smuggled out on scraps of paper; others she had dictated to Petya. Together, these paragraphs made up the most affecting piece Nadya had ever written. It had none of the stilted quality of her letters from prison or the forced bravado of her letters from jail. It held nothing back—not even the embarrassing parts.

By the time she declared her hunger strike, Nadya had been depleted by a summer of abuse, sleep deprivation, and undereating. Once she stopped eating, she quickly became very ill. Then she disappeared. IK-14 officials would not let anyone call her, and even the defense lawyers, when they showed up, were turned away. Nadya, they were told, had been hospitalized in serious condition. After two weeks she resurfaced at a prison hospital. Her hunger strike was over and she was awaiting transfer to a different penal colony. On October 18, she was, instead, sent back to IK-14. She declared a hunger strike again. Then she disappeared again. Prison authorities said she had been sent to a penal colony in a different region but they would not say which or where until she had arrived there. Every two days or so, rumors placed her at a new colony somewhere in the Urals or in Siberia or in Chuvashia—but no one really knew where she was.

I kept thinking of the first book I sent to Nadya in prison: My Testimony by Anatoly Marchenko, which she had requested. Marchenko had been an odd bird among Soviet dissidents, a manual laborer whom self-education had turned into a “political.” He spent about fifteen of his forty-eight years in camps, including in Mordovia, and jails and political prisons. It was at a special prison for “politicals” in Tatarstan that Marchenko declared a hunger strike in August 1986, demanding that Mikhail Gorbachev make good on his talk of reform by releasing all political prisoners. Many dissidents thought then he was rash and irrational: it would take years for the Soviet Union to rid itself of political prisoners, they believed, if it ever happened at all. Marchenko was hospitalized, force-fed, started his hunger strike again, and finally stopped after more than three months. Less than two weeks later he fell ill. He died in prison in December 1986. A few days later, Gorbachev launched the process of releasing all Soviet political prisoners. I am sure that in perestroika-era USSR no one had really wanted Marchenko to die: he was an almost accidental victim, a side effect of a system created to exert maximum pressure on anyone who resisted it. The system had changed little since the 1980s, and now it was crushing a woman, not yet twenty-four years old, who had not even wanted to fight it.

It had been two years since Pussy Riot started recording its first song, “Free the Cobblestones.”

Twenty-six days passed before there was any news of Nadya. Petya and the support group roamed Russia, first camping out in Mordovia, then following one in a long series of leads to Siberia. It was in Siberia that Nadya finally surfaced, in a prison authority-run TB hospital in Krasnoyarsk. She had apparently been greatly weakened by the hunger strike and the nearly four-week transport, but she was alive. She was told she would be allowed to serve out the last three months of her sentence in the relatively comfortable conditions of the prison hospital and would be given a job there if she regained her physical strength.

Less than a month later, Putin authorized an amnesty bill that would free all first-time female offenders who had small children. In a magnanimous gesture that garnered much positive press at home and abroad, Putin shaved two months off Maria and Nadya’s sentences. In the end, forty seconds of lip-syncing cost them around 660 days behind bars.