Please don’t expect Maria Alyokhina to be objective. You’d be subjective too if you’d been locked up over and over, beaten and abused for opposing the murderous tyrant ruling your country. Definitely call her brave, living a life so risky she finally fled Russia in disguise rather than being poisoned, shot or blown out of the sky like others who dared oppose the regime.
Alyokhina is one of the four women of Pussy Riot who donned colourful dresses and balaclavas to dance and sing their in-your-face punk prayer, “Virgin Mary, Banish Putin”, at the altar in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow on February 21, 2012. Russia would hold a presidential election on March 4, 2012, “won” by the autocratic Vladimir Putin.
Pussy Riot’s act of resistance successfully garnered worldwide attention but also two years in penal colonies for Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. Alyokhina wrote a book, “Riot Days”, in 2018 that related her arrest and imprisonment, and now has followed it up with “Political Girl” about her activist experiences from 2014 to 2022.
Following the stunt in the cathedral, the two women went to prison on March 4, 2012 and were due to be freed on March 4, 2014. But they were released two months early on December 23, 2013 in what Alyokhina decried as a VIP amnesty by Putin to impress the West before the Winter Olympics in the Russian city of Sochi from February 7-23, 2014.
Her reaction in penal colony no. 2 was to scream “I don’t want to leave because of Putin’s amnesty!”, and she emerged from incarceration not chastened but energised, feeling that other people who were still serving their sentences deserved it more than she did.
In the circumstances, readers might find it imprudent of her to immediately begin planning an “action” – a political protest – in Sochi , but Alyokhina is obviously not an “easy” person. A single mother, she had a young son, Filipp, when incarcerated and she comes across as headstrong, challenging, impetuous, dogged, a punk, a feminist; almost fearless.
Perhaps also foolhardy, depending on point of view. Still, you must admire her will power. “Political Girl” is absolutely relentless as Alyokhina describes one “action” after another after another by her and her fellow agitators – organising and attending protests and pickets, writing manifestos, getting chased, attacked, detained, thrown into avtozaks (paddy wagons), interrogated, body-searched, fined and ordered to perform community service by courts, donning disguises or being smuggled in a suitcase to evade police keeping her under surveillance, having your room rummaged, your power cut off, banned from travelling, etc.
If the consequences of challenging Putin, widely accused of being a corrupt murderer and thief, weren’t so serious, then it sometimes almost takes on the air of schoolboy/schoolgirl pranks, laughing and joking in the face of authority such as, for instance, collecting ladders and fake uniforms so as to fool guards and hang forbidden rainbow flags on official buildings.
Putin, recall, served as President of Russia from 2000 to 2004 and 2004 to 2008, then, faced by constitutional limitations on two consecutive four-year presidential terms, he simply swapped roles with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev from 2008 to 2012, before slipping seamlessly, and shamelessly, back into the presidency in 2012, the terms now six years.
Today, 14 years later, he still sits supreme in the Kremlin, seemingly until death do us part. He brushes aside constitutional niceties, increases his vast wealth, silences opposition voices and generally cows the population, ruling by death, torture and propaganda. He relives the Soviet past, fights wars in Chechnya, Georgia and Ukraine, and interferes in Moldova.
“For Putin, it is easier to rule in war than in peace, so war has become compulsory,” writes Alyokhina. “It is tiresome to have to account for corruption, police brutality, dysfunctional education and healthcare. Domestic policy is easier when it simply divides the world into allies and enemies: Have food prices gone up? – Western sanctions. Low doctors’ salaries? – thank America.” Constant propaganda, lies and fear effectively numb and coerce the people.
So, Alyokhina is out of jail and among 12 activists going to the Sochi Olympics to film a Pussy Riot video. They get detained, interrogated, intimidated, provoked, accused. While filming, Cossacks spray them with tear gas, whip them, twist their arms, yank off the balaclavas. Sochi saw a doping scandal when Russian urine samples were swapped via a hole in a wall.
In Nizhny Novgorod to visit the penal colony, while eating in McDonald’s her group is called “bitches, whores, fuckers”, and Zelenka, green ethyl alcohol, is sprayed at their eyes. The police won’t investigate, Alyokhina says, because they masterminded the incident.
This is her life in Russia from now. Her mother looks after the son. Alyokhina visits the attacked Ukrainian capital Kyiv in sympathy, spreads the word in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, speaks to politicians in Washington and drops banners at Trump Tower in New York. She defends prisoners’ rights and rails against unchecked domestic violence in Russia. Pussy Riot activists run onto the field dressed in police-style outfits at the football World Cup final between France and Croatia in Moscow in July 1918, embarrassing Putin.
Lest we forget, along the way Alyokhina gives incidental reminders of things that can happen in a muddled world – ; the sinking of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk on August 12-13, 2000, killing the 118-strong crew; the annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine’s Donbas region by Russia in 2014; the downing of a Malaysia Airlines airliner by a Russian-made surface-to-air missile over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 people on board; the Kemerovo shopping mall fire killing dozens in 2018; support for the rule-by-decree President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, especially in the huge but put-down protests of 2020; and the full war on Ukraine since 2022 to impede its democratic, pro-Western course.
Alyokhina quotes Alexei Navalny, who barely survived the poisoning of his underpants then died in custody in February 2024: “I have my country and my convictions. And I don’t want to turn my back on my country or my convictions… If your convictions are worrh anything, then you have to stand by them. And if necessary be prepared to pay the price. And if you’re not prepared to, then you don’t have any convictions. You just think you do. But they aren’t convictions or principles – just thoughts in your head.”
For Maria Alyokhina the fateful decision to leave or stay came as she was repeatedly placed under house arrest on fabricated charges, including accusations of being a Nazi. She was consumed by shame and rage. “A criminal sentence has become something mundane, something that you can receive between your morning coffee and lunch,” she writes.
An LGBTQ+ activist, she had also fallen in love with a woman, Lucy, but to be together became near impossible. Finally, after a hunger strike and sentenced to days in prison after missing a court appearance, Alokhina fled, like tens of thousands of other young Russians.
She twisted off her electronic ankle bracelet, escaped the flat at night, and, without a passport, bluffed her way into Belarus then Lithuania wearing the green jacket and carrying the branded bag of a food courier. She left her phone behind as a decoy.
“Political Girl” is written in fragmentary diary-like bites, occasionally stream-of-consciousness style and jumping around a little. The approach can be accusatory, irreverent, sarcastic, the tale of a country gone wrong. The punk prayer went unanswered. Summing up: “And I’m writing this not to be silent. The only thing I can do for myself is not to keep silent about what I saw in the country of my birth.”
