Red Pepper
When you first formed Pussy Riot fifteen years ago, how did you consider the role of music and performance in disrupting power?
Maria Alyokhina
We started by performing in unpredictable places, which was important because we wanted to use our art as a political weapon. Music, just like any art form, is powerful. It helped us give a message. Action, to us, was in itself a message, and during the early years in particular, music almost took on a kind of supporting role. It allowed us to communicate. What became clear, though, was that music makes a message stronger. It helped people feel what we were trying to say, not just hear it.
Red Pepper
Russia’s war on Ukraine is one of the main subjects in Political Girl. How did this event change the political context of your actions?
Maria Alyokhina
War changed everything. This is my second book. My first book, Riot Days, was about my prison sentence after our band’s ‘punk prayer’ protest against Vladimir Putin in 2012. My new memoir starts when I leave prison, at the end of December 2013 (because we’d been released two months before the end of the term). Stepping out of jail, my bandmates and I soon realised that we were stepping into a totally different country.
2014 began with violence. In 2014, Putin annexed Crimea. And in my opinion, this was the point of no return. Quite immediately after the annexation, he started a war in the eastern parts of Ukraine. Village by village, this went on for about a year, until the conflict was temporarily frozen. So, of course, if events like these are happening right after you’re released from jail, it feels very significant. It changes what your art is responding to.
In 2022, Putin started his full-scale invasion, an event also traced in the book. Of course, this could be stopped with the help of Trump. Something I try to get across in my writing is how, when Putin first began his invasion several years ago, he showed he was interested in only one thing: expanding his power. Any deal with a regime like that will fuck up everyone.
‘There is power in being a minority. Minorities make revolutions happen; they develop new and transformative ideas.’
Red Pepper
Your book has come at a time of intense political suppression around the world. In your chapter entitled War, you write about an 18-year-old girl who was jailed for wearing a jacket with your band’s name on it. Pussy Riot is, according to Russian law, an extremist organisation, and until recently, so was Palestine Action in the UK. Is this an important feature of your activism, to distinguish between what is legal and what is moral?
Maria Alyokhina
I think none of this is much of a surprise. We see how in Trump’s America, Western regimes are happy to copy Putin’s approach. You’re right that Pussy Riot was named as an extremist organisation by law, and cast me as its director. It’s fucking bullshit.
In law, an extremist is the worst form of criminal. A criminal case is a limited thing. But because I was accused of extremism, I got 13 years and 15 days [but had already fled the country, so the full sentence was not served]. This was as a result of an anti-war demonstration performed in Munich in 2024 and a performance video posted on YouTube called ‘Mama, Don’t Watch TV in 2022’. If you look at Trump, he calls all of his opponents terrorists. So, it’s an important question: who are terrorists? What does it mean to call somebody one?
It’s not difficult to see what oppressive regimes are trying to do by behaving like this. But there is a wider problem. The world is changing: it is being radicalised by right-wing ideology. At the same time, a lot of people are frustrated about this, although they might feel like a political minority. I would say, though, there is power in being a minority. There’s nothing scary about being one. Minorities make revolutions happen; they develop new and transformative ideas. Over the next decade or so, there might be more conflict and less peace. My opinion is that you can’t change our nature. It’s horrible the way governments oppress their people. But still, our future – whether or not we choose to fight back – that’s up to us.
Red Pepper
On the point of political will, I was drawn to a particular passage in your prison diary about the forces that chip away at it. You write: ‘Each of us has come up against this thought [of giving up] an infinite number of times. I smile only because I know I will write these words down.’ Is this something you were able to source in the process of writing the book? A restoration of power?
Maria Alyokhina
Nobody told us how to live during war – what to do if your country is the one starting the war. It is a huge, indescribable feeling to walk the streets knowing that in that very moment, your government is bombing another country. It’s like: ‘Okay, they are bombing Kyiv right now, in this very second.’ And yet you just walk. You look around you, and no one is protesting either. It is impossible to explain how that feels.
As for your question – what the process of writing gives you in moments like this, or possibly when you are the one being attacked, and thrown in prison – I am someone who always wants to fight back. This is what I feel in that moment, not that I am disempowered. In the moment, when someone beats you [as Putin’s cops did to me], you’re in shock. For me, this is just instinct. It’s not like I had to train myself to be this way.
It is the closed regime that is actually afraid. It’s afraid of light. Prison authorities are afraid of the media. They’re afraid that in Russia, everyone will begin to learn what they’re doing. When it comes to war, this is always about a war of information, in addition to violence. That is why we produced Mediazona [an investigative news source focused on human rights abuses in Russia] in 2014, to report on what is going on inside Russian courtrooms and prisons. This is what it means to write, to share, to actually make public.
