Pussy Riot's Mariya Alyokhina: 'Politics is not something that exists in one or another White House. It is our lives'
After ordering her fourth cappuccino in 40 minutes, Mariya Alyokhina feels she owes an explanation.
“I have a limit. No more than eight cappuccinos a day,” says the activist and member of balaclava-wearing protest group Pussy Riot. “I used to drink more.”
Dressed only in black, despite the mid-August Moscow heat, Alyokhina, 29, doesn’t instantly strike you as someone who has enjoyed international celebrity status since her role in a 2012 “punk prayer” performance in Russia’s main cathedral.
The now infamous stunt saw five members of Pussy Riot perform their song, Virgin Mary, Mother of God, Expel Putin! in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour less than a fortnight before presidential elections won by Russian president Vladimir Putin. Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, both then aged 23, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, then 29, were subsequently charged with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” in a trial that divided Russian society and whose every twist was covered in the international press.
Alyokhina was sentenced by the judge to two years in prison in what her supporters condemned as
