Riot Days

By Maria Alyokhina

A Pussy Rioter’s riveting, hallucinatory account of her years in Russia’s criminal system and of finding power in the most powerless of situations

In February 2012, after smuggling an electric guitar into Moscow’s iconic central cathedral, Maria Alyokhina and other members of the radical collective Pussy Riot performed a provocative “Punk Prayer,” taking on the Orthodox church and its support for Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime.

For this, they were charged with “organized hooliganism” and were tried while confined in a cage and guarded by Rottweilers. That trial and Alyokhina’s subsequent imprisonment became an international cause. For Alyokhina, her two-year sentence launched a bitter struggle against the Russian prison system and an iron-willed refusal to be deprived of her humanity. Teeming with protests and police, witnesses and cellmates, informers and interrogators, Riot Days gives voice to Alyokhina’s insistence on the right to say no, whether to a prison guard or to the president. Ultimately, this insistence delivers unprecedented victories for prisoners’ rights.

Evocative, wry, laser-sharp, and laconically funny, Alyokhina’s account is studded with song lyrics, legal transcripts, and excerpts from her jail diary—dispatches from a young woman who has faced tyranny and returned with the proof that against all odds even one person can force its retreat.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Sep 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9781250164919

Maria Alyokhina

Maria (Masha) Alyokhina is a founding member of Pussy Riot and a political activist. At the age of 24, she was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment following an anti-Putin performance at the Moscow Cathedral of Christ the Savior. She was released in December 2013. In March 2014, Alyokhina and fellow Pussy Riot member Nadya Tolokonnikova founded Zona Prava, an organization that defends prisoners’ rights. Alyokhina is a recipient of the Lennon Ono Grant for Peace and has also been awarded the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought.

Book preview

Prologue

We came up with an idea to make a film about the revolution. A real movie that would be shown in every theatre. Filming a frozen chicken being pushed up a cunt was good, but it wasn’t for a mass audience. Art for the masses is made in Hollywood. Revolution requires a big screen.

We visited at least twenty studios during one week: identical offices, snow-white smiles. Getting appointments was easy for us – we were stars in all the newspapers.

‘We want to make a movie about revolution.’

‘Which revolution might that be?’

‘The Russian revolution.’

‘What do you mean? The 1917 Revolution?’

‘No! The one that’s happening now.’

‘But there is no revolution now.’

Oh, really?

Perfect teeth. Suntanned bodies. Morning runs in sneakers.

‘We’ll buy your story if you’re selling it.’

‘But what about the revolution?’

1. My First Business

The summer was over. Darkness fell early. Putin announced he would run for a third presidential term.

The magical winter of 2011. The Snow Revolution. What will they write about it in the history books? Will they mention it at all? What will become of it – will it be the beginning of a bigger revolution that lies ahead? We were led by a belief in the possibility of change – a naive and childish belief that can awaken suddenly in adults, and is usually accompanied by feelings of shame and the need to justify oneself. We went out into the streets. We wrote and, letter by letter, we became a revolutionary statement. We wore white ribbons.

revolutionary writing

That winter, the little grey KGB agent Putin and a puffed-up, toy-like Medvedev decided to trade places: prime minister for president. Or maybe one of them decided – who cares? They called it ‘castling’, two pieces moving on the chessboard at the same time. They falsified the results of the elections to the Duma.

We believed that, if we pricked his ass with a pin, Putin would jump out of his presidential seat. He would leap up, and run to hell. His fleshy, Botoxed cheeks would head for the hills and roll off into the dustbin of history.

anyone can be pussy riot

I began to stay at the Bass Player’s place, and joked about academia. ‘It’s rotten and mildewed,’ I said. The Bass Player lived on the outskirts of town in a tall building. In her apartment, there was a portrait of Beethoven and a faux-leopardskin blanket on the sofa. We talked until five in the morning and watched Pasolini movies a lot.

We loved only heroes. The 1968 student revolt in France, the Russian avant-garde in the early decades of the 20th century. At the same time, we were reading Alexander Vvedensky, a poet who was murdered by Stalin on a convoy somewhere between Kharkov and Kazan on its way to a penal colony. One weekend, I locked myself in the room where the Bass Player burned CDs. I was going to make a stencil for a T-shirt. I decided I had to make a revolutionary T-shirt. I didn’t even notice when it got dark.

revolutionary t-shirt

When I went back out into the kitchen, it was full of girls. The Bass Player’s floor was tiled in black and white squares, like a chessboard. The girls were wearing brightly coloured dresses. They were arguing so loudly it must have been audible two floors down.

‘Check out the T-shirt I made,’ I said. I was very proud of the first T-shirt I’d created myself.

‘Céder un peu, c’est capituler beaucoup!’

‘Céder un peu, c’est capituler beaucoup!’ was stencilled on the T-shirt in black permanent marker. I had spent about five hours on it. The T-shirt was green. The girls were furiously cutting holes in colourful knitted balaclavas.

On the night of 4 December, there was a march along Chistye Prudy, past the FSB buildings, where prisoners are kept. Red fires from the flares. Temperature: 39ºF. Wind: 5mph. Relative humidity: 88%. Haze. Arrests.

39ºF, 5mph, 88%

The prisoners are hanging out a banner written with markers. Markers are banned in prison. They hang it up outside the bars, stretching their hands through the gaps. It reads: ‘Judge Moskalenko – burn in HELL.’

The judge didn’t burn in hell. She lives in it. She still works in the Russian court. The beginnings of the revolution’s first large-scale street protest were underway. A really massive street protest, right by the Kremlin wall.

The riot police were in position. We entered Revolution Square, 10 December 2011.

you can’t even imagine we exist

In January, we, Pussy Riot, started rehearsing in an old factory. After a while, the security guards were no longer surprised to see us. Oh, those girls are here again. Wearing strange-coloured tights, some weird headgear. Russia’s a strange place, anyway. Katya said, ‘It’s odd that they never ask us any questions.’ She thought there was something fishy about the way they let us come and go. But the security guards were just doing their job, drinking beer and watching TV.

‘This is one of their whims. They send nine people to one place, twenty to another; in some countries, they don’t think it’s necessary to send any at all. If they want to teach something, they should teach their wives to make cabbage soup!’

– Vladimir Putin on European observers at Russian elections, 2008

little whims

You need at least one month of rehearsal to put an action together. When you go live, you only get one take.

You walk through a large hall in an old factory, put up a ladder, climb up on to the windowsill one by one. Shout out a song. 30, 40 times in a row.

get ready

With a large, heavy backpack, after every rehearsal, I took the last, nearly empty bus to the metro and jumped over the turnstile just in time to catch the train. I never had enough money to pay for the ride.

jump

The Kremlin is alarmed. The TV denies anything unusual is going on. Condoms – the word Putin used to describe the opposition’s white ribbons. He meant that those who did not agree with him were just protection for a limp dick. Yeah, right.

putin peed his pants

The little towers of the Kremlin were dark; the snow was white. They used to execute people on Lobnoye Mesto.

On Lobnoye Mesto, there’s a round stone platform that looks like an executioner’s block. It’s surrounded by stone walls that are maybe six feet high. It’s like a large barrel cut in half. Inside, it can hold about thirty people.

In Red Square, directly facing the Kremlin.

The tsar read out decrees – ukases – here. And declared wars.

In 1968, eight dissidents climbed on to Lobnoye Mesto to protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia.

for freedom – yours and mine

It was an unprecedented protest in Soviet Russia. The authorities responded with prison sentences and forced psychiatric treatment.

In the 1990s, Alexander Brener, an artist who had been incarcerated in a Dutch prison for drawing a dollar sign on a painting by Kazimir Malevich, hopped around Lobnoye Mesto in his underwear and boxing gloves. He shouted at the Kremlin, ‘Come out, Yeltsin!’

Brener was called a ‘hooligan’ in the news. In 2000, Yeltsin resigned and made Putin president. Putin said, ‘We need stability.’ Stability was what he called himself.

floors swept, stability in place

When Pussy Riot performed on Lobnoye Mesto, we unfurled a violet flag: the Venus mirror symbol, a clenched fist in the centre. There were eight of us, like the eight dissidents in 1968.

revolution without caravaggio

As we were preparing for our Red Square action, Caravaggio’s paintings were brought to Moscow. But it’s not easy to carry a ladder into a museum. I didn’t go to see the Caravaggio exhibition.

What a strange thing to be doing during the days of Russian Christmas, I thought, walking home through the woods after rehearsal.

At the rehearsal, smoke started billowing from the guitar amp. Katya rushed over and managed to fix it. She’s an expert in nuclear submarines. And some of us couldn’t even install a couple of editing apps on the computer.

‘Smoke – that’s cool!’

‘We need smoke!’

‘There’s no smoke without fire!’

‘Let’s bring a poster and burn it!’

So, as well as singing ‘Putin Peed His Pants’, we decided to set fire to a poster of Putin kissing Qaddafi. We rehearsed the burning part for a long time: it was going to be cold, we’d have to douse the poster with kerosene. We gathered at the old factory in the evenings and practised burning the poster, day after day: unfold, douse, set alight, almost simultaneously.

learn how to burn it

A rebel column is marching on the Kremlin.

Windows of the FSB rooms are blowing out.

Bitches are shitting themselves behind red walls.

Riot announces, Abort the System!

Attack at dawn? I won’t object.

For our freedom and yours I punish them with my lash.

The glorious Madonna will teach you how to fight.

The feminist Magdalene went to a protest march

Riot in Russia – charisma of protest!

Riot in Russia – Putin peed his pants!

Riot in Russia – we exist!

Riot in Russia – Riot, Riot!

Go out to the streets,

Live on the Red,

Show the freedom

Of civic anger.

Sick of the culture of male hysteria

The savage cult of the leader devours your brain

Orthodox religion of a hard penis

Patients are offered treatment by conformity

The regime is moving towards censoring dreams

It’s about time for a clashing confrontation

A pack of bitches from the sexist regime

Beg forgiveness from the feminist fiends

Riot in Russia – charisma of protest!

Riot in Russia – Putin peed his pants!

Riot in Russia – we exist!

Riot in Russia – Riot, Riot!

Go out to the streets,

Live on the Red,

Show the freedom

Of civic anger.

the poster didn’t catch fire

The cops got us afterwards for trespassing. We told them we were drama students. We said that we were staging a play and had decided to rehearse at Lobnoye Mesto. We gave them fake names. Actually, they were real names, just not our own: we’d taken them from the registry of traffic offenders, found people who matched our ages, used them as our own. False names. Done. It worked for everyone. Except me.

‘Do you know you have an outstanding conviction?’

‘Huh?’

‘What’s your name again?’

‘Masha.’ I had to come clean. That’s how the police got hold of a copy of my passport. With my real address.

an outstanding conviction

I had never been in trouble with the police before. It had just never happened. I wasn’t a revolutionary.

They hadn’t heard ‘Putin Peed His Pants’. The poster we’d failed to set alight came with us to the police station as evidence.

‘If this is a play, what’s Qaddafi got to do with it?’ a policeman asked.

‘Well, we just thought it was funny, so we printed it out.’

we printed out qaddafi

The cops bought that, too. We drank coffee from the machine, warmed ourselves, and laughed. The main thing was not to let them take the guitar – we didn’t have money for a new one.

‘Silly girls, you must be frozen,’ the sergeant had said, while we were climbing down the stone walls of Lobnoye Mesto, which was covered with ice, in a torrent of snow.–12ºF, relative humidity

Reviews for Riot Days

[schatzi_5 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This one was hard for me to rate, but I eventually had to go with four stars just because Masha Alyokhina and Pussy Riot are kickass. The author jumps right into the events that led to her arrest and imprisonment; although we do learn a bit about her life before Pussy Riot here and there, she mostly focuses on the protest in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior and what came afterwards. The writing style is a bit rough and choppy, and I think it suffers a bit in the translation at some points. But it's also urgent, and once I got used to it, I found that it flowed very well and drew me into the book very easily.It's even more amazing, looking back, that these women had the courage to stand up to Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church, especially in such a totalitarian-leaning country such as Russia. By protesting, Alyokhina was sentenced to two years in prison - two very difficult years, undertaking a couple of different hunger strikes to draw attention to the abhorrent conditions in which prisoners were kept. Prisoners in Russia are routinely taken advantage of by the state, being forced to work in poor conditions far below the pay they are promised. Alyokhina's courage is impressive.

[jimcripps · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

(Review of an Advance Reader copy)This is a short book, but considering so much of it was written, and drawn, while incarcerated is understandable. Maria Alyokhina details what so many of us in the West don't know or see--the harsh, brutal conditions of jail in Russia. We hear stories of kangaroo courts, and stories of police brutality even in true democracies. And now we have it together, told all at once.On the outside, groups like Amnesty International make headlines when vying for a dissidents freedom. In this book, Maria, or 'Masha' as she is often called, becomes aware, astonished when she hears of the uproar she has caused outside the walls of her confinements. From all over, she learns that people who are strangers to her, fight for her and her bandmate's freedom. All the while, there are the more immediate issues she must deal with--getting food she can eat, clothing to wear, and even a blanket to stave off the freezing temperatures. Most of all, she wants to see her son, and finds that many women locked up with her, also yearn to see the faces of their own children, but have not been allowed to do so.It is a diary, a telling of not one prisoner's travails, but of all. All the wants, desires, and hopes of freedom.And there should be more.

[kristincedar · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I had known about the Pussy Riot girls for years, and was very excited to read this book. It is very dry and Maria's writing style can be seen as tough to get through, but she's honest, direct and heartfelt through her writing. I saw another ER say it was like machine gun fire, and that's an excellent way of putting it. It's a book that needs to be read, understood and to be an example of what crazy Putin is doing. READ THIS BOOK!

[johansenh-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I requested and received this book in exchange for an honest review.First, I'm going to ask you to ignore reviewers who cry foul about how the book is layers and printed up. It's readable, you can follow it, anyone who says otherwise is just... not getting it.This book is written in short paragraphs, diary/letter style, following the life of a member of Pussy Riot from the church protest to her time incarcerated. While I am familiar with Pussy Riot, this is my first exposure to the personal names and stories of the group members. Maria is an interesting writer, she reads like a Riot Grrrl memoir, almost like a mix of 90's activism and some sort of future warning told in a very conversational manner. That being said, it is important that her story is told, since we really hear the personal words of Russian dissidents. This voice in the US media is important. More recently events have made this book seem like an evolving future for the US. A sort of "back to 1984" feel permeates this, the slippery slope where she talks about how the Russian state reintroduced the Orthodoxy only to have it prop up the corrupt Putin and his dictatorship, the re-criminalization of the feminine, the random hate of Satanists believing they are actual Satanists instead of a political demonstration, the use of gossipy idiots in court testimony, and of course, the state of the prison system. Having worked in the prison system, I've seen similar things in the US often justified in the same way as in these Russian "colonies." (gulags)The feeling that I got while reading this was that I was looking in a mirror of the US. This is the US that some people want to come to pass, and are trying to make with these policies limiting free speech. Indeed, Maria's own conviction smacks of the foolish case against the woman here in the US who laughed at the republican congressman. Dissent called hooliganism, and then made into a crime. The incessant treating of women as children. The corrupt religious people in this book are disgusting, and the scary part is that all of the above, as she writes it, I feel I could go and find it in my own community. This mirror isn't too close to being a full reflection if we let it.Part of what I took, overall, from this memoir, I'm not sure if Maria intended. I respect Pussy Riot for telling people to fight the power and protesting a fascist like Putin, but in the end... did they make an impact? Maybe it's too early to tell. I certainly know there are modern Russian activists with voices now, but it's the system, the random people justifying their actions with complaints about their salaries, that disturb me the most in her book. Are people like her enough? Or is the book a warning that we can protest and sing and go to jail, and everything will carry on as a large part of the population remains complicit and convinced that they are defending the constitution and their livelihoods? Thanks for reminding me, Maria, that silence will not protect us.Recommended. And for those who want to protest her point of view, survive what she did, then we'll care about your opinion of how she handled it.

[akblanchard_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Pussy Rioter Maria Alyokhina relates the harrowing story of her trial and imprisonment for "hooliganism" in Riot Days. Maria and her fellow punk rockers were arrested for protesting Putin's cozy relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church by staging a performance of their anthem "Punk Prayer" at one of Russia's largest cathedrals. Arrested for this exercise of free speech, Maria and two other women were held in sweltering glass cages ("the aquarium") during their trial. Convicted, Maria was shipped to a women's detention camp in the inhospitable Ural Mountains. As a political prisoner (or "a political" for short) she was subject to a higher level of scrutiny than typical prisoners. She protested, often with hunger strikes, the poor living conditions and nonsensical rules of the prison camp. Maria tells her story in short bursts of evocative prose. She assumes you already know the story of her arrest and imprisonment, so It helps to have background information on Pussy Riot available. Nonetheless, every Russia-watcher, and anyone concerned with human rights, should read this book.

[lnduff · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Maria Alyokhaina presents her first person account of a slice of modern history that many outside Russia heard about only by following sporadic headlines. The key incident and its aftermath form the organizing thread through this impressionistic narrative.The Prologue to this book made me worry that this would be nothing but a self indulgent screed about modern Russia under Vladimir Putin. Chapter One did nothing to change my mind. The book progresses in episodic bursts, with headings that may or may not explain the text to follow, with occasional little line drawings of objects or places. The women of Pussy Riot were revolutionaries, just ask them. The lyrics to their songs, laid out in the text, are harsh and coarse.After a few chapters, though, I’d been drawn in by Alyokhina’s descriptions of musical protests by Pussy Riot, the subsequent trial of some of the members, and the aftermath of their convictions. It’s quite a story.The Putin-bashing continues throughout, but a context unfolds for the author’s anger and distrust of her country’s government. She writes with humor and irony of her journey through modern Russia. The headlines did not do justice to the experiences of these young women who used their music to promulgate the free speech denied by the government they resent and distrust.

[bluepigeon-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Riot Days by Maria (Masha) Alyokhina of Pussy Riot is a fast, grim read about Alyokhina's two-years behind bars as punishment for their two-minute performance of "Punk Prayer" in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior. In Riot Days, she chronicles the days that lead up to the protest-performance, the days after, during which the band goes into hiding, her arrest, the trial, and her stay at two different facilities, one in Perm and one in Nizhny Novgorod. In a way, her incarceration is a sort of education in prisoner rights and human rights, as Alyokhina goes from fearful submission to every search to resistance and demands of better treatment and better conditions for herself and the other prisoners. The results are mixed: prisoners are given shawls, better mattresses, etc., but some are held back from release due to their association with Alyokhina or punished for befriending her.The prison days are grim. In contrast, the trial is (unfortunately) comical and absurd. It is a testament to the weakness of human nature for self-righteousness and moral superiority. It is a testament to the rise of religious extremism (for ordinary people to feel superior over others and for powerful people to manipulate the ordinary people to gain yet more power) once again. Alyokhina's writing is crisp and urgent, though she never really loses her sense of humor, which provides some relief in the most desperate moments. The book is organized in short blurbs, each blurb providing the headline for the next one. Having not really followed the details of the Pussy Riot saga when it happened, I learned some new things, especially about the motivation for the protest. What she does not discuss in the book is how apt the choice of location was for the protest, because the cathedral in question has a long history that follows the rise and fall of various ideologies in Russia (it goes something like: first built as a cathedral in the late 1800s, then demolished by Stalin, then was going to be some giant Soviet structure, was interrupted by WWII, so sat there as a giant hole for a while, then was made into a pool during the Cold War, which was then closed and sat there empty for a while, and then the new cathedral was built as a replica of the old cathedral, using reinforced concrete [like a garage would be] complete with a VIP elevator to the high altar for the new powers of Russia [this, my partner tells me she learned from her research about the pool...])Riot Days is an invaluable look into the notorious penal structure of Russia and a testament to the value of resistance. Recommended for those who like dough, sanitary napkins, cigarettes, borscht, shawls, button holes, and, of course, cathedrals.Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.

[oregonreader · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I remember reading about Pussy Riot in the newspaper and Putin dismissing them as a young girl band looking for publicity, "hooligans". Riot Days, written by one of the group, tells a very different story.The layout of the book is unusual. There are protest song lyrics interspersed with the narrative and rather crude drawings. Although the lyrics in the book are in translation, their poetry comes through.They were not just a band. As she describes it, it was more performance art attacking Putin. They chose to do a performance in a church and that brought the government and the church down upon them. Alyokhina and another girl were arrested, convicted and sent to penal colonies. She describes in detail the daily life there and how she continued to fight for prisoner rights.It is a fascinating book telling her personal story against a background of bureaucratic inefficiency and cruelty.

[wickabod · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"Revolution is a story. If we fell out of it, disappeared, it would be their story, not ours. Their country, not ours. We never took off our masks. We had never left the church. My T-shirt: 'To back down an inch is to give up a mile.' No sense in wearing those words if you don't live up to them."This exemplifies the astonishing courage and defiance of the Russian band Pussy Riot in their stance against Vladimir Putin's regime and the Orthodox church. They were willing to go to prison, and they did. Former Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina's new memoir, RIOT DAYS, bears witness to the band's odyssey of protest and imprisonment over the past six years.RIOT DAYS is a fragmented book, presented in short, sharp vignettes. It feels like a diary of sorts. Her style is deadpan, and the passages are clever and witty. Sometimes she's laugh-out-loud funny. By it's very nature, the book runs the risk of being too loose and lacking coherence. Although it does feel a bit disjointed at times, on the whole, I felt that it all came together admirably in the end. She paints a vivid picture with her little brushstrokes.Despite the deadly seriousness of their cause and the response of Russia's police state, the book drips with the absurdity that goes hand-in-hand with totalitarianism. The literature chronicling the tragedy -- and absurdity -- of Russia's last century is vast. A fine recent example is Julian Barnes's masterful THE NOISE OF TIME, which is pitch-perfect in its depiction of Soviet tyranny and it's effect on the life and art of composer Dmitri Shostakovich. RIOT DAYS fits right into that tradition, while also giving us a modern spin on art, repression, and protest in Russia. Alyokhina's book shows us that for all the changes from Stalin's Soviet Union to Putin's Russia, in some ways the story remains the same. Now, more than ever, we need books like Alyokhina's.For all its wit and humor, RIOT DAYS is a brave and deeply humane book. Beyond the broad brush strokes of Pussy Riot's story, I didn't know much. I'm glad to have learned more about their struggle and the price they paid for it. It's a truly remarkable story, and it's well told by Alyokhina. This is a fine -- and necessary -- book, and I'm very pleased to have read it.(Thank you to Metropolitan Books / Henry Holt for a complimentary advance copy. Receiving a free copy did not affect the content of my review.)

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"Rise and shine, ladies!" shouts the warden in a voice that used to be a woman's, and bangs on the iron door with an iron key.Maria Alyokhina was a member of the punk group Pussy Riot, and one of the women who performed their song Punk Prayer in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. Along with a few others, she went into hiding, but was eventually arrested, tried and sent to prison in a part of Russia that was formerly used for the gulag. Riot Days is her account of that time and it's fantastically punk to its core. Alyokhina is fiercely devoted to resisting Putin's dictatorship and she is uncompromising in her unwillingness to comply or keep quiet. Even her time in various prison camps is marked by her determination to protest and to improve conditions for the people around her.Her memoir is told in the form of short segments. From the beginning, as they plan various performances - performances that were necessarily short and unannounced - she is both scared and determined. And as the state takes action against them, she clearly describes what is happening and the dire conditions she and the other prisoners live in, but she never complains or fails to stand up for those around her. We should all have her clear convictions and sheer perseverance.

[klmesoftly · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent memoir of an activist's time in the modern Russian prison system, fighting against institutional abuse. It's harrowing, especially given how recently the depicted events took place! Masha's courage and integrity are inspiring and the book itself is both very readable and informative.

[seriousgrace · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Riot Days is sharp, choppy and biting. Words fly off the page like the staccato of machine gun fire. Even the illustrations are crude and unpolished; but all are perfect for the message Alyokhina wants to relay. The facts are such - in February of 2012 members of an all-girl punk band smuggled an electric guitar into an Orthodox church in Moscow to perform a "Punk Prayer" in protest to Putin's regime. Alyokhina and another member of the band were finally arrested and sentenced to two years in a penal colony. Alyokhina's side of the story is interspersed with the court proceedings as if to say, "look how reality can get twisted; this is what happens when you have convictions; you get convicted." This is a quick but extremely worthwhile read.

[susanbooks · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wow! This was so kick-ass, as expected, but it was also so smart, full of allusion to every Russian or Soviet political prisoner you can think of (Dostoyevsky, the Decembrists, Trotsky, Solzhenitsyn etc). Alyokhina reveals herself as a thoughtful feminist activist, angry, kind, passionate. Just on the level of story, this book is wonderful. You worry about her and the women she's imprisoned with, are infuriated at their treatment, and looking at her life now, can only gaze in awe at her courage in returning to Russia. She's a superhero and a great writer.

[charl08-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Brilliant, accessible look at the experience of one of the Pussy Riot protestors who was jailed for two years following their performance in an Orthodox Church. Managing to find black humour in her experiences, from the weird comments of the prosecutors in her trial to the prison officials' inability to cope with her opposition to their unlawful actions to the rest of the prison population. I admired her bravery in mounting a protest in the first place, but her actions in the prison really go beyond this. She manages to acknowledge the cost of opposing more powerful forces: the state's use of isolation against her is particularly brutal. But the book leaves the reader with a strong sense of just how important it is to have your voice heard."In one of my enormous bags I’m carrying books . At night, in the car, I read poetry . When I read out loud, everyone around me quietens down. goes quiet ‘Parting is more terrible at dawn than at sunset,’ Boris Ryzhy wrote. ‘Who’s reading?’ a convict calls out. ‘Don’t you know?’ comes a voice from another compartment. ‘Pussy Riot’s here!’"(Netgalley copy)

[lovinglit · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Maria Alyokhina is a member of the punk protest group, Pussy Riot. She, and another member, were jailed for two years after performing a protest song, "Punk Prayer", as a protest in a Russian Orthodox church. To do this performance, they smuggled amps, and guitars into the church, jumped onto the altar, set up, and sang of 2 minutes tops before being thrown out and eventually arrested. Their protest was about the influence of the church on the state, and about Putin. More than this though, the book is about the author's time in prison, where, as a political prisoner, she received 'special' treatment, including being kept in solitary 'for her own safety', having her own guard who monitored her alone, and video surveillance of her cell. She showed incredible fortitude, courage and outright fearlessness in dealing with the prison system. She fought them, only rarely questioning the impacts this had on other prisoners, who were collectively punished for Maria's actions to seek basic rights for all prisoners. I so admire her steadfastness in this regard. She was unwavering in her conviction that "to back down an inch is to give up a mile". Prison time was tough, the hundreds of indignities and petty nastiness from the guards, and the 'system', were designed to create submissive prisoners. This type of systematic bullying and cruelty is so shockingly recent, 2012, and proves Putin's Russia to be nothing like the images it projects.