Meeting Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot, I have to stop myself exclaiming: “But you’re so young!” She is extraordinarily young — 25 — to have done all the things she has done — studied philosophy at Moscow State University, co-founded the feminist/activist group Pussy Riot, spent almost two years in prison, travelled and performed all over Europe, become a columnist for Vice and set up a non-governmental organisation (NGO) to promote prisoners’ right in Russia and an independent news service. She is also extremely beautiful — dark hair, huge eyes — which makes it seem a pity she performs so often in masks or balaclavas. She could easily be a model. But of course she wouldn’t want to be — she feels sorry for women who wear high heels — and she is far too busy changing the world.
I met her and her husband, Pyotr Verzilov, at a restaurant in Shoreditch, east London, when they were just back from doing the closing concert at Banksy’s Dismaland, which apparently went down a storm. Pussy Riot — Nadya and two friends — performed four new songs, including one in English called Refugee about the migrant crisis. According to Nadya: “The Banksy show was brilliant, but I was wearing a mask, so I couldn’t see the audience reaction.” She didn’t meet Banksy, but he has been a longstanding supporter — he raised £40,000 to pay for lawyers’ fees when Pussy Riot went on trial in 2012, and before that he backed Voina, another Russian activist group, to which she and Pyotr both belonged.
Pussy Riot came to worldwide attention when Nadya and two colleagues were arrested for performing A Punk Prayer at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour on February 21, 2012. They were protesting about proposed anti-abortion laws — “Give the holiest what they need! Make the women love and breed!” — but they sang for less than a minute before the police dragged them away. Still, the video of their demonstration went viral and celebrities from Madonna to Paul McCartney to Björk and even Hillary Clinton spoke out in their support.
The three women were held in detention for seven months before their trial — one was acquitted, but Nadya and her colleague Masha Alyokhina were sentenced to two years, though they were released after 13 months — just in time for the Sochi Olympics, where they staged another demonstration.
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“Sochi was quite scary,” Nadya recalls. “We did three songs and then we were put in prison for l0 hours. And when we were leaving, men with automatics blocked the road and were trying to pelt us with raw chicken. It was crazy. It was funny, but also scary.”
What makes demonstrating in Russia particularly scary is that you never know what crime you could be accused of. The charge over Pussy Riot’s cathedral demonstration was “religious hooliganism” — which was new to the statute books. In June, when she and Masha staged another demonstration — sewing a Russian flag while dressed in a prison jumpsuit in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square on Russia Day — the police said it was forbidden to sew in public. But at least they didn’t arrest them, perhaps because the protest was poorly attended.
The mood had changed while they were in prison — even with the rouble in freefall, Putin was more popular at home after he annexed the Crimea and invaded Ukraine. And all those photos of him bare-chested, riding horses and diving for archaeological treasures, which cause such hilarity in the West, are admired in Russia. Pyotr showed me one of Putin in a microlight aircraft leading a flock of migrating geese.
The trouble with interviewing Nadya is that her English is not great, whereas Pyotr’s is fluent. So when I ask her a question, she often gets him to translate, and then I find myself talking to Pyotr and she rolls her eyes. In a way, this is how Pussy Riot originated. She and Pyotr were members of Voina, but the media always talked to the men and treated the women as decoration. So the women broke away to form Pussy Riot. But when she was in prison, Nadya accused Pyotr of trying to co-opt Pussy Riot and make himself their spokesman. Did she really say that? Pyotr immediately starts talking, but she laughs, “Yes I did! He is doing it now. We are partners and obviously Pyotr deserves to speak. But the problem is that many people assume the man is in charge. But when we went to prison, I liked it that the media described him as my husband — he was Mr Pussy Riot!”
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Did she have a horrible time in prison? “No. I don’t want to say, ‘Oh, look at me, how I suffered.’ A lot of people suffer more than I did — think of refugees or people who are very ill. It was two years taken from my life — but men in Russia have to spend a year in the army and conditions there are really horrible.” But she does recall that she acquired her first grey hair in prison and she went on hunger strike.
She was in detention for almost two years. How did their daughter, Gera, take it? “She was fine,” says Pyotr, intervening again. “We spoke on the phone every week and we could go and see Nadya every couple of months for conjugal visits.” And, says Nadya, “she is more like Pyotr. She is extrovert, she can deal with people better than I can. She loved kindergarten and liked to play with her friends. When I was at kindergarten, I was like this [curling into a ball in the corner of the sofa] and I would sing to myself. I am introvert, I didn’t change!”
It seems odd to call herself an introvert when she is prepared to shout her head off in demonstrations, but I can believe she is driven by ideology and not by exhibitionism. What was she like as a child? Was she really so withdrawn? “I was a nerd, a geek. I sit with my book always reading.” While other girls were trying to attract boys? “Oh, I tried to do that. Once I tried wearing high heels and it was a disaster. It was winter, –40C, and you are on the snow and then you twist your foot. But at least I tried.”
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She grew up in Norilsk, a small industrial city inside the Arctic Circle that is one of the most polluted cities on earth. “When the snow falls it is white, but half an hour later it is brown.” Her father, a doctor, gave her political books and magazines to read from when she was 10 or 12. Then she discovered feminism — she remembers reading Shulamith Firestone with huge excitement — but when she tried to interest her classmates, one of them told her: “I feel sorry for you, but one day you will meet a nice man and not be a feminist any more.”
And in fact Nadya did meet a nice man, Pyotr, at university. He was a couple of years ahead of her and she asked him to tell her about Buddhism and in no time at all they were parents. It was an accident, she admits — there is little sex education in Russia and scant information about contraception. So she was a mother at l8, but still a feminist. “I was trying to move our family in a more fair way where man and woman share all the childcare.” Did she succeed? “Yes, but it’s not popular in Russia. Usually the woman is in charge of childcare.”
Her efforts now are devoted to running the NGO Zona Prava, which provides legal and material support to prisoners, and Mediazona, a news service that reports on Russian courts, prisons and police. They employ 14 people full-time as well as countless volunteers, so this is a serious operation. But who pays for it? Pyotr explains that they have support from various charitable foundations and “we do a big number of events and festivals, like Glastonbury, or opening Gay Pride in Toronto, and we get paid a fee and our expenses”. But still, their funding must be precarious.
Are they under surveillance in Russia? “Yes,” says Nadya, “but I don’t care. We live a very free life and if they want to listen to our phone or read our emails, they can do if they want. Actually I know the police went through our records looking for bad words. But I am an artist, I use strong words. If we want to have a private conversation, we don’t use phones.”
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She doesn’t think the police follow her and she still travels by metro in Moscow. Once or twice she has received hostile remarks, but most people who come up to her are friendly and supportive.
What will become of Nadya? She is so brave, so outspoken, so casually disrespectful of authority, but Putin is not renowned for tolerating dissent. What is unusual about Pussy Riot is that they campaign for all sorts of serious issues — LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or questioning) rights, prisoners, press freedom, the war in Ukraine — but in a consistently light-hearted way. The Ten Commandments of Pussy Riot include: do not read the news, make the news; and have a break, have a riot. You can call this attention-seeking if you want, but what is the point of demonstrations if not to gain attention? And Nadya believes, I think rightly, that “if you make a protest with irony, with wit, it gets more attention”.
Of course, it helps if the protestors are beautiful young women rather than men with beards. I kept wondering why Nadya made me feel so nostalgic and then realised that she reminded me of all our countercultural optimism in the late 1960s, early 1970s — the belief that by going on jolly demonstrations and shouting, “Make love, not war”, we could change the world. Sneer all you want, but the countercultural movement did eventually shift public opinion against the Vietnam War.