If Nadya Tolokonnikova (above) wanted to abandon protest and
flee Russia for a life of quiet exile in the west, it wouldn’t be so
surprising.
Although she was freed, by presidential amnesty, last December
after serving 18 months in prison for participating in an anti-Putin punk protest,
the Pussy Rioter remains under the close watch of the Russian state.
Naturally,
her emails are monitored; more disturbingly she recently discovered that state
security agents dropped by a cafe she regularly visits to install bugging
devices. She has been horsewhipped by police in Sochi and had green paint
thrown in her eyes by plain-clothed officers in a regional branch of
McDonald’s.
Many of her friends and fellow protesters have
decided to leave, in a new wave of departures that she describes as “the emigration
of disillusionment”.
In the two-and-a-half years since Pussy Riot, in
rainbow-colored tights and balaclavas, stormed into Moscow’s Christ the Saviour
cathedral to sing their Punk Prayer (“Virgin Mary, mother of God, banish Putin!
Virgin Mary, mother of God, banish him we pray thee!”), the optimistic
exuberance of Russia’s anti-Putin protest scene has mostly faded to despair.
Recently she has met her heroes Patti Smith and Noam
Chomsky, spoken at Harvard Institute of Politics, and spent half the night
following her talk protesting outside a police station at the arrest of a
Harvard student for trespassing (he was later released).
She is feted for her
bravery, and gets rock star treatment everywhere she goes, but she says that
she is always anxious to return to Moscow, to get back to work.
She laughs at
the notion of Federal Security Service (FSB) agents trying to wire up her
favorite cafe, and says with the wry understatement that flows beneath most of
her comments: “It’s obviously not very nice.
It makes you realize that the
conditions we endured in prison aren’t actually that different from the
conditions we’re faced with now that we’re free.”
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