5 Questions for Pussy Riot

Nadya Tolokonnikova You can say that our activities changed not mainly because we were in prison but because the climate of the country has really changed in the past months. We recently opened up a news outlet of our own [MediaZona] that we hope will provide an adequate and objective view on the situation with law enforcement, prisons, police, and in that field. There’s a huge absence of adequate information of what’s going on for the wider public because all the big media are controlled by the Kremlin, and independent media have been either shut down or forced to not take an adequate stance on the problems that exist. So for the period of at least the recent months with the war in Ukraine we are forced to step away from the bright, artistic side of our activities and focus on making a channel for the public to provide and to listen to what is happening out there, to get real information.

Masha Alyokhina We started MediaZona with the idea of covering the areas that take away one’s liberty—police, courts, prosecution—and we will cover various topics involving corruption. We hope to provide a real take on these issues. We hope to start a video service in the near future, and also in the near future we hope to collaborate with an American or English-language media outlet that will enable us to provide an English version of what’s going on in Russia so people from other countries will be able to get their own picture of what’s happening.

Nadya Tolokonnikova You have to understand that there is a very big criminalization in Russia—now we have a conception, a Putin conception, of a “fifth column” or “national traitors” like us who criticize him … So in this sense, maybe we don’t want to look like this and behave like this, but at some point we have to do it. We have voices. We now feel that there’s a big responsibility to talk about problems. And we have to look more normalized than we looked in previous times.

Masha Alyokhina I think any activist that has resources and a way to influence the administration will definitely use it, and we try to use what we have right now to influence the political and media situation in Russia. We try to use the resources and possibilities we have to give a voice and some support to independent journalists, media, and NGOs in Russia, which we feel bring forward our cause. Because we definitely want to work against a second Iron Curtain appearing there, and we think in the relatively not so long time that Russia has been able to actively communicate with the outside world, that has definitely been a productive and fruitful time for the country. We want to do things so it could continue to stay so.

Nadya Tolokonnikova We don’t want to divide countries. We are from an anarchist tradition, and the anarchist tradition likes to talk about a no-borders strategy. We want to see examples of how people can overcome problems. We think that U.S. has the same problems as Russia—for example, corruption and problems with prison system—and we want to talk to activists and NGOs who work, for example, with the prison-industrial complex in America to realize their experience to fight against violence in our prisons and against slave labor in our prisons.

Nadya Tolokonnikova We had some attacks on us but they were organized by the political police. These people were not just usual Russian people who hate us, because people who don’t like us don’t recognize us because they don’t think about us. It’s not about hate to us. They saw us on television, and those guys on Russian federal television told them we are bitches and witches and so on. But they don’t remember us. We meet on the streets only people who sometimes want to express solidarity. We have no worries about celebrity status in Russia; we just sit in our office and work on our NGO. That’s our occupation in Russia, and we spend most of our time in Russia.

Masha Alyokhina Sometimes we go to other regions, and there are a lot of mostly young people who support us, so often we do feel the support. For example, people don’t really like doing stuff with prisons but at our request people often send parcels to prisoners and visit prisons.