Lara Marlowe: Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina has a warning for Europe

When I met Maria “Masha” Alyokhina at the Borris festival earlier this summer, the Russian dissident and founding member of the feminist punk rock group Pussy Riot wore a Ukrainian T-shirt showing the Kremlin in flames.If she could, Alyokhina (38) really would burn down the Kremlin. “If I had a missile and I could fire it at Putin, I would do that,” she says, laughing.In February 2012, in the run-up to Vladimir Putin’s third presidential election (of five so far), Pussy Riot filmed a performance art clip inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Wearing fluorescent balaclavas, they screamed lines that included “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, chase Putin out.” For this they spent 22 months in Russian penal colonies. “The prison system is a legacy of the Soviet labour camps,” Alyokhina tells me over a video call this week. She speaks in the telegraphic style she used to write two memoirs, Riot Days and Political Girl. “People live in barracks, 100 people in each room. We sewed police and army uniforms. No medicine. No human rights. No complaints allowed. I spent four months in solitary confinement because I asked questions.” READ MOREIt is night-time and Alyokhina is somewhere in Montenegro, pacing around a shadowy apartment. She chain-smokes, has an impish smile and laces her conversation with laughter and expletives. A dog howls outside. Alyokhina remembers March 8th, international women’s day, in 2012. Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny came to Nizhny Novgorod, where she and two other members of Pussy Riot were imprisoned. “It was our first week. They came to the jail to support us with words, statements and placards. They were famous opposition leaders, and we were just the girls from the church. It was super important to me.”Nemtsov was assassinated near the Kremlin in February 2015. Navalny was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok in August 2020 and died in a penal colony inside the Arctic Circle in February 2024. “Yes, I was upset,” Alyokhina admits. “You can understand stuff in your head, but when it happens it’s an emotional shock.”Alyokhina and her fellow Pussy Riots – she uses the name as a descriptor for individual members – encountered Putin’s goons, known as gopniks or titushky, many times. She says Putin followed the example of his Ukrainian protege Viktor Yanukovych in employing young, often drunken men to beat up protesters. At the 2014 Sochi Olympic Games the Pussy Riots were attacked by Cossacks with horsewhips. The following month, they were assaulted in a McDonald’s restaurant by young men who squirted Zelenka or green ethyl alcohol into their eyes to blind them. [ Political Girl: Life and Fate in Russia by Maria Alyokhina - A page-turning memoirOpens in new window ]Alyokhina would be arrested a half dozen more times, but she never stopped protesting. In April 2022 she fled Russia, making her way to Iceland, where she was given a passport. Last September, a Moscow court sentenced five Pussy Riot members in absentia to prison terms of eight to 13 years. Alyokhina received the heaviest sentence: 13 years and 15 days.Russian opinion polls indicate that more than two-thirds of Russians still support Putin. Alyokhina does not believe it. “If you say you don’t support Putin, you go to prison for eight years,” she says. “How can you trust polls or statistics in a totalitarian country where there is military censorship, where you can be imprisoned for saying there is a war? There were and are millions of Russians who wanted to be part of Europe. Nobody wanted to be citizens of this barbarian, terrorist, crazy state.” Fearlessness is Alyokhina’s most impressive trait. “I am not afraid of you,” she told judges at her 2012 trial. “I am not afraid of lies and fiction, of the thinly disguised fraud in the sentence of this so-called court ... Nobody can take away my inner freedom.”Alyokhina says protest must be “desperate, sudden and joyous”. She has testified on Capitol Hill, shared a stage with Madonna and appeared in an episode of the Netflix series House of Cards. When she was a teenager, Alyokhina left home to live with hippies and punks in Moscow. “I want to live interestingly. To change the world. How, exactly is unclear,” she writes in Political Girl. Twenty years later, she still has no fixed abode. But she is no longer a hippie. “I am calling for guns and weapons for Ukraine, so you can’t say I’m a hippie,” she laughs.Alyokhina travels often to Ukraine. Pussy Riot raised €200,000 for Okhmatdyt, the largest children’s hospital in Ukraine, after a Russian missile strike in July 2024 destroyed 60 per cent of it.My Ukrainian friends are very distrustful of Russians, even those who have sided with Ukraine. “I met many Ukrainians and nobody judged me,” Alyokhina says. “Everyone said ‘thank you’ and it was heartbreaking.”The Irish Government wants to believe the fiction that alumina, which is used to manufacture drones, missiles and fuselages of warplanes, is not a fungible resource; that if alumina exported from Aughinish is used to wrap chocolate, there will be less metal for weapons production.[ The Irish Times view on Aughinish Alumina report: evasion dressed up as due processOpens in new window ]“Ireland is not the only EU country that maintains connections with Russian oligarchs,” Alyokhina says. “Most European countries continue to do business with Putin’s Russia.” The Financial Times reported on July 19th that Greece, France, Italy, Germany, Austria and Portugal all demanded exceptions for their businesses in the EU’s most recent, 21st package of sanctions against Russia.Alyokhina does not believe Donald Trump will protect Europe and says that Europe is in a state of virtual military collapse: “Why is it only right-wing politicians talk about it? What the hell? Like leftwing people don’t understand that this war is going on? Or they will give several more regions of Ukraine to Russia and for the next two years, maybe they will live in peace? And then what? Europe should be prepared. Even if it’s not possible to make a united Europe, each country should understand what is going on. Now only the Baltic countries are aware and preparing.”