Masha Alyokhina ran. First from a Russian apartment and her broken-off electronic ankle tag. Then through Belarus, Lithuania and Iceland, to London, where I am speaking to her now. Disguised initially as a takeaway driver in the Moscow commuter scrum, she successfully crossed the Russian border without identity papers on her third attempt.
There is a concern about publishing the name of the hotel in which we are talking. The Russian security services happily assassinate on British soil. As a founding member of Pussy Riot, the feminist protest and performance art group, Alyokhina isn’t intimidated. But other dissidents have been brutalised for lesser acts than igniting the global condemnation of Vladimir Putin’s regime in the way she has.
She is overstimulated. When I met her earlier she was already binge drinking coffee, keeping her backpack close at hand – and, inside it, the charging apparatus for her Lost Mary e-cigarette. Travelling to the hotel, in the back of a black cab, the air filled with vapour as we watched Russian protest music videos which occasionally skipped back thanks to an aftermarket screen repair, itself missing several chunks of glass, her black coffee scooped up as it teetered towards a spill. In the lobby a waiter bringing an iced latte made a good job of pretending not to notice the fruity cloud around our table. One of his colleagues, amused, asked Alyokhina to stop. She agreed, but continued. The everyday social pressure under which another person would politely fold barely registers for a woman unbroken by two years’ imprisonment in Penal Colony IK-28 at the foot of the Ural Mountains.
Not that it hasn’t left marks. Little islands of keratin rise from the ends of Alyokhina’s fingers, surrounded by what should be sensitive, wet nail beds. They are now overgrown by skin hardened by constant abrasion, picking and fiddling. At one point, she removes her black bomber, revealing strong arms in a black vest and a short, thick, mature scar across her right bicep. A black beanie contains dense, wavy, dirty-blonde hair, divided into two loose braids that taper into nothing. A miniature, metal-effect AK-47 hangs from a necklace.
The 37-year-old runs most nights – about 5km – in solid time, but at strange hours. On her Instagram, it’s not uncommon to wake up and see a Strava screenshot (a fitness app used to track exercise sessions) posted to Alyokhina’s stories at 3am.
“I desperately didn’t want to leave my country,” she says. “But I started to think – what is leaving? What is staying? Because politically they still persecute us; we exist there only by their documents.” This September, Alyokhina and four other members of Pussy Riot were sentenced in absentia by a Moscow court to the gulag for spreading “false information” about the Russian military in a music video, and for “obscene acts” after one member of the collective urinated on a portrait of Putin at a concert in Munich in April 2024. Alyokhina received the highest sentence of 13 years and 15 days. “Physically, we do not exist there. We… I… I’m not in the country. I know many people who are physically in the country but are not able to speak, to write, to express themselves as they want. It would cost them 13 years in prison. So politically, these people are self-censored. And it’s a big question: do they exist there, or not?”
One of those people is Alyokhina’s mother, who did not fully understand her daughter’s activism – “a troublemaker from childhood” – until the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Before that, they would argue about the Orthodox Church, the FSB, the demonstrations Masha attended. “But after Putin started to bomb Kyiv, everything changed. She understood well.” Her father died this summer. “The last thing he said to me was, ’I’m proud of you. You managed to fuck them even from there.’”
“We have an ability to speak. They have an ability to stand on the motherland.” She pauses and stares, eyes blue and uncompromising. “You have both abilities,” she tells me. I don’t know what to say – only a half-embarrassed “yeah, I do”.
In February 2012, Pussy Riot performed “Punk Prayer”, a protest song, inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour to protest the Orthodox Church’s support for Putin, a union now so complete that the Church’s primate, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, like Putin himself, is a former KGB agent. While the Soviet Union was a state with an almighty secret police apparatus, it is perhaps better to understand modern Russia as a military intelligence force with a country attached. In this sense, Putin’s regime represents a mutation, rather than a continuation, of communist dictatorship.
“It’s repeating but in a more cynical way,” Alyokhina says. “At least in the Soviet Union they were true believers for this communist future.” Irony drips from the two last words. “These don’t believe in anything except money. That’s why they mix the two aesthetics, building a Soviet Union with a cross because neither matters to them. It’s just aesthetical spheres which can be used to stay in power forever.”
“Punk Prayer” was short and energetic. The lyrics were blunt and provocative. Carol Rumens, the British poet, translated some as “Crap, crap, this holiness crap!”. At the time, Russian journalists were being murdered; the opposition politician and one-time richest oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky was in prison – but Moscow’s artists had yet to join him there. Alyokhina was surprised to be among the first. Putin would not win the presidential election until March of that year. Russians like Alyokhina knew they were at a crossroads, and the 40 seconds spent headbanging in front of that altar would have ramifications for decades.
One evening in 2012, after Alyokhina collected her son from nursery, a member of the secret police was waiting outside her flat. She put some things in a backpack. “I said to my son that I will come back tomorrow. I actually came back after two years.”
The story illuminates the grinding certainty of dictatorship – the heaving momentum of repression, of uncaring state machinery. She explains: “They opened a criminal case of two to seven years in prison. If they open, they don’t close.” In cases like Alyokhina’s, there was no chance of being found not guilty. “It’s a legacy of the Soviet Union prison system.”
It started at 38 Petrovka Street, Moscow, where the city’s policing units have been based since the October Revolution of 1917. “Petrovka 38” is synonymous with authority and, like Scotland Yard, the subject of novels and TV shows. The building’s imposing Stalinist architecture is hard to comprehend until a photograph, including a passing pedestrian, reveals its grand scale. “It has an atmosphere,” Alyokhina says. She was taken there 11 days after the protest in the cathedral. “The prison world said hello to me with the procedure of search. They put you in a cage, say that you should take off all of your clothes, including underwear, and squat, then bend over and show what is inside your ass. To check if any mobile phones are there.” I flinch.
After refusing to sign a confession and apology – “They try to break you” – Alyokhina was transferred to a penal colony where 100 women slept in one room. “No hot water, no normal food, no normal medicine, one fridge – a big attraction for hungry women.” There were two toilets, without walls. Beyond the living quarters, there was a working zone. Prisoners would sew uniforms for the Russian army and police, Alyokhina says, and were paid a wage equivalent to £2 a month.
In Perm – the last city before the Urals and the location of Alyokhina’s penal colony – the average winter high is -9°C. When she complained that the inmates’ uniforms weren’t warm enough to stand outside for 40 minutes’ exercise, she was punished. “They locked me in solitary confinement for four months. If you make any claims about the conditions, you are a revolutionary; you are dangerous. Disorganise our penal colony, it’s a criminal article for up to three years.”
Alyokhina went on hunger strike three times during her imprisonment, the longest of which lasted for 11 days. She says if you can break out of the first three – during which she would see slices of pizza “flying above her head” – then it’s possible to reach a state of higher consciousness. She recommends I try it one day.
As the Sochi Winter Olympics drew near, in 2013 Western governments faced an uncomfortable decision. Were they willing to attend the Games, and cavort in Putin’s playroom, while political prisoners were being brutalised by his abuse system? That question and its resulting pressure led to an amnesty, ostensibly for young mothers, so far-reaching that five women were released. Two of them were members of Pussy Riot: Alyokhina and her friend Nadya Tolokonnikova. On release, Alyokhina told the media that her prison sentence was a time of “endless humiliations” and she was subjected to near-daily gynaecological examinations for three weeks. The United Nations says Russia’s gulags still hold more than 2,000 political prisoners. Two weeks after the Sochi Olympics, Russia began its annexation of Crimea.
Alyokhina’s son, Filipp, was seven years old when she was released. She received some criticism for meeting with local human rights activists before reuniting with him. “It was difficult but I hope he understands. Everything we are doing is for the next generations.” She greets most questions with a pause, but the longest is held while she thinks about what she wants Filipp to be. He’s 18 now and living in Iceland. “I want for him to find himself in this world and to stay honest and remember that he is loved.”
He has been drafted to the Russian military and will be sent to die on the Ukrainian front should he return to his home country. The war is the central issue for Alyokhina and she believes that European countries should send their armed forces to fight the Russians and that nuclear-armed countries like France and the UK should engage in a kinetic war on Europe’s eastern periphery. “They will invade other countries if Europe will not wake up. War seems to be far away. Putin should not eat Ukraine, this is for European security. But somehow there aren’t left liberal politicians saying this – they just wave peace signs and sign papers and everything will be fine. It will not be fine. This regime will never be fine. Putin will fuck you up. He did it this year, that year. With these people, with those people. Just read the history. People have a short memory.”
She’s certainly right about the amnesia. Putin practised his art of atrocity – now perfected in Bucha and Mariupol – many times before, from Chechnya to Syria, including the thousands of civilians killed in the sieges of Grozny and Aleppo.
These horrors are now accompanied by further human rights abuses within the internationally recognised borders of Russia, and Alyokhina lists them from memory like a terrifying incantation.
She talks about teenage girls like Diana Loginova, who was ripped from the street by riot police for singing songs by prominent musicians who have been officially designated foreign agents by Russian authorities.“No placards, no slogans and no signs there is a protest,” Alyokhina says. Loginova was charged in October with discrediting the Russian armed forces, one of the suite of newly minted offences since the invasion of Ukraine – another justification for crushing the few remaining civil liberties of ordinary Russians.
More Russians are now beginning to resist the authoritarian government, like Ruslan Zinin. With no prior history of protest, he shot and wounded an army recruitment officer in September 2022 and declared, “Now we’ll all go home.” He received a sentence of 19 years in prison. Or the 68-year-old doctor Nadezhda Buyanova, who was accused by a patient of making negative remarks about Russian armed forces. She was sentenced to five years in prison in November 2024.There is no video or audio recording of her comments.
Darya Kozyreva, an anti-war activist, was given a sentence of two years and eight months in April for gluing a famous verse from a Ukrainian poet to his statue in St Petersburg. A poet, Artyom Kamardin, was sentenced to seven years in December 2023 for reciting his own work. The police allegedly filmed themselves raping him with a dumb-bell during the arrest, then went into the next room and showed the video to his partner. They told her they would do the same to her and stuck anti-war messages to her face with superglue. “I can name them,” Alyokhina says. “They are the country.”
She is now touring a show around Europe, Riot Days, to raise funds for Ukraine, performed with members of the collective, old and new. Nadya Tolokonnikova, the other Pussy Rioter imprisoned over “Punk Prayer” now runs an art studio in America, and recently published a podcast in conversation with Slavoj Žižek, but Alyokhina’s life seems more nomadic. She sends me a hotel room recording of an excerpt from her new book, Political Girl, about Alexei Navalny, the murdered opposition politician who so fundamentally believed in his right as a Russian to stand on the earth of the motherland that he walked into the jaws of his enemy – choosing to die like a martyr standing rather than live a life on his knees.
One of the songs we listen to together is called “Where Is My Home?” by the Russian duo IC3PEAK. Both members are exiled, and Alyokhina believes one is in Berlin and the other in Los Angeles. The chorus washes back and forth between two refrains: “I am going to war” and “Where is my home?”. Alyokhina says “[Home] is a feeling. If we talk about the place, I still have a place where my mum is in Moscow, but I cannot physically go there. I have our show, which is my home at some point, but I did not build a second base. I didn’t choose any Western country. Maybe it will change, I dunno. It’s just… Three years and several months like this.”
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This article appears in the 13 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, What Keir won't hear