The Pussy Riot member Masha Alekhina has fled Russia as the prospect of her incarceration in a penal colony loomed, the activist artist told The New York Times on Tuesday.
Alekhina disguised herself as a food courier and traveled a circuitous route via Belarus to Lithuania, with a European travel document facilitated by Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson. In 2012, she and fellow Pussy Riot lead Nadya Tolokonnikova spent nearly two years in prison after they filmed a video of their punk prayer at Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral, entreating the Virgin Mary to banish Vladimir Putin and mocking Patriarch Kirill I of the Russian Orthodox Church for his overly close and corrupt ties to the state. Last month, Kirill essentially blessed the Russian president’s decision to invade Ukraine.
Even after being arrested for political protest six times since last summer and serving multiple 15-day sentences, Alekhina was determined to stay in Russia and continue fighting Putin’s regime, but the invasion of Ukraine finally compelled her to leave for now. She told NYT that it was "impossible" to stay after the invasion.
“I don’t think Russia has a right to exist anymore,” she said. “Even before, there were questions about how it is united, by what values it is united, and where it is going. But now I don’t think that is a question anymore.”
NYT reported that most other members of the collective had already left the country, including Alekhina’s girlfriend Lucy Shtein, who also fled in a food courier uniform.
Kjartansson helped Alekhina and other Pussy Riot members when they went to Iceland to rehearse for events there in support of Ukraine and agreed to perform along with this relative, Bjork. The Icelandic artist had been the headliner of the grand opening of billionaire Leonid Mikhelson’s GES-2 art space near the Kremlin, with his recreation of the American soap opera “Santa Barbara,” but he cut ties immediately after the invasion.
After their release from prison in 2013, Alekhina and Tolokonnikova founded Mediazona, an independent news website reporting on human rights that was labeled a “foreign agent” by Russia’s justice ministry in 2021 and is now blocked in Russia.
On Wednesday, Pyotr Verzilov, the publisher of Mediazona, accompanied the wives of two Ukrainian fighters still holding out at the Azovstal factory in Mariupol to the Vatican for a meeting with Pope Francis. They asked him to help arrange the evacuation of Ukrainian troops who are still trapped in the steel plant due to fears they will be captured or killed by Russian forces.