Maria "Masha" Alyokhina, the activist and performance artist best-known as a member of Pussy Riot, recounts her protests against Vladimir Putin’s Russia in Political Girl: Life and Fate in Russia, a new publication charting her years of dissent. In 2012, she and fellow Pussy Riot founder Nadya Tolokonnikova spent nearly two years in prison after they filmed a video of their Punk Prayer song at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. In 2022 Alyokhina disguised herself as a food courier and fled Russia using a European travel document allegedly facilitated by the Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson. Below, she describes meeting Kjartansson at the opening of the GES-2 art centre in Moscow late 2021.
Extract from Political Girl: Life and Fate in Russia
The centre of Moscow, Scandinavian-style, white walls and huge windows. GES-2 is a trendy new gallery in a former power station that I know nothing about. Overlooking the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Putin’s oligarch, Leonid Mikhelson, spent $470m on it. To be fashionable, to appeal to hipsters, and so that the people who steal in Russia and spend it in the West can tell that the place has status. At the entrance is a fashionable sculpture by a fashionable Swiss artist, a piece of clay. Maximally like a mound of shit.
I get out of the taxi and walk to the entrance. [Colleague] Misha and the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, who is staging the exhibition, are there to meet me. “Hello! I’m an artist!” he says in Russian, “and this is Santa Barbara!” The soap opera Santa Barbara was watched endlessly in Russia during the 1990s, a window onto the Western world for a young Russia being formed on the site of the Soviet Union.
The phrase “It’s all gone a bit Santa Barbara” became a catchphrase for messy relationships. I laugh and answer, “Your Santa Barbara is nowhere near ours.” It’s a good thing that he doesn’t know what I mean. “For me your Punk Prayer is one of the greatest performances in the history of art,” says Ragnar. “I’m staying in an apartment with a view onto the Pussy Riot church!”
He is giving me a princess’s welcome. “Your visit is as important as one from Putin!” Ragnar jokes. I want to shout that this is all a façade. It just seems that this city looks like a normal city, but here they are constantly imprisoning and torturing. This is the hardest year, I want to scream, but I say this with a suppressed grin. No one will understand if you start yelling, and it wouldn’t look like a performance. It would look like plain hysteria.
• Political Girl: Life and Fate in Russia, Maria Alyokhina, Allen Lane, 480pp, £25 (hb)