Vol. 76/No. 42      November 19, 2012

The court upheld the two-year prison term for Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22. The third convicted member, Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30, received a suspended sentence.

The three were convicted in a Moscow court Aug. 17 of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” for performing a “punk prayer” in the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of Christ in Moscow Feb. 21, asking the Virgin Mary “to drive [President Vladimir] Putin away.” They were arrested March 3.

The case is at the center of the fight for freedom of speech and artistic expression in Russia. The women have won support around the world.

After the appeal denial, Tolokon-nikova was sent to a prison colony in Mordovia, 300 miles east of Moscow, and Alyokhina was sent to one in the Perm region in Siberia, 700 miles east of the capital. They had requested to serve their time in the Moscow region, which would have permitted them to be closer to their small children.

Tolokonnikova’s husband, Pyotr Verzilov, tried to visit her at the prison camp Nov. 2, but was turned away and told she would be held in quarantine for several more days, reported the Associated Press.

Verzilov told AP that Tolokonnikova “had been treated well by prison officials, but he attributed that to the publicity stirred up by the trial.”

The judge’s motivation for Samut-sevich’s suspended sentence was that she was stopped by guards outside the church and never actually participated in the “prayer.” Samutsevich is now on probation for two years. She has to report once a month and “must not take part in similar performances or will go to prison,” the judge warned.

“I want to continue the actions of Pussy Riot, but that means you have to be more careful and you have to be more cunning,” Samutsevich said to radio station Echo Moskvy Oct 12.

“We are sitting in jail for our political beliefs,” said Alyokhina at the appeal hearing. “And these beliefs won’t let me be quiet. … We went into the cathedral to issue a protest against the fusion of the spiritual and political elite of our country.

“We are not militant Atheists,” she clarified. “We are against cutting crosses, against stealing icons, against pouring ink on icons.”

“We believe that we live in a secular society,” Samutsevich told CNN Oct. 10. “The representatives of the church should not interfere with the politics of the country, and we wanted to highlight this problem through our action.” In an interview in the Moscow Times Oct. 15, Samutsevich said the Pussy Riot trial had succeeded in getting Russians talking about the intertwining of church and state and the politically engaged courts.

“People who never even thought about these things started to talk about them, to read and to listen to other people’s opinions,” she stated. “A discussion has begun in society and that is very important for us.”

“They got what they asked for,” President Putin said three days before the appeal hearing in an interview on state television.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Nov. 2 he thought the women should be freed. He made a similar statement Sept. 12, adding that imprisonment “seems to me to be unproductive,” according to NBC News. He also said he was “sickened by what they did, by their looks, by the hysteria which followed what had happened.”

Meanwhile, three women who were arrested for wearing balaclavas in a protest in support of Pussy Riot Aug. 17 outside the Russian Consulate in New York have challenged a state law dating back to 1845. The law is a subsection of New York’s loitering statute and forbids three or more people from wearing masks in public.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home