The Pussy Rioter Championing Navalny / Times Magazine

 
Even in these days of disembodied Zoom interviews, talking to Nadya Tolokonnikova is a strange experience.

The 31-year-old anti-Putin activist and founder of the Pussy Riot protest art movement will not say where she is talking from – not even whether she is in Russia. She tells me she is working on the assumption that Russian intelligence agents are listening to our conversation. I briefly see her sitting in a nondescript room, with false beauty spots beneath each eye and wearing a T-shirt proclaiming “God Loves the Fierce” in Russian, but almost immediately she turns the camera off so I can only hear her voice.

Tolokonnikova’s caution is understandable. As she says, these are “crazy times”. Last August, her friend and comrade, Alexei Navalny, President Putin’s nemesis, was poisoned with novichok by federal agents and medevacked – with her help – to Berlin. On January 17, he was arrested on his return to Moscow. Russia has since been rocked by protests of unprecedented size and geographical spread, and the regime has responded by arresting thousands of protesters, including many close colleagues of Navalny and Tolokonnikova.

Tolokonnikova believes she is also on the target list, and has no wish to return to prison. She has already served 22 months in a brutal penal colony for Pussy Riot’s notorious 2012 protest against church-state collusion in Moscow’s Russian Orthodox cathedral.

More importantly, she is presently doing all she can to highlight Navalny’s plight now that he has been sentenced – ludicrously – to nearly three years’ imprisonment for breaking parole while he was fighting for his life in Germany. She is trying not only to secure his release, but to prevent him being killed while incarcerated. “Everyone understands that’s a possible scenario, including Navalny himself,” she says.

She is giving interviews to international media outlets. She is soliciting support from artists around the world, and reels off names that have joined her campaign – Massive Attack, Rage Against the Machine, Radiohead. And she has just deployed what she calls “the ultimate tool that we are known for, which is protest art”. She has released, months earlier than planned, a single entitled Rage, which she regards as “the best piece of music Pussy Riot has ever done”.

“It’s about freedom,” she says. “It’s about being a heretic in your own country. It’s about being burnt at the stake, but at the same time feeling stronger than those people who oppress you.”

She explains, in fluent but heavily accented English, “The thing about political activism is it’s not transactional. It’s not, ‘I give you a dollar and you give me an apple.’ Sometimes things that you do have ripples that reach people you will never know. I just really hope that this piece of art will inspire people to act, to do their own protest music, to show up in the streets, to speak out, not to be silent, and to be courageous.”

That is what Navalny seeks to do: inspire people to overcome their fear. “For years he has given hope and courage to hundreds of thousands of Russians,” says Tolokonnikova. “He gives us hope that something he calls ‘the beautiful Russia of the future’ is achievable. As long as Alexei Navalny is alive and working and with us, we believe that beautiful Russia of the future is achievable.”

Thus one very brave, creative and resourceful Russian opponent of Putin’s increasingly repressive rule finds himself championed by another.

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Tolokonnikova was raised in Norilsk, a Siberian nickel-mining city. The pollution turned her into a teenage environmental activist. “I saw rivers turn blue and green. You saw snow falling from the sky and in 40 minutes it turned grey and in 2 hours, black,” she recalls.

She wanted to become a journalist, but Norilsk’s newspapers rejected her articles on the city’s environmental crisis. They told her the mining companies would never let them be published. “My mum said, ‘That’s how it is in Russia. You can’t be a journalist in Russia. You’re going to be murdered if you follow this path.’ ”

She instead set her sights on the elite Moscow State University, nearly 2,000 miles away in the centre of Russia’s political power. “Nobody around me believed it was possible. They made fun of me, but that made me even more determined,” she says. “I guess that’s how it is right now when me and my colleagues are trying to overthrow Putin.”

Against all odds she won a place to read philosophy, and almost immediately embraced radical protest. She co-founded an anarchic group called Voina (“War”), which staged what she calls “crazily illegal actions, abrasive and provocative acts, to make people pay attention to the political agenda we were promoting”.

They “stormed” the White House, the seat of Russia’s government, scaling its perimeter fence and projecting a giant skull and crossbones onto its façade with lasers. “We wanted to show the regime is much more vulnerable than it pretends,” she says.

They mounted “Operation: Kiss Garbage”, whereby female activists walked up to unsuspecting policewomen in public places and kissed them. Another stunt was entitled “F*** for the heir, Puppy Bear”. Five couples, including Tolokonnikova and her new husband, Pyotr Verzilov, had public sex in Moscow’s State Biology Museum to mock Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s puppet president. Tolokonnikova, then 18, was heavily pregnant. Days later she gave birth to a daughter, Gera, who is now 12 and a committed activist herself.

Of course she was afraid, Tolokonnikova says, but “really effective activists are those who control their fear. That’s the daily job of lots of activists who are fighting one of the most oppressive regimes on this planet.”

After Voina split, Tolokonnikova and other former members established Pussy Riot, a punk rock and performance art collective, to promote feminism and LGBT rights as well as fighting Putin.

The guerilla stunts continued. Wearing neon clothes and brightly coloured balaclavas they scaled tram roofs and elevated spots in subway stations to play their protest music.

After a crackdown on demonstrators in 2011 they seized a platform in Red Square and performed a song entitled Putin Zassa (Putin Has Pissed Himself). They sang on a garage roof next to the Moscow Detention Centre for hundreds of detained activists.

Then came the Punk Prayer protest in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Tolokonnikova and four other women cavorted around the altar singing, “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, chase Putin out.” The Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church accused them of sacrilege. Putin said they had “undermined the moral foundations” of Russia. Despite an international uproar, and Amnesty International designating them “prisoners of conscience”, Tolokonnikova and a colleague, Masha Alekhina, received two-year sentences for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”.

She was sent to Penal Colony No 14 in Mordovia in central Russia. The inmates were “speechless slaves” forced to sew police uniforms for 16 hours a day, she complained in an open letter. They received inhuman punishments. The food and hygiene were unspeakable. Any prisoner who dared complain triggered collective sanctions.

Tolokonnikova eventually went on hunger strike. After five days she was transferred to the colony’s hospital, and then to another prison in Siberia. She and Alekhina were released two months early to improve Russia’s image before the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

“It was a degrading and humiliating experience, and a great trauma for everyone who went through it,” she says. But imprisonment did not break her spirit. “If you have to suffer [for your activism] it’s unfortunate, but we realised we had to go through it.”

She was barred from completing her university degree, but continued her activism. She and Alekhina co-founded MediaZona, which has since become one of Russia’s leading independent media sites. She went to the Sochi Olympics to stage a protest entitled “Putin Will Teach You to Love the Motherland” and was beaten, pepper-sprayed and arrested “multiple times a day”.

In 2018, her husband, from whom she is now separated, was poisoned with a nerve agent weeks after he and three Pussy Riot members wearing police uniforms invaded the pitch during the World Cup final in Moscow. He was flown comatose to Berlin where Tolokonnikova met him.

“He had just regained consciousness, but he didn’t make any sense” she recalls. “He couldn’t recognise me. It was really scary because I knew him as a vital, energetic, really emotional and strong human being, but he couldn’t even move his hands. When I talked about our daughter he didn’t know who she was.” He recovered but “for two weeks, we didn’t know if the damage to his brain was reversible or not”.

Last February, she rented a St Petersburg studio to film a video with 200 activists for Rage, her new single. They had barely started before the police cut off the heating and electricity in the middle of a Russian winter, accused Tolokonnikova of promoting gay propaganda, and detained her for five hours.

“With our prison sentence we ended up on the black list for all law enforcement agencies in Russia so our every step is followed closely,” she says. “Sometimes they don’t even hide themselves. There will be a car outside your house and it follows wherever you go.”

She has been arrested scores of times, and beaten on many occasions. “It’s an ongoing struggle with yourself. For sure, when you’re brought to a police station it’s not a pleasant procedure... You know the law. You know what they can and can’t do with you. But our government doesn’t really care about the law. Sometimes they use force against you. Sometimes they beat you.”

She adds, “I don’t see myself as a hero or something. I’m just trying to contribute my word to what’s going on.”

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On the face of it Tolokonnikova and Navalny are very different. He is a law graduate who spent a year at Yale. He has a striking (and very strong and supportive) wife, Yulia, and a daughter studying at Stanford. He has nationalist leanings, while Tolokonnikova is a social progressive. “We have a different political agenda,” she says, and jokes that she looks forward to opposing him in a free Russian parliament.

But they have made common cause since meeting at a dissidents’ march in Moscow in 2007. “We are part of the same activist family and have been working together on projects for many, many years,” she says. “To stand against an authoritarian government you have to be really good at co-operating and co-ordinating your efforts.”

While Tolokonnikova battled for human rights, Navalny made his name as a blogger exposing the corruption of Russia’s leading companies and politicians. In 2011 he set up the Anti-Corruption Foundation in Moscow – now one of Russia’s leading independent investigative forces. He has no political party, but a nationwide network of organisers dedicated to thwarting the Kremlin’s election-rigging. He has a YouTube channel with 6.4 million followers, and 2.5 million followers on Twitter.

Like Tolokonnikova, he has been repeatedly harassed and arrested. He was convicted on a trumped-up charge of embezzlement that he successfully challenged in the European Court of Human Rights. He was placed under house arrest for a year. His brother, Oleg, was jailed for three years in what Navalny called an act of “hostage taking”. He ran for mayor of Moscow in 2013, winning 27 per cent of the vote, but was barred from challenging Putin in the 2018 presidential election because he had a criminal conviction. By then he had become Putin’s most formidable opponent.

Tolokonnikova talks admiringly of his courage, his use of humour to ridicule Putin, and his political skills. “He’s very energetic. He’s very positive in the worst possible conditions… He’s incredibly effective, a good manager and a good organiser.”

She was “devastated” when she heard of his poisoning last August, and swiftly put his aides in touch with the German doctors who had saved her husband two years earlier. Just in time a private plane flew him to Berlin from the city of Omsk, where he had been comatose in hospital for four days.

As Navalny recovered, so did his tactical genius. He teamed up with the investigative website Bellingcat to identify the Federal Security Service (FSB) agents responsible for poisoning him. He then telephoned one of his would-be assassins, pretending to be a senior government official, and tricked him into revealing how they had put novichok in his underpants.

When Navalny announced he was returning to Russia last month Tolokonnikova was “in awe” of his courage. “We all understood that Putin was not going to let him go,” she says. “At that point Putin saw Navalny as his personal enemy because he had committed the ultimate crime. He had made Putin look stupid, and for Putin as a thug that’s the worst thing you can do to him.”

Navalny ensured his airport arrest was live streamed. From his prison cell, two days later, he had his team release a two-hour video exposing Putin’s secret $1 billion Black Sea palace that has since been watched 110 million times. He used his court hearing on February 2 to mock the regime, calling Putin “Vladimir, the poisoner of underpants” and asking how he could respect his parole terms when he was poisoned and comatose in Germany.

“Don’t be afraid,” he urged his followers, and on January 23 and 31 hundreds of thousands of Russians braved freezing temperatures, warnings of mass shootings by the security forces and the very real danger of arrest and incarceration to protest in support of Navalny in 180 towns and cities from the Crimea to Vladivostok. Around 11,000 were arrested in an unprecedented wave of repression, much of it captured on mobile phones and posted on social media.

Tolokonnikova says Putin is “panicking. He makes stupid mistakes one after another. In 2021 people don’t tolerate violence any more. It’s not OK to beat your own citizens with police batons… People are being tortured and beaten in police departments. They’re being held in inhuman conditions. They’re being held in police buses for over 40 hours without being able to get food or water.”

Putin never mentions Navalny by name. He responds to his opponent’s challenge not with subtlety or cunning, but with the blunt instruments of repression. His legitimacy is draining away. “Navalny is giving Putin’s government and Putin the rope to hang themselves,” she says.

Putin has also managed to turn Navalny into a global symbol of resistance – the modern-day equivalent of the Soviet dissidents Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

But it is still hard to see Putin falling, I argue. He still controls all the levers of power including a pervasive security apparatus, a formidable state propaganda machine and the judiciary. He has survived previous waves of protest without much trouble, and although this one is bigger only a tiny fraction of the Russian population has joined it.

Tolokonnikova is unperturbed. The real battle is for the hearts and minds of her fellow Russians, she argues. They are sick of corruption, falling living standards and repression, but they have to surmount what she calls their “political depression” or “learnt helplessness” – the idea that there is nothing they can do to change their lives, as encapsulated in the popular question, “If not Putin, who?”

Navalny gives them that choice, she says. These protests are not only bigger than previous ones, but 40 per cent of the participants are protesting for the first time. “He is able to galvanise people who didn’t believe in the importance of political action before.”

Navalny has survived assassination. He has not been forced into exile. He has not been broken. With his mockery and defiance he, like Tolokonnikova and Pussy Riot, is making the regime look ridiculous. He is chipping away at the fear which has sustained it for 21 years, she insists. “When each citizen of Russia refuses to fear, it will lead to the immediate overthrow of Putin.”