archiveauthordonateinfoloadingloginsearchstarsubscribe

Interview. We spoke with Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, a member of the Russian protest punk group Pussy Riot, about her new book Read & Riot: A Pussy Riot Guide to Activism. In the face of Trump and Putin, she says being punk means building institutions, not toppling them.

The Pussy Riot guide: How Nadya Tolokonnikova survived jail and stayed zen

What is most striking about Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, whom we interviewed during a stop on her promotional tour for her latest book (Read & Riot: A Pussy Riot Guide to Activism), are her dark gaze, like a Tamara de Lempicka painting, and her slender frame. Despite her diminutive appearance, for over a decade she has not recoiled from staring down Putin’s ferocious regime.

The 29-year-old co-founder of the Pussy Riot art-punk feminist collective, and mother to a 10-year-old daughter, has had to pay a heavy price for her choices. The women from the collective were savagely beaten by Cossack militias in Sochi, stalked, arrested, and dragged out of the Moscow stadium by police and imprisoned after they invaded the pitch during the World Cup final this summer. Some years ago, the group’s “punk prayer” in the cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow got Tolokonnikova sentenced (together with two fellow members, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich) to two years of forced labor.

Performers of a type of Situationism inspired by punk, Actionism, performance art and the artistic avant-gardes from 1900 to 1968, the members of Pussy Riot embody both youthful rebellion and the international feminist revolt that today has brought women to the forefront of resistance against the neo-totalitarian involution represented by nationalist populism.

Tolokonnikova’s latest book is a sort of handbook for rebellion, a workbook full of revolutionary notes in random order, with quotes ranging from Betty Friedan to Michel Foucault, Vaclav Havel and Noam Chomsky, Gui Debord, Jean Luc Godard and Angela Davis, Tristan Tzara, Kurt Cobain, Judith Butler, Ursula Le Guin and Diogenes, among others. Instead of a manifesto, it offers fragments: a collection of ideas for an ideal transnational movement against the new totalitarianism, written in English in order to also reach the new resistance of the youth that has taken shape in Trumpist America, a place where Pussy Riot has begun to perform on a regular basis.

We spoke with Tolokonnikova about her book and about her activism. This interview has been edited for clarity.

Do you have an opinion of the recent American midterm elections?

I think it’s really important to restore power to the Democratic Party, but I also have a lot of questions for the Democratic Party. I think it moved too far to the neoliberal side and doesn’t really protect the workers anymore. But still, it’s better to have the Democratic Party. I am very much in touch with Emma Gonzalez [a leader of the March for Our Lives student anti-gun movement] actually (I haven’t met her in person actually, but I spoke to her by telephone), but I met David Hogg, and I think they are doing an incredible job and they are very articulate and motivated. They are our future. They are really inspirational for activists.

Are you still involved in political action?

Actually, activism has become more and more difficult. We have many more political prisoners, and it’s getting worse. We have people being imprisoned for likes and shares on Facebook. It’s still possible to do these actions, like illegal actions on the streets, but it’s getting really hard because we are being followed all the time and all our phones are being listened to. Part of our group was Pyotr Verzilov, my ex-husband, who ran onto the field during the final of the World Cup. Putin was there and Macron was there, and other world prominent politicians. But the revenge from the authorities was pretty tough. Pyotr was poisoned, and for two weeks he was completely out of his mind. He was unconscious for three days, and we didn’t know if he would survive. For two weeks he was delirious. Now he is recovering, and he is planning to go back to Russia, but not now. So it’s getting worse.

When you found out that you were going to prison, did you talk to your daughter?

I didn’t have time to tell anything to her. I just had to gather my things and go. She was in kindergarten then, and I told her grandmother that I was going to be away for two weeks and maybe longer and I just went and gathered my things. At that time, I was changing places every day because cops were chasing us.

How was a typical day in prison or a labor camp?

At a labor camp, you wake up at 5:45 and then you go to the morning exercises, which are actually just a way to mock the prisoners. Because we only sleep for four hours a night and after that you clearly don’t have energy to go and exercise. Then you clean everything and you clean your barracks. It’s kind of like army discipline. You have to wash everything for an hour. It definitely doesn’t require one hour of cleaning, but you do it because they want you to work and not write in your notebook or think about things. Then you go to breakfast and back to work and you work for eight hours.

What kind of work?

It depends, but in my case it was producing police uniforms. And after eight hours, in my case, I went back to the barracks. I had support from lawyers and I told the prison bosses I wasn’t going to work more than is required by the labor code. But all other prisoners, they had to return after these eight hours for another eight hours because they don’t have the support and they don’t have lawyers. So basically they are like slaves, working 16 hours a day and coming back to the barracks at 1 a.m. They wash themselves quickly in cold water and then go to sleep at 2. And at 5:45 they wake up again.

Did you decide to write a book when you were in jail or when you came out of jail?

As soon as I was arrested I started to write notes. But the problem is that prison officials know almost better than you that the key to mental survival in jail is to keep doing art and to keep sticking to intellectual activity. And that’s exactly why they took away from me all of my notes that I was writing. That hurt me really badly because I was thinking that maybe I could make a kind of research from this experience. And yes, it definitely sucked to be there, but at least I could write a book about it and maybe it would help somebody if I could be a witness of what is going on. But they made it impossible for me to write about prison when I was there. So when I was released in 2014 and I got out, I wrote down everything I could remember about prison. Later, I came back to this material after Trump was elected. I was pretty sad because I was thinking about how it would influence Russia, too, because it definitely makes Putin stronger. I decided to share my experiences and situations and feelings that brought me to action, brought me to activism, and so I just put them in this book.

Is it still possible to resist regimes like Putin’s or Trump’s, which specialize in cheating, chaos, and obfuscating truths?

I don’t want to destroy things, but I want to deconstruct them, and that is different for me. It’s a really volatile moment, though, and I was thinking about this a lot when I got out of prison in 2014. I was thinking about my role in Russian society because it was really a terrible year. Putin annexed Crimea, a glaring example of post-truth in that you clearly had Russian troops in Ukraine but all the mainstream media outlets were saying there are no troops. And most people tended to believe the authority. They unfortunately don’t have the privilege of time to discover what is truth and what is fake news.

And that’s why we came to the conclusion that our role right now is a little bit different: when your government acts like a crazy person, our job here, strangely—our punk job—is to be original and sane.  So we started to build institutions instead of destroying them. We built an independent media outlet that is called MediaZona, and we started covering prisons and politics. Then we expanded and somehow managed to become one of the most important independent agencies in Russia. And another thing that we started is a solidarity network for prisoners all around Russia, modeled on the ACLU. We help them case by case and give them a bunch of lawyers, telephone lines, and a network of families and acquaintances, so prisoners have someone to call. So the conclusion is, yes, I think our role right now is to structure this world, starting with separating truth from lies and constructing alternative structures to those of power.

So you are a little bit optimistic?

Yes, if I weren’t, I think I would just die.

What about angry?

What requires heroism in prison is to take back the life that they want to take away from you. To take back the joy and bring back positivity. It was pretty difficult, but the bottom line for me was, how can I make my life meaningful when I am in prison? Was I angry? Not that much. I didn’t feel that anger was the right emotion because we received so much anger from the opposite side, from the state prosecutors to the Russian television channels, which created all this hysteria that we are witches, that we are here to destroy Russia, that we are here because of Clinton or George Soros or somebody else. So there was enough bullshit that was triggered by anger and too much anger, so me and my friends, we just decided to be in a state of Zen. And this is really difficult while you are in prison.

Two weeks before Trump was elected, you predicted he would win in a video.

It was a piece of art, not a prediction. I saw a lot of optimism in Americans at the time, which I thought wasn’t grounded in reality. I saw a lot of my American friends seemed to be really underestimating how popular Trump could be outside of big cities. So I just wanted to warn them that you should be more active and you should share your knowledge and your political passion beyond big cities and talk with people outside of them. That’s why our music actually is pretty conservative and we don’t use slang words. Even though I say fuck every second word in my normal language, we decided not to use it because we risk losing listeners who haven’t decided yet who to vote for, and it was important for us to go beyond.

Can you talk about Pussy Riot? What is happening with the rest of you?

We don’t have the rest of us. It’s like a movement. So this might not just exist in Russia now; it exists in different countries, too. I can go to Chicago and I will meet people there in masks, and they are like, “We are Pussy Riot. We consider ourselves that.” And that’s actually a dream because when we started it, we wanted to create a movement. People come and go and they join and some people who were with us in 2011 are coming back this year and they’re like, “We will create a song with you.” So we don’t have stable members. Some of them are dedicating themselves mostly to journalism right now and some of them to activism and some of them want to do paintings. But most of us, we are still sticking to activist art.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Your weekly briefing of progressive news.

You have Successfully Subscribed!