46 The Times Magazineven 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.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 inRussia. 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.E
Alexei Navalny on a flight
back to Moscow from Berlin
on January 17. He was
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