Almost ten years ago, on August 17, 2012, five woolly girls took the altar of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow to the blow of a punk guitar and asked the mother of God to expel Putin from their country. . The band’s performance, Pussy Riot, was canceled just a minute later, and their two-year prison sentence didn’t teach them not to continue their risky missions: “We condemn the situation in Russia, which has seriously deteriorated with the war” spokesperson points to this newspaper by phone Maria (or Masha) Aliokhina.
Repeated in the denunciation actions, Masha fled Russia a few weeks agoHe left the customs officers behind with his food delivery outfit. He went to Belarus, then to Lithuania, and from there flew to Iceland, From where he had friends in the art community and then left for a European tour with Pussy Riot, which toured German territory this week and will stop in Barcelona (Razzmatazz 2) on June 1. “I have been on restricted release for almost a year and a half,” explains Maria Aliokhina. “I was arrested six times, locked up for 15 days each time, and eventually placed under house arrest, forced to wear an electronic wristband.”
war censorship
By now he had made it clear that he had no intention of leaving his home Russia. “I have decided to go out to perform the tour as planned since last November. Our actions are illegal in Russia, everything is illegal. But I can’t talk about my plans because they are extremely unpredictable. Now we’re focused on the ‘show’ and doing our best,” he says, remembering how things were in his country. “Declaring a war of war, disseminating photos of Bucha or information about deceased Russian soldiers is illegal. They imprisoned people known in the West like Vladimir Kara-Murzá. [periodista y opositor]For speaking out against the war in the Arizona legislature. This is war censorship and they can open criminal cases for anything.”
He assures that his escape is only one more, “About four million people have left Russia since the beginning of the war.” The result of a conflict “where the propagandists of the Russian media tried to feed the hatred of the people and for which they were as responsible as the army”. TV commentators casually talking about missile launches in Paris or Berlin. They do not provoke, they show their strength permanently,” he said.
broken ligaments
And there, did Mr. Putin exceed your expectations? “A bloody maniac pretending to be a new Stalin defeating the Nazis. But now there are no Nazis and this is a bloody war against a country with deep family ties. Many Russians who have relatives in Ukraine and vice versa, and these connections will no longer be the same. Masha believes that the announcements of the embargo on Russian oil and gas by the European Union are “late and insufficient, but it is a start.”
All of this permeates ‘Riot days’, Pussy Riot’s touring show based on the book of the same name published by Aliokhina in 2017. “Liberty and peace is our manifesto. My story from my first act to my last day in prison has expanded with references to the war in Ukraine,” he explains. What she describes as punk, who doesn’t think too much about the genre of music, from both international references (a Lydia Lunch) and, above all, “punk artists from the perestroika era, like Kino.”
Pussy Riot is on its way as an open collective: another member, Nadya Tolokonnikova, lives in the United States. “We are in different places, but for the same reasons we fight in favor of human rights,” stresses Maria Aliokhina, who does not consider herself a fearless woman despite her background. “Hard to say. If you see what’s going on in Ukraine, you can’t call yourself brave.”
Source: Informacion
