The subtitle, Life and Fate in Russia, of this engaging, defiant and sometimes funny book, is a nod to the epic novel Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, one of the themes of which is the tragedy of the Russian people living in a totalitarian state at a time of war.
And just as in Grossman’s work, the twists and turns of Maria (Masha) Alyokhina’s chaotic life are not necessarily introduced in chronological order. Her memoir is a collage of diary entries, jottings, flashbacks, dialogue, character sketches, and narrative segments, confusing at times, but amounting to a rapid-fire page-turner.
If the sentences are terse and short, she explains, it is because she learned in prison to talk about herself in just a few words. But she lets herself go at times, for example with an acid 500-word sentence imagining Russian opposition leader Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny in prison, and ending, “… like at a wake, 308 days in solitary confinement, emergency doctors confirmed the death of the convicted, convicted Navalny felt unwell after his walk, what was the reason is not clarified, goodbye Alexei Anatolyevich says the judge.”
It is also a story of love, love for her country and love for Lucy Shtein, a fellow protester, who put a clown’s nose on a stone Stalin and, with Masha, hung rainbow flags around Moscow after LGBT activities were banned.
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Alyokhina is best known internationally as a member of Pussy Riot, the feminist punk band which infiltrated the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, and sang, “Virgin Mary, banish Putin”. She was sentenced to two years in a penal colony for this “hooliganism”.
On release, she continued her activism, co-founded MediaZone, a news outlet exposing abuses within the Russian legal system, studied journalism and embarked on several world tours, at first with the band, then to promote her first memoir, Riot Days.
In 2019 she arrived backstage at the Pavilion Theatre in Dún Laoghaire, barely on time for a public interview with me, a slight, intense figure, flustered and distracted, desperate to find a socket to charge her phone, then for an hour she captivated the audience with her calm account of the struggle against repression in Putin’s Russia.
She recalls in the book how activists in Dublin told her about the fight to repeal the Eighth Amendment and of “illegitimate children just like me” being sent with their mothers to Magdalene laundries. Masha did not meet her father until she was 20.
Fame abroad did not dampen her ardour for activism at home. Her life became one of repeated protests, followed by harassment, detentions and house arrest, and occasional rough treatment, constantly under surveillance by cops from Centre E, the Centre for Combating Extremism. Displaying a slogan at a street demonstration was permitted for a time, then only if it was a one-person picket. So, activists queued to take turns standing alone on busy streets to hold up their piece of subversive cardboard. Then that was banned in ever-worsening authoritarianism, to the point where Masha reflects that “every second thought I have breaks the criminal code”.
Interrogations were Kafkaesque. You have a right to a lawyer. Can I call my lawyer? No. Alyokhina was in court and detention centres so regularly that law enforcers got to know her well, and some treated her kindly. Once, after screaming with frustration in a cell, the head of the detention centre told her, “Masha, you’re a hero, you’re a legend, everybody here knows you, don’t even think about cracking up”.
An Insp Vlad bought her pizza, cheese and juice for which he took no money, saying, “That’s a hundred points of karma for me”. He was reassigned. They were the exception. Fellow activist Pyoty Verzilov fell ill with suspected poisoning and had to be evacuated to Berlin, though he survived. Members of a chat group exchanging news of the war were tortured and jailed. A historian revealing Stalin’s victims was sent to the camps.
The day on which Putin announced the war against Ukraine coincided with the 10th anniversary of the Punk Prayer in the cathedral. Alyokhina despairs: “Ten Years. Virgin Mary, banish Putin. Well, where are you now?”
Since then, activists have had the choice of the gulag, capitulation or flight. Lucy decided to make a run for it. Alyokhina defied home arrest to be with her as she packed, and for this she was detained and sent home to await trial for the crime of violating parole for the third time, which meant being returned to the camps. She slipped out of her apartment dressed as a food delivery courier, unnoticed by the bored Centre E men stationed in cars outside.
An elderly sympathiser drove her all the way to the Belarus border with Lithuania, which she got through, posing as an Icelandic actor who had lost her passport. It was the end of the Pussy Riot challenge to Putin. Everyone from her collective was leaving.
“In a matter of months,” she concludes, “the country will be ‘cleansed’ of people like us … the real Russia will be in the courts and the prisons.”
- Conor O’Clery is a former Moscow correspondent of The Irish Times
