On a mild November morning a couple of days before Thanksgiving, Maria Alyokhina is sitting in the kitchen at a friend's apartment in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York.
Alyokhina, known to her friends as Masha, is sipping coffee and smoking a Russian cigarette, both of which, she says, are helping her to gather her thoughts, as she hasn't had much sleep. The night before, news organisations reported that a grand jury had decided not to charge a white policeman in Ferguson, Missouri, who had shot dead a black teenager, Michael Brown, in August 2014. Spontaneous protests had broken out across the country, prompting President Obama to appeal for calm.
The previous evening Alyokhina had just arrived at the apartment in a four-storey red-brick building when she read on Twitter that a number of demonstrations against the grand-jury verdict were taking place in New York City. She headed into Manhattan and, over the next few hours, was one of a few hundred people who blocked the Robert F Kennedy Bridge, which links northeastern Manhattan to Queens and the Bronx. She marvelled at the noise of the crowd, was surprised by the politeness of the New York cops, encountered a journalist from Russia Channel, a state-owned Russian broadcaster, and took a selfie with Perry Chen, the cofounder of Kickstarter, before returning to Bed-Stuy at 4.30am.
As Alyokhina made her way towards the East River that night, the crowds were unaware that among their number was one of the world's foremost political activists – one whose arrest during a protest in Moscow a few weeks later would make headlines across the globe.
Along with her associate Nadezhda (Nadya) Andreyevna Tolokonnikova, Alyokhina is part of the feminist collective Pussy Riot, who became a political prisoner following a protest at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow in February 2012.
Standing barefoot in her friend's kitchen in a black dress, Alyokhina holds an iPhone and watches footage of people chanting and marching along a roadway the night before. She has a mischievous, dry sense of humour. When there is talk of a trip to a local Dunkin' Donuts, she softly grimaces. "I'm no snob, but Dunkin' Donuts?" the 26-year-old says, before ordering a coffee with caramel.
Tolokonnikova arrives quietly with her husband, the activist Pyotr Verzilov, and takes a seat next to Alyokhina at the open kitchen window to smoke a cigarette. She wears a red-and-white checked shirt and her black hair is dyed green at the tips. Her face is open and calm with eyes that hover between intensity and wariness. In appearances in the UK the previous week she has been animated, even playful, when onstage, making jokes about the movie Borat.
Today, she is less buoyant, but registers the humour in what she says – much of it a commentary on the grim state of modern Russia – with a small laugh at the end of her sentences.
Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova were released from prison in December 2013 as part of an amnesty that served to demonstrate the capricious nature of the Russian justice system: around the same time Mikhail Khodorkovsky, formerly Russia's wealthiest man, was granted clemency after fraud charges against him were unexpectedly dropped. Greenpeace activists who had been arrested in the Arctic Circle were also freed. In all three cases the releases were perceived as a gesture meant to divert criticism from the regime before the Winter Olympics, held in Sochi in February 2014.
Despite the deprivations of prison, Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova remained energetic iconoclasts. Weeks after being released from their prison camps in Nizhny Novgorod in western Russia and Krasnoyarsk in Siberia respectively, they travelled to the winter Olympiad. On arrival, they and other members of Pussy Riot were attacked by whip-wielding Cossacks – empowered to act as informal security agents for the event – before being detained by local police. Released after a few hours, Pussy Riot then gathered by the interlocking rings that act as the symbol for the games and performed a newly composed song: "Putin Will Teach You to Love the Motherland" – a direct quote from one of the Cossacks earlier that day.
A reasonable course of action for those who face aggressive, bigger, more powerful opponents with limitless resources is to remain on the margins. But Tolokonnikova's extraordinarily articulate and defiant closing statement in court in August 2012 – a speech delivered from inside a cage when she was aged 23 that was shown live on Russian television – established that Pussy Riot was neither contrite nor cowed. During 15 minutes of daring eloquence, she called into question the legitimacy of what was happening: "This mock trial is close to the standards of the Stalinist troikas."
Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova could leave Russia and would almost certainly be granted asylum in the west – Verzilov has Canadian residency after spending time in North America when growing up. But instead, Pussy Riot is pursuing a new project – a human-rights group and media service that will, once again, pit them against the regime and its president, who in 2012 described them as "having undermined the moral fundamentals" of the country. "It's not a question of courage, it's a question of your personal development, because everything interesting begins with conflict," Alyokhina says. "It can be personal conflict and it can be public conflict, but the conflict forces you to grow up, pushes you to understand something. If you just have a comfortable life you start to degrade."
Just as their reputation now offers them – and, by extension, those incarcerated in Russian jails – a voice, so it makes them a target. One morning in March 2014, the women were in the city of Nizhny Novgorod when six young men attacked them, spraying an acidic liquid in their faces and leaving them covered in green stains. They say that Russian security forces routinely harass them. Pussy Riot's power, as with all dissidents and activists, is that they're visible – the protest in Christ the Saviour Church lasted less than a minute, yet reached across the globe.
When talking about the beating they suffered in Sochi, Tolokonnikova says wryly: "We don't want to produce a lot of these incidents. A lot of Russian people believe we did this by our own hands, that we hired Cossacks to make publicity..." "And paid them to beat us!" Alyokhina says incredulously. "We are a special type of masochist."
They are continuing to work on art projects – the New York trip is to discuss a secret assignment to be revealed later in 2015 – but much of their energy is now put into Zona Prava, an NGO focused on prisoners' rights, and a news website, MediaZona, that will report on human rights, prisons and the judicial system in Russia. ("Zona" has a dual meaning in Russian vernacular, also signifying prison camps.)
It's a bold and unapologetic move that they see as consistent with other aspects of their work: "When you're doing political art you can sometimes use it in your prison rights or human rights," Tolokonnikova says. "You don't separate it."
The origins of MediaZona, naturally, are in incarceration. While imprisoned, Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova were subject to deprivation and arbitrary punishments. On September 23, 2013, after a year behind bars, Tolokonnikova went on a hunger strike. In an open letter sent from the prison (where, according to Tolokonnikova, the deputy chief of the penal colony described his politics to her as "Stalinist") she described how "fellow prisoners collapse under the strain of slavery-like conditions" and demanded that the administration respect human rights and operate in accordance with the law. After seven days she was moved to the prison hospital. "There wasn't this much attention on a civil human-rights case in Russia for a long time," Verzilov says. They realised that there was an opportunity to try and change the system in the region where Tolokonnikova was being held and worked with the human-rights group Agora, which includes Irina Khrunova, the lawyer who represents Pussy Riot. Alyokhina also took on the authorities, fighting to have hearings in open court, for access to books and challenging the prison's right to subject her to a gynaecological search when her lawyer visited.
The Russian experience of prison is very different from Europe's: "Everybody knows somebody who is in prison," Alyokhina says. "We have a strong culture of prisons from empire times to the Soviet Union right through to today." "Estimates are that a third of the population went through the Gulag – it could happen to anyone," says Ben Judah, the author of Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin. "A family that's been through prison in Russia is as normal as a Jewish family in Israel that's been through the Holocaust. It's a cornerstone of the culture."
According to a 2013 survey by the International Centre for Prison studies, Russia has around 681,600 prisoners, 475 for every 100,000 people. Only the US, with 2,239,751 (716 people per 100,000) and China, with 1,640,000 (121 people per 100,000) have more citizens locked up.
Ksenia Zhivago, 24, is in charge of the Zona Prava prison map project, a mission to build an interactive database that provides information on penitentiary institutions across Russia – 758 of which are penal colonies. It's an effort to bring transparency to a system which, in some parts of the country, can be chaotic (after her sentencing, Tolokonnikova went missing for 28 days, eventually emerging in a work camp in Siberia), overcrowded and sometimes corrupt. Teams of Zona Prava volunteers are gathering data points – from official sources, online forums, searches on Yandex and supervisory groups as well as former prisoners, who are answering a 300-question survey. Zona Prava is also working with the Public Supervisory Committee, an official group that has access to prisoners and passes on the questionnaires during visits. "It covers everything from contact details for the administrators, to visiting hours, transport links, medicine, working and living conditions and communication with officials," Zhivago says.
The website also offers practical assistance: there is a hotline that provides access to a psychologist and a lawyer, but also guidance in navigating bureaucracy. "We also provide help in writing complaints, investigations, cases of death, investigations in penal colonies, phone consultations and the European Court of Human Rights."
The intention, according to Zhivago, is that the database will become close to a real-time picture of the system that will be corroborated at every stage. Zona Prava is working with the Yandex maps API to geolocate each institution and aim to ensure that the platform can be embedded on other websites.
MediaZona is edited by Sergey Smirnov, who when he was appointed had been a casual acquaintance of Tolokonnikova for around five years. During that time he had been reporting for online newspaper Gazeta.ru, covering the military and the political opposition. He rose to prominence after reporting on alleged voter fraud in Russia's 2012 presidential election.
On May 6, 2012 – the day before Putin was to be inaugurated for his third term – hundreds of protestors were arrested after clashes with the police in Bolotnaya Square in central Moscow. Many received lengthy sentences. The protestors, according to one participant who preferred not to be named, were largely educated professionals and the demonstration had been organised via social media. "That frightened the authorities – it finally made them take the internet seriously," says Ilya Oskolkov Tsentsiper, a media entrepreneur who is also cofounder of the Strelka Institute, a nonprofit educational institution located across the Moscow River from the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.
Smirnov covered the story in some detail. "The Kremlin was not happy about some of the articles," he says via email. "Gazeta.ru began to experience problems with censorship and some journalists had to quit voluntarily."
Smirnov left to become deputy editor of political news site Russkaya Planeta before joining MediaZona in May 2014. He now finds himself at the nexus of where Russian political life is being played out. "Opposition activity is reduced to constant criminal proceedings in courts," he says. "The [anti-Kremlin] movement's leader Alexei Navalny has received a conditional sentence in a fabricated criminal case against him. Another trial involving him as an accused is running now." [Navalny was given a conditional sentence in December and rearrested hours later.]
Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, a political scientist at King's College London's Russia Institute, affirms that the Russian legal system has never really been independent of the Kremlin and that the current system has its roots in the chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 90s. "They created a political pyramid of power and integrated the institutions – legal, law enforcement, political, even economic – to support the power system," she says. "If you're Putin, you don't want to turn the opposition into martyrs – you want to keep them busy and off the street," Judah says. "Take someone like Navalny: you stick him with a million court cases, so he has to basically fight in the courts for the rest of his life – he has no time to set his agenda."
Sharafutdinova echoes this, describing Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova as having experienced "a very personal touch" of the Russian criminal justice system.
The small team of journalists divides duties between posting around ten news items per day, reporting from the courts and publishing trial updates in a timeline format. In November 2014, there were several of what Smirnov describes as "politically motivated criminal cases" running consecutively in Russia, meaning that the team was continually updating the site with developments.
Reports are posted once a day, sometimes more, and investigative and historical stories a couple of times per week. Smirnov says his next goal is to get this up to three a week. Traffic is modest – the relatively narrow focus of the site means that there is a built-in limitation to the audience – at 3,000 to 10,000 visitors a day. The best performing post – reports on the Navalry trial and a female prisoner's story of 16 years inside – gained around 100,000 views.
"MediaZona may be cited as a human rights project, however we work strictly according to the rules of journalism," Smirnov says. "We are journalists and unlike regular human-rights organisations we have to take responsibility for the quality of the information that we deliver. This is why fact-checking is mandatory for us and it is always better if we can get information from official sources."
Judah, who lived in Moscow during the opposition's most audacious years and has travelled extensively within Russia, recalls a time when a new generation of bloggers and media entrepreneurs, such as Oskolkov-Tsentsiper, were establishing voices that were independent, bold and unfettered by the burden of what had come before. "From 2007 to 2012 there was a generation of young journalists who didn't remember the Soviet Union and weren't completely fucked in the head by its collapse," he says. "They'd grown up in a Moscow with the living standards of South Korea. They'd also grown up online when there was no censorship and were setting up these cool websites. These were the people who had been to Shoreditch and liked it very much – they wanted to bring that to Moscow."
But the Russia that Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova emerged into when they were released from jail was a very different country: the optimism and boldness of the millennium's first ten years had largely been crushed, along with the political opposition.
In October 2014 Putin approved a law limiting foreign companies from owning more than 20 per cent of Russian media outlets. The legislation was widely seen as a way of curtailing some of the remaining independent voices, such as the business daily Vedomosti (which is owned by News Corp), Pearson and the Finnish company Sanoma. Internally Russian media has been purged: some outlets have been swallowed up by state-run enterprises (the fate of the NTV television station which is now part of Russian energy giant Gazprom), experienced state-sponsored changes in editorial staff (such as news websites Lenta.ru and Gazeta.ru), or been dissolved by presidential decree (the fate of RIA Novosti, the widely respected state news agency). In November 2014, Mikhail Mikhailin, editor of Kommersant – a newspaper that once published an issue consisting of blank pages in defiance of a court order – stepped down during a change in leadership that's widely seen as a retrograde step for objective reporting.
A month after the law on foreign ownership was passed, the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library, based in St Petersburg, announced that it was setting up an alternative to Wikipedia. According to an official press release, the online resource will "objectively and accurately present the country and its population," after Wikipedia was deemed lacking in "enough detailed and reliable information about Russian regions and the life of the country".
In August 2014 a new information security law was passed in an attempt to restrict social media: bloggers with more than 3,000 daily readers must now register with a state regulator. Human Rights Watch described it as "another milestone in Russia's relentless crackdown on free expression". Verzilov says that, since then, Twitter's legal department wrote to inform him that it had received a request from the state watchdog Roskomnadzor, asking to know the number of visitors to his feed. From January 1, 2015, all companies that store data from Russian users have to locate their service inside Russia – something that is logistically impossible.
Verzilov views it as a ploy – the Russian government knows that Google, Facebook and Twitter can't comply, so will try and reach accommodation regarding other forms of data. "The Russian government is preparing the ground for negotiating with foreign internet companies," he says.
While the large services are robust enough to resist attack, protecting independent news sites such as MediaZona from denial of service (DoS) attacks is crucial to keeping them online. In cases involving state actors the attack is often undertaken using so-called botnets: large numbers of computers that are infected with a virus that can be controlled by a third party. Smirnov says that they are "expecting all possible virus attacks". Verzilov confirms that MediaZona has been targeted.
"The ability to keep web content online can be the Achilles' heel of independent media groups – availability is their power, yet they're easily knocked offline by very cheap DoS attacks," says CJ Adams, the amiable, goateed, 29-year-old product manager of Project Shield, a Google initiative that works to protect independent news organisations, NGOs, sites detailing election information and human-rights groups from attack. Google allows under-threat websites to route their traffic through its infrastructure, mitigating any attack by filtering out bad traffic.
Internet security company CloudFlare runs a similar project named Project Galileo. Incidents of these kinds of attacks have occurred over the past 18 months in Iran, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine and Russia. "Tech companies should be listening to those who face these risks – it makes technology better, safer and stronger," Adams says. As part of the project, his team has created the Digital Attack Map, an online data visualisation that shows, in real-time, the top two per cent of attacks happening across the world according to security company Arbor Networks, which has DoS mitigation boxes on all tier-one and -two ISPs. "If we can solve the problem for people who face extreme risks, we make everybody safer," he adds. "Our mission is to make sure that all the world's information is accessible and useful."
Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova sit at a table in the apartment. The place is Brooklyn eclectic – there are guitars and a keyboard, artwork throughout the space, an area with a projector and a screen and a zebra skin on the wall. Alyokhina eats a plate of eggs while Tolokonnikova picks at some carrot cake while curled in a desk chair. Verzilov sits at the table working on a MacBook, occasionally adding to the conversation when asked to clarify a point by Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova. They sometimes rely on him to translate, but today they speak in English which is better than they seem to think it is.
The Pussy Riot project, with its derring-do and pop-punk aesthetic, has provided the group with a platform to address the world about the domestic issues facing the Russian Federation; whether they can initiate change through journalism is another matter. "News media professionals, reporters and editors need a business model," Oskolkov-Tsentsiper says, adding that dissenting websites won't be able to attract advertisers, meaning that they have to be privately funded. "We make no secret of who we receive money from," Smirnov says. "Funds are raised by Masha and Nadya [from speaking engagements].
We are funded by various organisations from abroad, but we do not get any money from foreign governments."
The regime positions Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova as unhealthy outsiders. Sharafutdinova says that Putin has situated himself as the protector of Russian morality, a stance that has become as important as the struggle for mineral resources and oil. "There is a war going on, but it's not a war through weaponry," she says. "The weaponry here is information and values."
At the end of the block where the pair are staying, there is a huge mural named "When Women Pursue Justice" which features a number of prominent female leaders and activists. These include Shirley Chisholm – the first African-American woman elected to US Congress and the first to seek nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate – who described herself as "a catalyst for change", a nod to those who would come after her.
This kind of historical perspective has resonance for Pussy Riot. Alyokhina talks about their desire to increase the amount of video footage on MediaZona, that the way to engage a potential audience is to show them the "reality" of what is happening. "After 20 years I hope it will be part of history and people will watch it and they will remember that this way of living, this way of building a country is not right," she says. "For me, it's a lot for history – for memory."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
