May 26, 2025 • 41 mins
When Nadya Tolokonnikova saw her country Russia change under President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime, she knew she had to do something.
She started the iconic ski-mask-wearing art protest collective Pussy Riot. On February 21st, 2012, they performed their anti-Putin protest song, Punk Prayer, in a Moscow church, launching Nadya into overnight activist fame… and a prison labour camp.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, girlfriends, I just wanted to give you a heads
up that this episode includes conversations about state violence and incarceration.
But around those you'll hear the twisty tale of how
a group of artists protest against the Russian government. Oh
and also there's gonna be some swearing. But you knew
that already, didn't you. Nadia is sitting in her Moscow
(00:22):
flat playing the piano.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
I'm a piano player. It's difficult thing for Russian kids.
You either have to go to blair or to piano.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
She's stuck playing this little tune over and over.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
It was beautiful and really mystique. I wrote a little
draft and rose to my friends and quickly made a
check in a couple of hours, and there's a punk prayer.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Punk prayer, a song of hope, anger and dreams of
a better Russia. And the friend she wrote that song for.
They're the ski mask wearing protest collective pussy Riot, created
by Nadia.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
The chorus goes, Britain, Mary, please become feminist. And in
the versus we talk about reproductive justice, we talk about
the corruption in the church, and one of my favorite allignes,
gay pride, is sent to Siberian in chuckles.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Nadia doesn't know it yet, but punk Prayer will be
heard all around the world with some pretty damning consequences.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Eventually, in broken into prison.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
She'll spend almost two years in a prison labor camp
sow in police uniforms from dawn till dusk. That's the
price Nadia and her Pussy Right sisters will pay for
challenging Russia's President Vladimir Putin, one of the most powerful, wealthy,
and dangerous men on earth.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
We're not professional criminals or anything like that. Were just
a bunch of artists who were doing our best.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
But Punk Prayer will also launch Pussy Riot as the
moral conscience of Putin's Russia, the front runners of a
global feminist movement rallying together against Russian authoritarian power and
their weapon art. I'm Anisonfield and from the teams at
(02:31):
Novel and iHeart Podcasts, this is the Girlfriend's Spotlight, where
we tell stories of women women today. Nadia Punk's the President.
(03:05):
The first time I saw Nadia Tolakanikov and Pussy Riot
was on my very twenty twelve tumbler feed. I thought
it was a cool statement art, funny hats. But it
came and went like everything else on Tumblr. And then
there were the arrests, the courtroom dramas, political interference, and
prison time. Now Pussy Riot were making headlines and I
(03:30):
was gripped. But I never really learned how Nadia and
the other women got there. So let's start this story
somewhere nice and picturesque, like Siberia in nineteen eighty nine,
the year Nadia was born.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Siberia is a wonderful place and it has shape of
huge pennis so I'm from head of it and my
grandmother who would visit every summer vacation. We've between the balls,
and to get from one part of the dick to
another you need to spend four hours in the plane.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Wow, that is a big dick.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
I know. No one can really impest me with the
size of their thing. After that, it's.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
Not just Siberia's size that it's known for. It's also
defined by its weather.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
It's a place where you have winter for nine months
out a year. It's Mine's forty degrees celsius plus really
really heavy wing. Polar winter brings its own heaviness on
everyone's life. So people find all sorts of escapes. It
could be drugs and sometimes hard drugs, or it could
(04:42):
be bitter games. And for me it was mostly books.
And my house was filled with art books on Potticelli
and early Greek art, and I think it gave me
radicalosing that probably otherwise would not emerge.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Wow, you had, like I, really kind of high brow
early education in art. You weren't reading normal kids books art.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
He was my family in a package. My dad and
my mom are both very artistic people. My mom and
dad split when I was five, and she was responsible
for feeding me and paying the bills. My dad, with
whom I stayed connected and really close. He was a
(05:30):
multimedia artist in the Soviet era, which also pushed him
to the edge of society, but he gave me this
passion to art.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
By the early two thousands, Nadia had basically learned everything
she needed from the grand masters of art. It was
time to look to the future.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
It was a magical coincidence that this festival of contemporary
art came to my home city. I was around thirteen,
and I was lucky enough to witness and a series
of talks and exhibitions and performances of a few contemporary
artists who became my guiding starts, and it started to
model my life after them.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
At sixteen, hungry to learn more, Nadia moved to the
big city, Moscow, and there she started studying philosophy, but
she was unimpressed by the art world.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
What is so around me was mostly commercial art. It's
just way too boring. Commercial art is by definition something
that is useless. But for me, my idea was to
provide an alternative to the commercial art scene and hopefully
started a movement.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
And were you always interested in the sort of political
sides of philosophy and art at that stage?
Speaker 2 (06:50):
I think I arrived to my interest in politics through
my interest in avant garde art and their world building ambitions,
which was political in a way that they wanted to
build me a society, and that sort of totality of
art that wants to change life once and for all
(07:12):
was really speaking to me. And I wanted to see
something like that around me among young hungry artists and
wanted them to change the world. I wanted them to
change well, at least our government, which was at the
time moving towards authoritarianism.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Nadia was only ten when Putin first became president and
started centralizing power, Regional autonomy was reduced, media outlets were
brought under state control, and over the years critics of
the regime died under suspicious circumstances. Slowly but surely, Russia
became more authoritarian and more nationalists, two things that understandably
(07:55):
have never sat comfortably with Nadia.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
It's dangerous not just for Russian people, but also for
people abroad, for neighboring countries.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Nadia believed in Russia, but not Putin's Russia. She believed
in culture and education, art, freedom. She had to do something.
So in two thousand and seven, Nadia, together with the
man who had become her husband and another couple, started
a collective. They planned to arrange protests all over Moscow.
(08:28):
So the choice of name was clear. Viner By now
means war in Russian.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
It meant war against conservatives, our constitutions and the political order.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
Vina did things like storming the Russian White House, which
is the heavily guarded government headquarters in central Moscow, by
jumping over the six meter fence and running for their
lives through the grounds.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
We were debating if we are going to be electrocuted
once we reached the top, were shot that would not
be fun, but it didn't happen, so all good and
the ideas to show that resisting is indeed an option.
Imagine if a group of anarchists can really do this
(09:15):
very radical action without ever getting caught, without going to jail,
without getting arrested. Then imagine what would happen if a
million if people try to do the same and eventually
will have real democracy.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Okay, a small goal. Life for women and queer people
in Putince Russia had arguably gotten worse. Rights were rolled back,
and patriarchal rhetoric seem to dominate politics and culture.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
And so eventually four years in by now brought me
to the need of struying something that will be feminist oriented,
that will focus not just on achieving democracy, but also
on protecting rights of queer people, on making sure that
(10:03):
gender equality is achieved in my country. And this how
pursued was born. Wow, and how did you come up
with the name.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
It's a great name.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
This started from me and kat sitting in her apartment.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Kat is Yakatarina Samutzovich, who had also been part of
Vina and had a pretty messy flat.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Neither a kut or her dad cared about cleaning stuff up.
If you open the fridge, you'd die from the smell.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
It's September twenty eleven, six months before Putin, then Prime
Minister is set to return for a third term as
Russia's president. Nadia, who's now in her early twenties, knows
what this means. More powerful one, less democratic freedoms, agency
and rights for everyone else. So she and Kat are
(10:56):
into something they're calling punk feminism, and.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
We'll look did this term broadly, and not just punk
as music, but also really really bold and groundbreaking artistic
move So we got truly inspired by the Red Girl movement.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
The Right Goal movement was actually a pretty big inspiration
for me too when I was in my early twenties.
It was this diy feminist music scene that was started
in the Pacific Northwest in the early nineties, and I
actually wrote one of my final music school essays about them.
After I was the only one who put my hand
up when the lecturer asked if anyone would call themselves
a feminist. He said, watch out for this one, and
(11:37):
everyone laughed at me. I obviously had to go on
a feminist rampage after that, and the Right Goal movement
was the perfect outlet. The people at the heart of
it were angry but also playful. They made scenes and
sang punk songs about politics and sex and misogyny. The
genre's high Priestess, Kathleen Hannah from the Bamborkini Kill, had
(11:58):
this famous slogan girls to the Front, meaning the girls
stood at the front of shows while the dudes had
to move to the back. In short, right girl was
the antithesis to my old lecturer and to Putin's Russia.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
We started to joke around what would happen if Russia
had their own Red Girl moment. We thought that would
be cool to record a song of a Russian version
of Red Girls. But we were visual artists, so me
(12:33):
and Kat wanted to start a fake band and convince
everyone this is an actual band.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
This fake band would put on gorilla gigs to draw
attention to the government's human rights violations and hypocrisy.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
We just started to call it pussered to bring a
derogatory term for a woman, for a girl that we
are going to reclaim the same way that word bitch.
Queer punk was reclaimed.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Name sorted great and now everything else.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
So what do we need? What do bands do, and
we cyclarless, watched some videos and we went on website
where people sell used stuff in Russia. We didn't have
money at all, but we bought a guitar that didn't play,
an electric guitar that used the props to create an
(13:23):
image of a band.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
They recalled their first song in Cat's Bathroom.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
We didn't have smartphones at the time, so it was
just a very cheap Olympus recorder, and we didn't have
any knowledge on how to put songs together, so it
was very ugly.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
And that's punk. That's the wonder you're doing it exactly
how you should be.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
We weren't even able to put together a loop like
in a continuous fashion, so there was this little pause
in between of the loops, so it would be like
to do.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
And that same page sounds like you're in jazz now
what's going on? That's very cool, but also, I mean,
the sad fact is there's like nothing more punk band
than being like a punk band who insists they're not
a punk band, even if you weren't one, which is
(14:20):
so cool. You've gone through the looking glass.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
On October one, twenty eleven, Nadia and Cat play the
song they recorded during a presentation on punk feminism. They
say it's by a new Russian punk band called Pussy Riot,
and they call the song kill the Sexist. The sexist
that they're referring to is not explicitly putin, but it
is a comment on his ideology. A Pussy Riot want
(14:46):
to start making a noise about the imminent return to
presidency that he's planning. But they are just two people.
This fake punk band needs more members and fast.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
We didn't have a lot of time. Just felt like
we have to work every single day and try to
at least think that we have an actual movement because
we didn't have any money, so we were mostly stealing
stuff from supermarkets. Yeah, we lived by shoplifting. Then we
started to work actually with our friends punk musicians, and
you told them, just writing shitty like really quick in
(15:21):
an hour and we'll screen something on top. It was
mostly mean kat as the core, but we were good
at art propaganda. We knew how to write press releases,
how to context journalists like work close professional photographers and
videographers and put together videos. So it's a unheard of
(15:42):
speed of production.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Would you be able to tell me about your very
first protest that you guys did together.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
The first batch of processed actions was called Free the Couplestones.
It was the end of October in Moscow. It was
already freezing cold. I found to be outside, so we're
decided to invade Masclow subway and we found places with
this scaffolding being in the middle of the station and
(16:11):
it looked just like the stage. So we would climb
on that little platform and packer a guitar that didn't
play and connected the microphone that did work and make
the action.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
Wearing brightly colored mini dresses and ski masks to conceal
their identities, Pussy Riots shout and dance on subway scaffolding
and in crowded subway cars. They warn that ballots will
be used as toilet paper in the approaching elections.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
And we did dozens of those in the subway and
then compelled it altogether in one video.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
Pussy Riots actions aren't designed to scare people. Their tricksters
inspiring hope. What they're doing is fun but also dangerous
because almost every single time they perform, they get arrested.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Imagine cops run to the base of this scaffolding and
there's unless you learned how to fly. There is no
windows cape. Some cops are nice, some cops are nut
Some cops are you know, punting and dragging you around
by your hair, And I was used to it.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
I mean, did you not, after you realize that happened
the first couple of times, did you not decide to
like perform on the floor where you could could make
a run for it.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
That would not be beautiful.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
I can't argue with that, but Putin did after the
break a punk prayer. In December twenty eleven, Putin's party
(18:10):
United Russia won the parliamentary elections amid allegations of electoral
fraud and a pre arranged role swap with the sitting president.
Tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets to protest.
They were the largest protests in Russia since the fall
of the Soviet Union in the nineties. Pussy Riot was
there too. They shouted lyrics like riot and Russia Putin
(18:34):
chickened out. You could find them screaming their protest songs
in luxury boutiques and fashion shows. A top expensive cars.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
And they do behind it was Britain was throwing a
lot of money to make people compliant to everything he
does and momentum these places where it reached people in
Moscow were hanging out to the time to warn them
that one day their lives are going to get complicated
(19:03):
because of Putain.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Next on their target list was the Russian Orthodox Church.
Nadia and Pussy Riot believed that the church's support of
Putin created an unhealthy authoritarian relationship between church and state.
It lent us sort of moral and spiritual legitimacy to
Putin as a divinely sanctioned leader. So Pussy Riot came
(19:28):
up with a way to draw attention to it. It
would be dangerous, lots of people would be appalled, but
no one would be able to ignore it.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
On the day of the performance set it's really called
not Cozy Windy Gray. A lot of participants said the
day of the action that they aren't going to be
able to join. People felt uneasy.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
It's February twenty first, twenty twelve, and Pussy Ryes are
about to do a flashmob performance inside Moscow's Cathedral of
Christ the Savior, right in front of the altar. They're
going to sing punk Prayer, which is the song you
heard Nadia described at the start of the episode, the
song that calls on the Virgin Mary to become a
(20:18):
feminist and banish Putin.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
We knew that we were touching topic that is potentially radioactive,
but we believe that because we do a symbolic artistic protust,
we don't punch from you one, we don't destroy anything.
We should be fine.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
As a priest is literally offering sacraments to worshipers. Five
Pussy Riot members in their signature scheme, masks and colorful
dresses sing kick and punch the air before the altar.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
It happened all very quickly. Forty seconds of performance. We
got pushed away by the guards really quickly. They didn't
make an attempt to arrest us, because I think it
was more like, it's just a minor annoyance. Who are
this crazy girls jumping up and down? And why did
they do that? They took our piece of equipment, like
(21:12):
our little audio system they were very proud of. So
we were arguing with church security, the motherfuckers, give us
back our equipment.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
Pussy Riot don't get their equipment back. And despite no
arrests in the cathedral, Nadia knows things. We were about
to get serious. She goes on the run, changing her
location every day.
Speaker 3 (21:34):
We didn't use our phones, it didn't use internet. We
were anxious and they're right to be. The news of
their protest was making its way to the President himself.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
Putting personally gave an order to arrest us, and Putting
gives an order if instead interpolice system Approssia is looking
for you. You don't know when the arrest is going
to happen, so you almost wanted them to happen because
at least it's some sort of clarity.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Notice the use of when, not if, because after a
week of trying to outrun the authorities, the arrest does happen.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
It was me and my husband at the time. We
went to by President for our daughter, who was about
to turn four years old next day, and we got
surrounded by around twenty people in playing clothes. The Yelda
gest They said, hangs against the wall. They're very verbally
(22:35):
abusive to me, and I think it came from from
the fact that the Bernetta able to find us for
a week. So it was relief. It was relief for me,
it was relief for them.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Nadia and fellow Pussy Right members Katsumotovic and Maria ali
Akina are all sent to a detention facility, to a
white trial.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Once you're transport, there is not a joke anymore.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
This how started protests ripple out from Moscow. A YouTube
video of punk Prayer goes viral. At her Moscow concert,
Madonna even don's a scheme mask and dedicates her song
like a Virgin to Pussy Riot, and in late July
the trial starts.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
When it started, it became obvious it's very accusatory, and
the tone of the judge and the tone of all
the participants from from the government side was just so
rude and so discriminatory to us. They told us this
feminism is by definitions hostile to the Orthodox religion, and
(23:41):
Orthodox religion is a key ideological system for Russia. So
hence we are hostile not just to the religion but
to the entirety of Russian and Russian people. That we
were told that we are paid by Hillary Clinton to
destroy Russian They said that we cursed the entire country.
Thus we need to be burnt at the stake. Some
(24:04):
people say that we need to be whipped publicly under
it's quat Oh my god, I've realized that there is
nothing really here to lose. We already we're really going
to jail, that's for sure, and so we just turned
it into a circus.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
They're in a glass case, being infuriatingly positive and doing
some devilish twitching.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Of course, it was a lot of fun. Seriously.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
In Nadia's closing statement, she describes pussy Riot as freer
than the prosecution because quote, we can say what we want,
while they can only say what political censorship allows. Nadia,
Kat and Maria are convicted of hooliganism motivated by religious
hatred and sentenced to two years in prison. And despite
(24:57):
her tough exterior, Nadia's two.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
Years in jail seemed like a lot because by that
time I was in jail on for six months and
it felt like eternity. And imagine that I have to
stay locked up three times is more, and then I'm
going to be moved from Moscow to Pinal Colony, which
basically Gulag labor camp. That was terrifying.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Yeah, well tell me about that. Tell me about your
time in prison. I went through twelve different fasodies. I
was not an easy prisoner, just demoralized. I didn't feel
like myself.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
I forgot what I was before, I think was just deep,
deep trauma that really destroys your image of yourself, your identity.
And I was forced to work all the time that
I wasn't sleeping, I was performing different tasks, like I
was sewing police uniforms. Then I was digging trenches. Then
(25:59):
it was moving heavy giant stones around people colony. That's
how the Prussian prison authorities are controlling the prisoner. They
make sure that they are exhausted physically and emotionally to
the point of turning into walking corpses. And that's who
(26:21):
I became in a labor camp. Took me a year
or two to realize that I'm still the same person
who I was before jail, that I still have a
voice to protest against the prison system they've started hunger strike.
Wrote an open letter protesting against the prison conditions. A
couple of weeks after I started my hunger strikes, I
spent a month in different prison facilities and prison cars.
(26:48):
It was a long time, one month without any connection
with my relatives or lawyers. They thought by then that
I'm probably dead, and I thought, who knows what's happening
with me? But ended up in Siberia which was Arden.
I ended up in Krasnajersko, which is the city that
had visited every single summer. This is the city where
my grandmother lived, the city between the balls.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Just like the gay Pride parade, Nadia sang about in church,
she too had been sent to Siberia in shackles.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
No, I was delayed. Well as the kind of the
best thing that could ever happened to me, I came back.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
Hum, yeah, in a way I'm sure you never expected.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
No, you only get to know where you are once
you're there. Didn't transport you pretty much as a sack
of potato.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
But outside of the prison walls, Nadia is no sack
of potatoes. She's become a powerful symbol. Amnesty International names
her a prisoner of conscience. Calls to free Pussy Riot
echo around the world, along with a furious international debate
about freedom of expression. Then, finally, after eighteen graweling months
(27:59):
in prison, on December twenty third, twenty thirteen, Nadia and
Maria are released, early.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Two months before the end of my term. Putin said
it to sign an amnesty to release not all political prisoners,
but just just a few of them. And I think
he targeted, specifically those who have been talked about the most.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
Some people believe that Putin's amnesty is just some big
propaganda stunt designed to bolster Russia's image before they host
the twenty fourteen Winter Olympics. But Putin isn't the only
one planning for the games.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
We got out and went right back into action. We
wrote a song Putin will teach You how to Love
Them otter Land, and it was dedicated to political prisoners,
those who remained jailed, and to corruption, to increasing authoritarianism
in Russia.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Pussy Riot will be there at the games in Sachi
with the newly released Nadia. She's an international symbol of
radical resistance now and everyone's waiting to see what she'll
do next after the break. All eyes on Nadia.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
Oh Gotchachi, I've got you, gotcha, God you, I've got you.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
In February twenty fourteen, only two months after Nadia was
released from prison, Pussy Riot traveled to Soachi to protest
the Olympic Games there.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Even before we jumped on the plane to go to
so cheap starting through a mascow, we got followed by
the cops constantly. We were there targets number one at
a time when we got released. So every move, every
step is being watched, every word has been listened.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
I mean, after spending all of that time in the
penal colonies, like having a really tough ride a bit,
you know, it sounds like it was awful, but you're
not afraid to be back out protesting doing more actions.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
I was fair, I was shaking. It was so scary
for me to go back to jail, but it felt
like we had to make this a statement.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
Under an Olympic banner, armed with a plastic guitar, Pussy
Rights sing their newest protest song, Putin Will Teach You
How to Love the Motherland. But mid song they're attacked,
beaten and dragged by militiamen wielding whips and pepper spray. Bloodied,
yet defiant, they keep going.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
We're getting arrested five times a day. But we've realized
it's almost impossible to do actions in the same style
we've done before because we became so hyperfile as activists.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
Wow, what was that like saying there? When I mean,
it just seems like you're being completely haunted by the police.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
Pretty surreal, and you feel yourself like a paranoid but
with one important note that you are actually being followed.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
It's weird, but Nadia is not going to admit defeat.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
There was a lot of stuff to be done in Russia.
We started a media project that's called Media Genre, and
the idea behind it was to tell the people of
Russia on what's happening in prisons, in police departments and
tell about the most important political trials of the time.
(31:58):
Now it's the number one independent media outlets in Russia,
which is truly incredible given that it is started by
a bunch of punks.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
But eventually you left Russia. Could you tell me why
and how that happened.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
I think I would never leave it if I had
to make a conscious decision to leave. It was just
a series of circumstances, a series of artists me and
people who I cared about who got in the mix
just because of me, just because they were working with me,
and I felt like I'm responsible for that. I felt
(32:37):
very guilty. So I felt like I need to move away,
just take a step back, to protect people I love,
and that pushed me to stay for some time out
of Russia because I still wanted to create, or just
didn't want to put people in dangerous situation. By associating with.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Me outside of Russia, Nadia could use have reputations be
even louder and without the police literally breathing down her neck.
In twenty twenty three, she put on her first solo
gallery exhibition in la an immersive installation which she called
Putin's Ashes.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Puttins Ashes is a response to Putin's full kill invasion
to Ukraine. For the first two months of the invasion,
I could not think about making art. I was doing
everything they can to help with resources so to do
actual help. And then after a few months I felt
(33:38):
I needed to make an artistic statement and it was
a group of women from Blaruche, Ukraine and Russia. We
all came together to kurtz Puttin. The ultimate art piece
is the performance that is documented in video that's called
Pussin's Ashes, accompanied with the song that I wrote.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
In the piece, Nadia can be seen leading the women
clad in fishnets and red Ski masks in a ritualistic
ceremony to burn a large portrait of Putin and collect
its ashes. Putin didn't like it one bit.
Speaker 2 (34:13):
My parents got visited by police and asked some questions.
Then there were a couple of searches at my friend's
apartment who still lived in Russia into my ex mother in.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
Law, Nadia was declared a foreign agent by the Russian court.
She was put on the country's most wanted criminal list.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
Now I'm arrested in absentia, so I knew that if
I go back to Russia, I'm going to be arrested immediately.
And even now I'm going to hear left Russia. I
feel uneasy about it. The only meaningful connection that I've
ever had in terms of my art and geography was
(34:54):
the connection between me, my art and Russia. I think
I get it.
Speaker 1 (34:58):
Your heart's still in Russia, right and your heart and
your heart, I'm.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
Very attached to the place. I'm very attached to my language,
and I was over much rather speaking version right now.
I never think that the smartest they're like, you know,
the most talented or the most connected, definitely not the
most powerful. But I have this dedication and I always think, like,
(35:25):
what if more talented musicians did, what did? But I
stick to this deary principle follow your dreams and then
the consequences.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
After years of imprisonment, harassment, and attacks, Nadi's commitment to
see a better Russia without Putin has never waivered, and
I just know she won't ever stop as long as
he's in power. It's nothing short of awe inspiring. I
(36:04):
can't believe I'm already saying this, But this is the
last episode of the first season of The Girlfriend's Spotlight.
Thank you so much for listening, and if you haven't
heard the other seven amazing stories, then do go back
and listen, and if you like them, tell your friends.
We'll be back with more incredible stories of women winning soon,
(36:24):
but in the meantime, coming up next on The Girlfriends,
a brand new original limited series with Me Your Girl
Annison Kelly Harnett spent over a decade in prison for
a murder she says she didn't commit. I'm one hundred
(36:45):
percent innocent. While behind bars, she learned the law from scratch.
He goes, Oh God, her knit Jahaus lawyer, and as
she fought for herself, she also became a lifeline for
the women locked up alongside her.
Speaker 2 (36:59):
It was abba faith in God, but I had nothing
but faith in home.
Speaker 1 (37:02):
So many of these women had lived the same stories.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
I said, Were you a victim of domestic violence since
she was a Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:10):
But maybe Kelly could change the ending.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
I said, how many people have gotten other incarcerated individuals
out of here?
Speaker 1 (37:21):
I'm going to be the first one to do that.
This is the story of Kelly Harnett, a woman who
spent twelve years fighting not just for her own freedom,
but her girlfriends too.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
I think I have a mission from God to save
souls fate getting people out of prison.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
The Girlfriends Gelhouse Lawyer. Listen from July fourteenth on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey,
it's Anna. You've reached the Girlfriend's hotline. Leave your story
(37:58):
after the tone.
Speaker 3 (38:00):
Okay, I gotta go.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
I love you.
Speaker 4 (38:03):
So. I have this friend who I've been friends with
for almost nine ten years now, and although we've only
actually lived in the same place for three of them,
me and her have built this routine while living apart
from each other, and it'll be that we'll wake up
(38:27):
and we'll call each other, we'll eat our meals together.
Speaker 5 (38:30):
There was a time where I was over at this
guy's house that I was seeing and I think he
went to peete and in that forty five seconds I
managed to fit in a call just to update her
about my whereabouts, I mean yesterday she gave me a
tour of what was in her fridge.
Speaker 6 (38:50):
I guess it sounds creepy in some sense, but I
think it's a really just nice and stable and beautiful
connection that has grown and somehow deepened in the distance
and non in spite of it.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
If you have your own story like the one you
just heard, and you'd like the whole Girlfriend's Gang to
hear it, then please send it to us. You can
record it as a voice memo under ninety seconds please
and email it straight to the girlfriends at novel dot Audio.
Please don't include your name with keeping things a little anon.
(39:28):
We want stories like the time your friends still showed
up to your kid's birthday party even though she was
really seriously hungover, or the time she didn't get mad
when you spilled a mug of coffee all over her
white sofa, not the white sofa. I want stories that
are meaningful or silly. I want big, I want small.
(39:48):
I'm desperate to hear them, so send them over. This season,
the Girlfriend's Spotlight is supporting the charity Womankind Worldwide. They
do amazing work to help women's rights organizations and movements
to strengthen and grow. If you'd like to find out
more or donate to help them secure equal rights for
(40:09):
women and girls across the globe, you can go to
womankind dot org dot UK. The Girlfriend's Spotlight is produced
by Novel for iHeart Podcasts. For more from Novel, visit
(40:31):
novel dot audio. The show is hosted by me Anna Sinfield.
This episode was written and produced by a Malia Sortland.
Our assistant producer is Lucy Carr. Our researcher is Zayana Yusuf.
The editor is Hannah Marshall. Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan
are our executive producers. Production management from Joe Savage, Sri
(40:55):
Houston and Charlotte Wolf. Sound design, mixing and scoring by
Nicholas Alexander and Daniel Kempson. Music supervision by Jako Taievich,
Nicholas Alexander and Anna Sinfield. Original music composed by Louisa
Gerstein and Jemma Freeman. The series artwork was designed by
Christina Lemkool. Willard Foxton is creative director of Development and
(41:19):
Special Thanks to Katrina Norvel, Carrie Lieberman and will Pearson
at iHeart Podcasts, as well as Carlie Frankel and the
whole team at w M E
Hey, girlfriends, I just wanted to give you a heads
up that this episode includes conversations about state violence and incarceration.
But around those you'll hear the twisty tale of how
a group of artists protest against the Russian government. Oh
and also there's gonna be some swearing. But you knew
that already, didn't you. Nadia is sitting in her Moscow
(00:22):
flat playing the piano.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
I'm a piano player. It's difficult thing for Russian kids.
You either have to go to blair or to piano.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
She's stuck playing this little tune over and over.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
It was beautiful and really mystique. I wrote a little
draft and rose to my friends and quickly made a
check in a couple of hours, and there's a punk prayer.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Punk prayer, a song of hope, anger and dreams of
a better Russia. And the friend she wrote that song for.
They're the ski mask wearing protest collective pussy Riot, created
by Nadia.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
The chorus goes, Britain, Mary, please become feminist. And in
the versus we talk about reproductive justice, we talk about
the corruption in the church, and one of my favorite allignes,
gay pride, is sent to Siberian in chuckles.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Nadia doesn't know it yet, but punk Prayer will be
heard all around the world with some pretty damning consequences.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Eventually, in broken into prison.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
She'll spend almost two years in a prison labor camp
sow in police uniforms from dawn till dusk. That's the
price Nadia and her Pussy Right sisters will pay for
challenging Russia's President Vladimir Putin, one of the most powerful, wealthy,
and dangerous men on earth.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
We're not professional criminals or anything like that. Were just
a bunch of artists who were doing our best.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
But Punk Prayer will also launch Pussy Riot as the
moral conscience of Putin's Russia, the front runners of a
global feminist movement rallying together against Russian authoritarian power and
their weapon art. I'm Anisonfield and from the teams at
(02:31):
Novel and iHeart Podcasts, this is the Girlfriend's Spotlight, where
we tell stories of women women today. Nadia Punk's the President.
(03:05):
The first time I saw Nadia Tolakanikov and Pussy Riot
was on my very twenty twelve tumbler feed. I thought
it was a cool statement art, funny hats. But it
came and went like everything else on Tumblr. And then
there were the arrests, the courtroom dramas, political interference, and
prison time. Now Pussy Riot were making headlines and I
(03:30):
was gripped. But I never really learned how Nadia and
the other women got there. So let's start this story
somewhere nice and picturesque, like Siberia in nineteen eighty nine,
the year Nadia was born.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Siberia is a wonderful place and it has shape of
huge pennis so I'm from head of it and my
grandmother who would visit every summer vacation. We've between the balls,
and to get from one part of the dick to
another you need to spend four hours in the plane.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Wow, that is a big dick.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
I know. No one can really impest me with the
size of their thing. After that, it's.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
Not just Siberia's size that it's known for. It's also
defined by its weather.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
It's a place where you have winter for nine months
out a year. It's Mine's forty degrees celsius plus really
really heavy wing. Polar winter brings its own heaviness on
everyone's life. So people find all sorts of escapes. It
could be drugs and sometimes hard drugs, or it could
(04:42):
be bitter games. And for me it was mostly books.
And my house was filled with art books on Potticelli
and early Greek art, and I think it gave me
radicalosing that probably otherwise would not emerge.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Wow, you had, like I, really kind of high brow
early education in art. You weren't reading normal kids books art.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
He was my family in a package. My dad and
my mom are both very artistic people. My mom and
dad split when I was five, and she was responsible
for feeding me and paying the bills. My dad, with
whom I stayed connected and really close. He was a
(05:30):
multimedia artist in the Soviet era, which also pushed him
to the edge of society, but he gave me this
passion to art.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
By the early two thousands, Nadia had basically learned everything
she needed from the grand masters of art. It was
time to look to the future.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
It was a magical coincidence that this festival of contemporary
art came to my home city. I was around thirteen,
and I was lucky enough to witness and a series
of talks and exhibitions and performances of a few contemporary
artists who became my guiding starts, and it started to
model my life after them.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
At sixteen, hungry to learn more, Nadia moved to the
big city, Moscow, and there she started studying philosophy, but
she was unimpressed by the art world.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
What is so around me was mostly commercial art. It's
just way too boring. Commercial art is by definition something
that is useless. But for me, my idea was to
provide an alternative to the commercial art scene and hopefully
started a movement.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
And were you always interested in the sort of political
sides of philosophy and art at that stage?
Speaker 2 (06:50):
I think I arrived to my interest in politics through
my interest in avant garde art and their world building ambitions,
which was political in a way that they wanted to
build me a society, and that sort of totality of
art that wants to change life once and for all
(07:12):
was really speaking to me. And I wanted to see
something like that around me among young hungry artists and
wanted them to change the world. I wanted them to
change well, at least our government, which was at the
time moving towards authoritarianism.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Nadia was only ten when Putin first became president and
started centralizing power, Regional autonomy was reduced, media outlets were
brought under state control, and over the years critics of
the regime died under suspicious circumstances. Slowly but surely, Russia
became more authoritarian and more nationalists, two things that understandably
(07:55):
have never sat comfortably with Nadia.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
It's dangerous not just for Russian people, but also for
people abroad, for neighboring countries.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Nadia believed in Russia, but not Putin's Russia. She believed
in culture and education, art, freedom. She had to do something.
So in two thousand and seven, Nadia, together with the
man who had become her husband and another couple, started
a collective. They planned to arrange protests all over Moscow.
(08:28):
So the choice of name was clear. Viner By now
means war in Russian.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
It meant war against conservatives, our constitutions and the political order.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
Vina did things like storming the Russian White House, which
is the heavily guarded government headquarters in central Moscow, by
jumping over the six meter fence and running for their
lives through the grounds.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
We were debating if we are going to be electrocuted
once we reached the top, were shot that would not
be fun, but it didn't happen, so all good and
the ideas to show that resisting is indeed an option.
Imagine if a group of anarchists can really do this
(09:15):
very radical action without ever getting caught, without going to jail,
without getting arrested. Then imagine what would happen if a
million if people try to do the same and eventually
will have real democracy.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Okay, a small goal. Life for women and queer people
in Putince Russia had arguably gotten worse. Rights were rolled back,
and patriarchal rhetoric seem to dominate politics and culture.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
And so eventually four years in by now brought me
to the need of struying something that will be feminist oriented,
that will focus not just on achieving democracy, but also
on protecting rights of queer people, on making sure that
(10:03):
gender equality is achieved in my country. And this how
pursued was born. Wow, and how did you come up
with the name.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
It's a great name.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
This started from me and kat sitting in her apartment.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Kat is Yakatarina Samutzovich, who had also been part of
Vina and had a pretty messy flat.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Neither a kut or her dad cared about cleaning stuff up.
If you open the fridge, you'd die from the smell.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
It's September twenty eleven, six months before Putin, then Prime
Minister is set to return for a third term as
Russia's president. Nadia, who's now in her early twenties, knows
what this means. More powerful one, less democratic freedoms, agency
and rights for everyone else. So she and Kat are
(10:56):
into something they're calling punk feminism, and.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
We'll look did this term broadly, and not just punk
as music, but also really really bold and groundbreaking artistic
move So we got truly inspired by the Red Girl movement.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
The Right Goal movement was actually a pretty big inspiration
for me too when I was in my early twenties.
It was this diy feminist music scene that was started
in the Pacific Northwest in the early nineties, and I
actually wrote one of my final music school essays about them.
After I was the only one who put my hand
up when the lecturer asked if anyone would call themselves
a feminist. He said, watch out for this one, and
(11:37):
everyone laughed at me. I obviously had to go on
a feminist rampage after that, and the Right Goal movement
was the perfect outlet. The people at the heart of
it were angry but also playful. They made scenes and
sang punk songs about politics and sex and misogyny. The
genre's high Priestess, Kathleen Hannah from the Bamborkini Kill, had
(11:58):
this famous slogan girls to the Front, meaning the girls
stood at the front of shows while the dudes had
to move to the back. In short, right girl was
the antithesis to my old lecturer and to Putin's Russia.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
We started to joke around what would happen if Russia
had their own Red Girl moment. We thought that would
be cool to record a song of a Russian version
of Red Girls. But we were visual artists, so me
(12:33):
and Kat wanted to start a fake band and convince
everyone this is an actual band.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
This fake band would put on gorilla gigs to draw
attention to the government's human rights violations and hypocrisy.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
We just started to call it pussered to bring a
derogatory term for a woman, for a girl that we
are going to reclaim the same way that word bitch.
Queer punk was reclaimed.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Name sorted great and now everything else.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
So what do we need? What do bands do, and
we cyclarless, watched some videos and we went on website
where people sell used stuff in Russia. We didn't have
money at all, but we bought a guitar that didn't play,
an electric guitar that used the props to create an
(13:23):
image of a band.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
They recalled their first song in Cat's Bathroom.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
We didn't have smartphones at the time, so it was
just a very cheap Olympus recorder, and we didn't have
any knowledge on how to put songs together, so it
was very ugly.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
And that's punk. That's the wonder you're doing it exactly
how you should be.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
We weren't even able to put together a loop like
in a continuous fashion, so there was this little pause
in between of the loops, so it would be like
to do.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
And that same page sounds like you're in jazz now
what's going on? That's very cool, but also, I mean,
the sad fact is there's like nothing more punk band
than being like a punk band who insists they're not
a punk band, even if you weren't one, which is
(14:20):
so cool. You've gone through the looking glass.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
On October one, twenty eleven, Nadia and Cat play the
song they recorded during a presentation on punk feminism. They
say it's by a new Russian punk band called Pussy Riot,
and they call the song kill the Sexist. The sexist
that they're referring to is not explicitly putin, but it
is a comment on his ideology. A Pussy Riot want
(14:46):
to start making a noise about the imminent return to
presidency that he's planning. But they are just two people.
This fake punk band needs more members and fast.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
We didn't have a lot of time. Just felt like
we have to work every single day and try to
at least think that we have an actual movement because
we didn't have any money, so we were mostly stealing
stuff from supermarkets. Yeah, we lived by shoplifting. Then we
started to work actually with our friends punk musicians, and
you told them, just writing shitty like really quick in
(15:21):
an hour and we'll screen something on top. It was
mostly mean kat as the core, but we were good
at art propaganda. We knew how to write press releases,
how to context journalists like work close professional photographers and
videographers and put together videos. So it's a unheard of
(15:42):
speed of production.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Would you be able to tell me about your very
first protest that you guys did together.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
The first batch of processed actions was called Free the Couplestones.
It was the end of October in Moscow. It was
already freezing cold. I found to be outside, so we're
decided to invade Masclow subway and we found places with
this scaffolding being in the middle of the station and
(16:11):
it looked just like the stage. So we would climb
on that little platform and packer a guitar that didn't
play and connected the microphone that did work and make
the action.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
Wearing brightly colored mini dresses and ski masks to conceal
their identities, Pussy Riots shout and dance on subway scaffolding
and in crowded subway cars. They warn that ballots will
be used as toilet paper in the approaching elections.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
And we did dozens of those in the subway and
then compelled it altogether in one video.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
Pussy Riots actions aren't designed to scare people. Their tricksters
inspiring hope. What they're doing is fun but also dangerous
because almost every single time they perform, they get arrested.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Imagine cops run to the base of this scaffolding and
there's unless you learned how to fly. There is no
windows cape. Some cops are nice, some cops are nut
Some cops are you know, punting and dragging you around
by your hair, And I was used to it.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
I mean, did you not, after you realize that happened
the first couple of times, did you not decide to
like perform on the floor where you could could make
a run for it.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
That would not be beautiful.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
I can't argue with that, but Putin did after the
break a punk prayer. In December twenty eleven, Putin's party
(18:10):
United Russia won the parliamentary elections amid allegations of electoral
fraud and a pre arranged role swap with the sitting president.
Tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets to protest.
They were the largest protests in Russia since the fall
of the Soviet Union in the nineties. Pussy Riot was
there too. They shouted lyrics like riot and Russia Putin
(18:34):
chickened out. You could find them screaming their protest songs
in luxury boutiques and fashion shows. A top expensive cars.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
And they do behind it was Britain was throwing a
lot of money to make people compliant to everything he
does and momentum these places where it reached people in
Moscow were hanging out to the time to warn them
that one day their lives are going to get complicated
(19:03):
because of Putain.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Next on their target list was the Russian Orthodox Church.
Nadia and Pussy Riot believed that the church's support of
Putin created an unhealthy authoritarian relationship between church and state.
It lent us sort of moral and spiritual legitimacy to
Putin as a divinely sanctioned leader. So Pussy Riot came
(19:28):
up with a way to draw attention to it. It
would be dangerous, lots of people would be appalled, but
no one would be able to ignore it.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
On the day of the performance set it's really called
not Cozy Windy Gray. A lot of participants said the
day of the action that they aren't going to be
able to join. People felt uneasy.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
It's February twenty first, twenty twelve, and Pussy Ryes are
about to do a flashmob performance inside Moscow's Cathedral of
Christ the Savior, right in front of the altar. They're
going to sing punk Prayer, which is the song you
heard Nadia described at the start of the episode, the
song that calls on the Virgin Mary to become a
(20:18):
feminist and banish Putin.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
We knew that we were touching topic that is potentially radioactive,
but we believe that because we do a symbolic artistic protust,
we don't punch from you one, we don't destroy anything.
We should be fine.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
As a priest is literally offering sacraments to worshipers. Five
Pussy Riot members in their signature scheme, masks and colorful
dresses sing kick and punch the air before the altar.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
It happened all very quickly. Forty seconds of performance. We
got pushed away by the guards really quickly. They didn't
make an attempt to arrest us, because I think it
was more like, it's just a minor annoyance. Who are
this crazy girls jumping up and down? And why did
they do that? They took our piece of equipment, like
(21:12):
our little audio system they were very proud of. So
we were arguing with church security, the motherfuckers, give us
back our equipment.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
Pussy Riot don't get their equipment back. And despite no
arrests in the cathedral, Nadia knows things. We were about
to get serious. She goes on the run, changing her
location every day.
Speaker 3 (21:34):
We didn't use our phones, it didn't use internet. We
were anxious and they're right to be. The news of
their protest was making its way to the President himself.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
Putting personally gave an order to arrest us, and Putting
gives an order if instead interpolice system Approssia is looking
for you. You don't know when the arrest is going
to happen, so you almost wanted them to happen because
at least it's some sort of clarity.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Notice the use of when, not if, because after a
week of trying to outrun the authorities, the arrest does happen.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
It was me and my husband at the time. We
went to by President for our daughter, who was about
to turn four years old next day, and we got
surrounded by around twenty people in playing clothes. The Yelda
gest They said, hangs against the wall. They're very verbally
(22:35):
abusive to me, and I think it came from from
the fact that the Bernetta able to find us for
a week. So it was relief. It was relief for me,
it was relief for them.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Nadia and fellow Pussy Right members Katsumotovic and Maria ali
Akina are all sent to a detention facility, to a
white trial.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Once you're transport, there is not a joke anymore.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
This how started protests ripple out from Moscow. A YouTube
video of punk Prayer goes viral. At her Moscow concert,
Madonna even don's a scheme mask and dedicates her song
like a Virgin to Pussy Riot, and in late July
the trial starts.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
When it started, it became obvious it's very accusatory, and
the tone of the judge and the tone of all
the participants from from the government side was just so
rude and so discriminatory to us. They told us this
feminism is by definitions hostile to the Orthodox religion, and
(23:41):
Orthodox religion is a key ideological system for Russia. So
hence we are hostile not just to the religion but
to the entirety of Russian and Russian people. That we
were told that we are paid by Hillary Clinton to
destroy Russian They said that we cursed the entire country.
Thus we need to be burnt at the stake. Some
(24:04):
people say that we need to be whipped publicly under
it's quat Oh my god, I've realized that there is
nothing really here to lose. We already we're really going
to jail, that's for sure, and so we just turned
it into a circus.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
They're in a glass case, being infuriatingly positive and doing
some devilish twitching.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Of course, it was a lot of fun. Seriously.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
In Nadia's closing statement, she describes pussy Riot as freer
than the prosecution because quote, we can say what we want,
while they can only say what political censorship allows. Nadia,
Kat and Maria are convicted of hooliganism motivated by religious
hatred and sentenced to two years in prison. And despite
(24:57):
her tough exterior, Nadia's two.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
Years in jail seemed like a lot because by that
time I was in jail on for six months and
it felt like eternity. And imagine that I have to
stay locked up three times is more, and then I'm
going to be moved from Moscow to Pinal Colony, which
basically Gulag labor camp. That was terrifying.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Yeah, well tell me about that. Tell me about your
time in prison. I went through twelve different fasodies. I
was not an easy prisoner, just demoralized. I didn't feel
like myself.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
I forgot what I was before, I think was just deep,
deep trauma that really destroys your image of yourself, your identity.
And I was forced to work all the time that
I wasn't sleeping, I was performing different tasks, like I
was sewing police uniforms. Then I was digging trenches. Then
(25:59):
it was moving heavy giant stones around people colony. That's
how the Prussian prison authorities are controlling the prisoner. They
make sure that they are exhausted physically and emotionally to
the point of turning into walking corpses. And that's who
(26:21):
I became in a labor camp. Took me a year
or two to realize that I'm still the same person
who I was before jail, that I still have a
voice to protest against the prison system they've started hunger strike.
Wrote an open letter protesting against the prison conditions. A
couple of weeks after I started my hunger strikes, I
spent a month in different prison facilities and prison cars.
(26:48):
It was a long time, one month without any connection
with my relatives or lawyers. They thought by then that
I'm probably dead, and I thought, who knows what's happening
with me? But ended up in Siberia which was Arden.
I ended up in Krasnajersko, which is the city that
had visited every single summer. This is the city where
my grandmother lived, the city between the balls.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Just like the gay Pride parade, Nadia sang about in church,
she too had been sent to Siberia in shackles.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
No, I was delayed. Well as the kind of the
best thing that could ever happened to me, I came back.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
Hum, yeah, in a way I'm sure you never expected.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
No, you only get to know where you are once
you're there. Didn't transport you pretty much as a sack
of potato.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
But outside of the prison walls, Nadia is no sack
of potatoes. She's become a powerful symbol. Amnesty International names
her a prisoner of conscience. Calls to free Pussy Riot
echo around the world, along with a furious international debate
about freedom of expression. Then, finally, after eighteen graweling months
(27:59):
in prison, on December twenty third, twenty thirteen, Nadia and
Maria are released, early.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Two months before the end of my term. Putin said
it to sign an amnesty to release not all political prisoners,
but just just a few of them. And I think
he targeted, specifically those who have been talked about the most.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
Some people believe that Putin's amnesty is just some big
propaganda stunt designed to bolster Russia's image before they host
the twenty fourteen Winter Olympics. But Putin isn't the only
one planning for the games.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
We got out and went right back into action. We
wrote a song Putin will teach You how to Love
Them otter Land, and it was dedicated to political prisoners,
those who remained jailed, and to corruption, to increasing authoritarianism
in Russia.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Pussy Riot will be there at the games in Sachi
with the newly released Nadia. She's an international symbol of
radical resistance now and everyone's waiting to see what she'll
do next after the break. All eyes on Nadia.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
Oh Gotchachi, I've got you, gotcha, God you, I've got you.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
In February twenty fourteen, only two months after Nadia was
released from prison, Pussy Riot traveled to Soachi to protest
the Olympic Games there.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Even before we jumped on the plane to go to
so cheap starting through a mascow, we got followed by
the cops constantly. We were there targets number one at
a time when we got released. So every move, every
step is being watched, every word has been listened.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
I mean, after spending all of that time in the
penal colonies, like having a really tough ride a bit,
you know, it sounds like it was awful, but you're
not afraid to be back out protesting doing more actions.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
I was fair, I was shaking. It was so scary
for me to go back to jail, but it felt
like we had to make this a statement.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
Under an Olympic banner, armed with a plastic guitar, Pussy
Rights sing their newest protest song, Putin Will Teach You
How to Love the Motherland. But mid song they're attacked,
beaten and dragged by militiamen wielding whips and pepper spray. Bloodied,
yet defiant, they keep going.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
We're getting arrested five times a day. But we've realized
it's almost impossible to do actions in the same style
we've done before because we became so hyperfile as activists.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
Wow, what was that like saying there? When I mean,
it just seems like you're being completely haunted by the police.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
Pretty surreal, and you feel yourself like a paranoid but
with one important note that you are actually being followed.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
It's weird, but Nadia is not going to admit defeat.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
There was a lot of stuff to be done in Russia.
We started a media project that's called Media Genre, and
the idea behind it was to tell the people of
Russia on what's happening in prisons, in police departments and
tell about the most important political trials of the time.
(31:58):
Now it's the number one independent media outlets in Russia,
which is truly incredible given that it is started by
a bunch of punks.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
But eventually you left Russia. Could you tell me why
and how that happened.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
I think I would never leave it if I had
to make a conscious decision to leave. It was just
a series of circumstances, a series of artists me and
people who I cared about who got in the mix
just because of me, just because they were working with me,
and I felt like I'm responsible for that. I felt
(32:37):
very guilty. So I felt like I need to move away,
just take a step back, to protect people I love,
and that pushed me to stay for some time out
of Russia because I still wanted to create, or just
didn't want to put people in dangerous situation. By associating with.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Me outside of Russia, Nadia could use have reputations be
even louder and without the police literally breathing down her neck.
In twenty twenty three, she put on her first solo
gallery exhibition in la an immersive installation which she called
Putin's Ashes.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Puttins Ashes is a response to Putin's full kill invasion
to Ukraine. For the first two months of the invasion,
I could not think about making art. I was doing
everything they can to help with resources so to do
actual help. And then after a few months I felt
(33:38):
I needed to make an artistic statement and it was
a group of women from Blaruche, Ukraine and Russia. We
all came together to kurtz Puttin. The ultimate art piece
is the performance that is documented in video that's called
Pussin's Ashes, accompanied with the song that I wrote.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
In the piece, Nadia can be seen leading the women
clad in fishnets and red Ski masks in a ritualistic
ceremony to burn a large portrait of Putin and collect
its ashes. Putin didn't like it one bit.
Speaker 2 (34:13):
My parents got visited by police and asked some questions.
Then there were a couple of searches at my friend's
apartment who still lived in Russia into my ex mother in.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
Law, Nadia was declared a foreign agent by the Russian court.
She was put on the country's most wanted criminal list.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
Now I'm arrested in absentia, so I knew that if
I go back to Russia, I'm going to be arrested immediately.
And even now I'm going to hear left Russia. I
feel uneasy about it. The only meaningful connection that I've
ever had in terms of my art and geography was
(34:54):
the connection between me, my art and Russia. I think
I get it.
Speaker 1 (34:58):
Your heart's still in Russia, right and your heart and
your heart, I'm.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
Very attached to the place. I'm very attached to my language,
and I was over much rather speaking version right now.
I never think that the smartest they're like, you know,
the most talented or the most connected, definitely not the
most powerful. But I have this dedication and I always think, like,
(35:25):
what if more talented musicians did, what did? But I
stick to this deary principle follow your dreams and then
the consequences.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
After years of imprisonment, harassment, and attacks, Nadi's commitment to
see a better Russia without Putin has never waivered, and
I just know she won't ever stop as long as
he's in power. It's nothing short of awe inspiring. I
(36:04):
can't believe I'm already saying this, But this is the
last episode of the first season of The Girlfriend's Spotlight.
Thank you so much for listening, and if you haven't
heard the other seven amazing stories, then do go back
and listen, and if you like them, tell your friends.
We'll be back with more incredible stories of women winning soon,
(36:24):
but in the meantime, coming up next on The Girlfriends,
a brand new original limited series with Me Your Girl
Annison Kelly Harnett spent over a decade in prison for
a murder she says she didn't commit. I'm one hundred
(36:45):
percent innocent. While behind bars, she learned the law from scratch.
He goes, Oh God, her knit Jahaus lawyer, and as
she fought for herself, she also became a lifeline for
the women locked up alongside her.
Speaker 2 (36:59):
It was abba faith in God, but I had nothing
but faith in home.
Speaker 1 (37:02):
So many of these women had lived the same stories.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
I said, Were you a victim of domestic violence since
she was a Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:10):
But maybe Kelly could change the ending.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
I said, how many people have gotten other incarcerated individuals
out of here?
Speaker 1 (37:21):
I'm going to be the first one to do that.
This is the story of Kelly Harnett, a woman who
spent twelve years fighting not just for her own freedom,
but her girlfriends too.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
I think I have a mission from God to save
souls fate getting people out of prison.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
The Girlfriends Gelhouse Lawyer. Listen from July fourteenth on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey,
it's Anna. You've reached the Girlfriend's hotline. Leave your story
(37:58):
after the tone.
Speaker 3 (38:00):
Okay, I gotta go.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
I love you.
Speaker 4 (38:03):
So. I have this friend who I've been friends with
for almost nine ten years now, and although we've only
actually lived in the same place for three of them,
me and her have built this routine while living apart
from each other, and it'll be that we'll wake up
(38:27):
and we'll call each other, we'll eat our meals together.
Speaker 5 (38:30):
There was a time where I was over at this
guy's house that I was seeing and I think he
went to peete and in that forty five seconds I
managed to fit in a call just to update her
about my whereabouts, I mean yesterday she gave me a
tour of what was in her fridge.
Speaker 6 (38:50):
I guess it sounds creepy in some sense, but I
think it's a really just nice and stable and beautiful
connection that has grown and somehow deepened in the distance
and non in spite of it.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
If you have your own story like the one you
just heard, and you'd like the whole Girlfriend's Gang to
hear it, then please send it to us. You can
record it as a voice memo under ninety seconds please
and email it straight to the girlfriends at novel dot Audio.
Please don't include your name with keeping things a little anon.
(39:28):
We want stories like the time your friends still showed
up to your kid's birthday party even though she was
really seriously hungover, or the time she didn't get mad
when you spilled a mug of coffee all over her
white sofa, not the white sofa. I want stories that
are meaningful or silly. I want big, I want small.
(39:48):
I'm desperate to hear them, so send them over. This season,
the Girlfriend's Spotlight is supporting the charity Womankind Worldwide. They
do amazing work to help women's rights organizations and movements
to strengthen and grow. If you'd like to find out
more or donate to help them secure equal rights for
(40:09):
women and girls across the globe, you can go to
womankind dot org dot UK. The Girlfriend's Spotlight is produced
by Novel for iHeart Podcasts. For more from Novel, visit
(40:31):
novel dot audio. The show is hosted by me Anna Sinfield.
This episode was written and produced by a Malia Sortland.
Our assistant producer is Lucy Carr. Our researcher is Zayana Yusuf.
The editor is Hannah Marshall. Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan
are our executive producers. Production management from Joe Savage, Sri
(40:55):
Houston and Charlotte Wolf. Sound design, mixing and scoring by
Nicholas Alexander and Daniel Kempson. Music supervision by Jako Taievich,
Nicholas Alexander and Anna Sinfield. Original music composed by Louisa
Gerstein and Jemma Freeman. The series artwork was designed by
Christina Lemkool. Willard Foxton is creative director of Development and
(41:19):
Special Thanks to Katrina Norvel, Carrie Lieberman and will Pearson
at iHeart Podcasts, as well as Carlie Frankel and the
whole team at w M E
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