Anti-Putin campaigner and co-founder of Russian punk group Pussy Riot Maria Alyokhina talks about her ongoing activism and using the proceeds of her book Political Girl: Life and Fate in Russia to raise money for hospitals in Ukraine. Listen back above.

A 13-year prison sentence awaits Maria Alyokhina if she returns home to Russia. The 37-year-old artist and political activist was convicted late last year in absentia of "spreading false information" about the Russian armed forces and for committing "obscene acts" with a portrait of President Vladimir Putin's during a 2024 performance in Munich by her performance art/punk band, Pussy Riot. Maria now lives in exile, having escaped from house arrest in Russia in 2022.

Alyokhina came to international attention in 2012, after Pussy Riot staged an anti-Putin performance inside a Moscow Cathedral. Maria was arrested and tried along with other members of the group. She served two years in a brutal penal colony, after being convicted of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred". Maria explains that the outcome of their trial was not justice:

"In Russia there is still this what is called telephone right when the judge receives the call from the Kremlin directly. And they tell the judge which punishment this or that political prisoner should have."

Maria tells Oliver that she began her sentence by serving four months in solitary confinement. It was after she complained that prison clothing was inadequate to protect inmates from the cold during twice-daily roll calls - these took place outside, she says, in temperatures which sometimes fell below minus 30 degrees centigrade:

"I visited the Human Rights Commission. I told them that the clothes which the state provides to prisoners is quite thin. So people are freezing during the checking. And checking is 40 minutes outside. Right. In the morning and in the evening."

Reflecting on the political atmosphere in Russia in 2012 that led to the original Pussy Riot protest in Moscow, Maria recalls the widespread unrest that erupted across Russia after allegations of election fraud and Putin’s planned return to power:

"In March of 2012, he falsified the elections and became president for the third time. And this third term became a point of no return for our country because he not only imprisoned us and many other activists, but also annexed Crimea and started the war in Ukraine"

After her release in 2014, Maria remained politically active in Russia despite increased repression and surveillance by the authorities. She said that the poisoning and eventual death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny had a profound influence on her:

"He is a hero. It is heroic gesture. And I think it shows like nothing else that Russia is not represented by Putin’s gang. That there are different people. And some of these people can sacrifice their life to show this difference"

Alyokhina says her most recent conviction is a punishment for publicly supporting the opposition politician. After posting online in support of Navalny after his return to Russia in 2021, Maria says she was placed under house arrest and later sentenced in absentia:

"They opened the third criminal case on five members of Pussy Riot, so I got 13 years and 15 days in abstention."

Eventually, friends and family helped organise her escape from Russia after authorities confiscated her international passport and placed her under electronic monitoring:

"I changed the dress into a food delivery costume and left the phone in the apartment because of its GPS tracker."

With assistance from supporters and emergency travel documents issued by Iceland, she eventually managed to flee through Belarus before going into exile in Europe.

Maria says that writing her memoir Political Girl: Life and Fate in Russia has given her an opportunity to process the events she had lived through during more than a decade of activism:

"I was on the road and still on the road all the time. But when me and Olga Borisova, who is also a member of Pussy Riot and editor of this book; when we started to collect the book together, I think step by step all the things which happened were being kind of realised, yeah. You realise what you've actually been through."

Since leaving Russia, Alyokhina has continued touring internationally with Pussy Riot performances and political events, while also fundraising for Ukrainian hospitals during Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

Oliver asks Maria if she has much hope for change in her native country; now or into the future? Her answer is sobering and pragmatic;

"I mean, Russian history is definitely not a field with flowers. So, I don't actually like these questions like 'What will happen if Putin dies?' Like, I don't like "ifs". I like to live and do now."

Maria Alyokhina will appear in conversation with journalist Sally Hayden at the International Literature Festival Dublin on May 19. More info here.

Maria's book Political Girl: Life and Fate in Russia is available now, published by Penguin.