06.06.1988–?
Maria Alyokhina
Maria Alyokhina (born 1988) is known for the “punk prayer” in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour on 21 February 2012, for which she was sentenced to two years in a penal colony. After her release she turned to human rights work, creating Zona Prava and Mediazona together with Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. She is the author of the book “Riot Days” and has lived outside Russia since 2022.
Biography
The verdict of the Khamovnichesky court came on 17 August 2012: two years in a general-regime penal colony for “hooliganism”. The day before, in her closing statement, Alyokhina said that for her this was a “so-called” court and that only “so-called” freedom could be taken away, not her inner freedom.
She was born on 6 June 1988 in Moscow. She changed schools several times: the system, she said, teaches people not to ask questions. She studied at the Institute of Journalism and Creative Writing, attended literature workshops given by the poets Dmitry Vedenyapin and Andrei Kubrik, and writes poetry. At the time of her arrest she was a fourth-year student. Before the action in the cathedral she took part in Greenpeace environmental campaigns: from December 2008 to save the Bolshoi Utrish nature reserve, and in 2009–2010 for Lake Baikal and the Khimki Forest. She was a volunteer with the Danilovtsy movement and ran creative classes for patients at Children’s Psychiatric Hospital No. 6 in Moscow. Earlier she had been a member of the art group Voina (“War”).
On 21 February 2012, together with Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich and two participants whose names remain unknown, she staged the action “Mother of God, Drive Putin Away!” in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which the group called a punk prayer. A video was edited from the recording and posted on YouTube. A criminal case for hooliganism was opened; in August Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova were sentenced to two years. Amnesty International recognised her as a prisoner of conscience. During the trial she cross-examined witnesses herself and contested the charges.
Alyokhina served her sentence in the women’s colony IK-28 in Berezniki, Perm Krai, and from August 2013 in IK-2 in the Nizhny Novgorod region. She was released on 23 December 2013, two months before the end of her term. She and Tolokonnikova held their first meeting in Krasnoyarsk, where they discussed Zona Prava (“Prisoners’ Rights Zone”), a project to defend the rights of prisoners, and then presented it at a press conference in Moscow. As her moral compass Alyokhina named Vladimir Bukovsky, the writer and Soviet dissident, whose biography she had read in the colony. In the same year, 2013, they founded Mediazona, a media outlet devoted to the courts and the prison system. In 2014 both received the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought.
Other actions followed. On 20 December 2017 members of Pussy Riot unfurled a banner reading “Happy birthday, executioners” outside the FSB building on Lubyanka Square, marking the centenary of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police, and Alyokhina was detained. In February 2018 she travelled to Crimea for an action in support of the film director Oleg Sentsov. In April 2018 a court sentenced her to 100 hours of community service for organising an unauthorised action, and in July she was fined 400,000 roubles for evading it. In the same month, together with participants in the Decommunisation project, she demanded that the “execution house” on Nikolskaya Street be handed over to the Gulag history museum. In 2017 her book about the trial and the colony, “Riot Days”, was published; a stage show with live music based on it has been performed in various countries.
On 27 January 2021 she was detained in the “sanitary case” over the protests of 23 January; Memorial, the Russian human rights organisation, recognised her as a political prisoner. On 10 September 2021 she received a year of restricted freedom: staying at home from ten at night until six in the morning, not leaving Moscow, not taking part in mass events. On 27 February 2022 she was detained in Moscow by three men in plain clothes. On 21 April the Presnensky court replaced the 21 days she had not yet served with imprisonment, citing her late returns home and her removal of the electronic tag in protest against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On 26 April the Interior Ministry put her on its wanted list.
In May 2022 she left Russia through Lithuania; accounts of the route differ, and Belarus is also named, and she was helped by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson. Pussy Riot then gave a series of concerts across Europe, raising money for those affected by the war in Ukraine. In 2023, after she moved to Iceland, the Althing granted her Icelandic citizenship. On 18 September 2024 the Russian Interior Ministry put her and several other members of the group on its wanted list.
Profile notes