Two members of Pussy Riot have travelled to London under a cloak of secrecy to speak to the press about the plight of their bandmates in Russian labor camps. Laurie Penny was one of the reporters who got to interview them in a small, no-photos press conference:
These girls are young. Very young. For their safety, I can’t say how young, but imagine how young you think they might be. Are you imagining it? They’re about five years younger than that. When they arrived I wondered, for a second, who let a couple of moody work experience kids into a clandestine meeting…
And then there’s the cultural backlash – including sexist attacks on what Pussy Riot stand for. “The simplest example is the idea that there’s a [male] producer behind us, or that we must be being paid by foreign governments – nobody can imagine that women themselves are expressing their opinions!” says Schumacher.
“In the Russian mass media they’re saying we’re stupid girls, not able to think. Among the orthodox believers, in the media, they tell us to stay at home, do cooking, give birth to children,” says Schumacher. “And Masha and Nadya are attacked for not fulfilling their roles as mothers.” This last is particularly cruel, because not only is it the Russian state that placed Masha and Nadya in Labour camps far from their children, but both have been denied the usual clemency that allows mothers of young children to receive suspended sentences.
Pussy Riot: “People fear us because we’re feminists”