When Putin and the Kremlin throw a charm offensive to distract people from the popular uprising in the Ukraine and the institutionalized homophobia in Russia, it's good news for dissidents and former billionaires. Russia's Stalin-loving strongman has extended amnesty to Pussy Riot, the Greenpeace 30, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky (formerly Russia's richest man, who fell into Putin's bad books and onto hard times).
The other high-profile beneficiaries of the amnesty are Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina of the punk group Pussy Riot, who are serving two-year sentences for staging an impromptu punk performance in Moscow's main cathedral early last year.
Petya Verzilov, Tolokonnikova's husband, said he believed an order had been given to speed up the process. Although technically releases could take up to six months to be processed from the day the law is published, officials at both prisons have indicated they are ready to release the Pussy Riot duo as soon as soon as the law is passed, he said.
Alyokhina is serving her time in a prison in the city of Nizhny Novgorod, while Tolokonnikova was recently moved from Mordovia, a region known for its Soviet-era gulags, to the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk.
She has said that the conditions are incomparably better than in Mordovia, from where she published a long open letter detailing slave-like conditions of forced labour and cruel punishments.
Arctic 30 protesters and Pussy Riot members set to walk free [Shaun Walker and James Meikle/The Guardian]
(Image: Free Pussy Riot Posters & Designs 04, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from centralasian's photostream)
