Riot Days review: Maria Alyokhina’s memoir is a call to arms against corruption and injustice

After one conversation with a prison guard, who pleads with her to stop her hunger strike, Maria Alyokhina records her reaction: “What kind of answer can I give you, Guard? I protest wherever I can, wherever I need to. That’s my nature. I need to protest.” As the end of her incarceration draws nearer, Alyokhina and another inmate at IK-2 in Nizhny Novgorod make an insulting poster and parade it up and down before the entire prison colony. “This is what protest should be — desperate, sudden and joyous,” she writes.

Protest is the idea that binds together Riot Days, Alyokhina’s vivid account of her role in balaclava-wearing feminist group Pussy Riot, and the trial and jail sentence that came in its wake. From Moscow punk performance to humiliating functionaries and taking prison officials to court in a campaign for better conditions, there is no mistaking the nature of Alyokhina’s protest: indefatigable and potent.

Alyokhina, 29, shot to international fame for her part in Pussy Riot’s 2012 performance of Virgin Mary, Mother of God, Expel Putin! in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral on the eve of Russia’s presidential elections. Along with Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, then aged 23, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, then 29, Alyokhina was charged with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” in a politicised trial that sparked an international furore. All three women were found guilty, and while Samutsevich was eventually released with a suspended sentence, Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova were each handed two-year prison terms. To the West, the two women became the embodiment of victimised resistance against an increasingly authoritarian Putin, drawing the attention of celebrities from Madonna to Paul McCartney who used concerts and public outings to voice their support for Pussy Riot.

Riot Days is Alyokhina’s account of her experience of these few years, from the founding of Pussy Riot in the winter of 2011-12 to the last day of her prison term in 2013. Alyokhina avoids a dry, factual account of her experiences, peppering the hundreds of small sub-sections in the book with drawings from her now ten-year-old son, Filipp. The book, she says, was intended to be a true-to-life “fairy tale” more than a traditional memoir, and her propensity to switch her prose between naivety, brutality and humour underscores the absurdity of the trial while giving Riot Days a compelling sense of pace.

Alyokhina is open about her battle to remain strong in prison, but she gives little away about her personal life

Particularly amusing is the farcicality of her trial, the legal contortions of the prosecution and the check-shirted Moscow hipster photographers who stare apologetically at her in the glass cage where Russian defendants are obliged to sit.

While Alyokhina is open about her battle to remain strong in prison, she gives little away about her personal life. One of the few allusions to her young son is when a police investigator threatens Alyokhina by revealing officers have visited his kindergarten. There is just a fleeting mention of her parents, who met for the first time since their divorce in the courtroom where their daughter was on trial.

Nor does she elucidate some of the unexplained moments of Pussy Riot’s story. How did the other participants of the stunt in the church evade arrest? How did the police find her and Tolokonnikova? Why did she fall out with her lawyers? Why was Samutsevich freed from the courtroom? What did she think of the criticism she received for flying to Siberia to meet with Tolokonnikova before going to see her son?

This book is more of a call-to-action than a history book: Alyokhina is focused on the escapades of Pussy Riot and the inhumanity of Russia’s criminal justice system rather than some of the more practical details of their experience which, by their absence, come across as extraneous to the author.

While anyone familiar with Pussy Riot will know Alyokhina’s story, many will not know the details of the week the band spent in hiding as they tried to escape the police who were desperately looking for them. There is a gripping re-telling of how Alyokhina, Tolokonnikova and Samutsevich moved from Moscow apartment to apartment, giving dozens of interviews in balaclavas while locked in the toilets of cafes — using only public wifi networks was a security precaution. They turned down offers of help to flee the country and were eventually arrested by ten police officers clad in black outside the metro. “We didn’t want to emigrate. In our story, personal choices are political,” Alyokhina writes.

Even more powerful is Alyokhina’s portrayal of prison life — from the detention facilities in Moscow where she is held before and during her trial, to the long transfer east by train and the prison colony where she served most of her sentence near Russia’s Ural Mountains.

It is hard not to grimace at Alyokhina’s description of the intense cold of one cell in Moscow, where cracks in the walls are stuffed with chewed bread and sanitary pads

The grinding reality of prison life in Russia takes up over half of Riot Days. It is hard not to grimace at Alyokhina’s description of the intense cold of one cell in Moscow, where cracks in the walls are stuffed with chewed bread and sanitary pads. She recounts inspections by guards of naked prisoners, apparently looking for tattoos, regular gynaecological examinations and her brushes with drug addicts on the verge of death, murderers and stool pigeons.

The international attention Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova received meant that their experience was different from normal prisoners, but she gradually learned how to use her position — through hunger strikes and the help of human rights activists, journalists and lawyers — to assist her fellow prisoners. New shawls, milk and the installation of new telephones were some of the concessions she won for fellow inmates.

Alyokhina finds her calling, and some comfort, in the constant battles with the prison authorities. She dubs her small victories “a narrow sliver of a right, in a huge field of injustice and mistreatment” and says: “I love this sliver of freedom.”

In its descriptions of Russian prison life, Riot Days is the latest in a long line of biting portrayals of the system by ex-political prisoners, and Alyokhina takes pride in placing herself in this tradition, calling Pussy Riot the “new dissidents”. While in prison, she read Varlam Shalamov and Vladimir Bukovsky, both famous chroniclers of the Soviet Union’s gulag network.

Riot Days is full of momentum, but its vision for Russia’s future is bleak: since the late Soviet period, little has changed, Alyokhina says, and it doesn’t look like it will soon start. Her book is unmistakably a cry for change, but it is also a warning against a stasis gripping the country. She quotes one prison guard who had worked at her colony for 40 years, and who had always, Alyokhina notes, answered her with kindness. “Nothing has changed,” Irina Vasilievna tells Alyokhina. “Look around you. Does it look like anything ever changes in this country?”