Pussy Riot: Punk Prayer on Trial
Forty seconds in a cathedral, two years in prison
Image: Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
In 2012 members of the feminist collective Pussy Riot performed a 'Punk Prayer' against Vladimir Putin in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Three were convicted of 'hooliganism motivated by religious hatred' and imprisoned.
The brief guerrilla performance, filmed and set to a protest anthem, became a global cause célèbre. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich were arrested and tried; two served nearly two years in penal colonies.
The case crystallised international concern over the criminalisation of protest art in Russia and made Pussy Riot one of the defining art-censorship stories of the century — the state treating performance as crime, and prosecution turning performers into symbols.