Pussy Riot member fears for safety of colleague
MOSCOW — Two women from punk band Pussy Riot face harsh, Sovietstyle prison camps, where their lives may be in danger because of a lack of medicine and hot water amid sub-zero temperatures, according to a band member.
Pussy Riot’s anti-Putin protest in a Moscow cathedral had attracted global attention because of the twoyear jail sentences meted out to its members for what prosecutors called “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.”
Opposition figures say the punishments formed part of a wave of repression against opponents of President Vladimir Putin.
Putin said last Thursday that the women “deserved what they got” because their punk prayer in Moscow’s main cathedral last February, during which the balaclava-clad women appealed to the Virgin Mary to get rid of the president, amounted to “group sex” and threatened the moral foundations of Russia.
Yekaterina Samutsevich, the third member of Pussy Riot who was released from jail this month after her sentence was suspended on appeal, spoke in an interview about the prison camp in Mordovia, about 500 kilometres southeast of Moscow, where her colleague, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, has been sent to serve her sentence.
She said its conditions recalled the Soviet era. “There is no hot water in Mordovia and there are only special prison clothes given out which are very cold for the weather,” Samutsevich, 30, said.
“There is no medicine. In Soviet times they thought that if people fell ill, that was their own problem. … If someone gets sick and nobody helps them, they can die — unfortunately there have been such cases and they happen periodically.”
The other jailed group member, Maria Alyokhina, is bound for a prison camp in the Urals city of Perm, a location used to jail political prisoners in the Soviet era. She has not yet arrived.
Samutsevich predicted that Putin’s government would in the end fall victim to mass unrest, and said the clampdown on dissent now underway in Russia showed just how scared the Kremlin was.
She said Pussy Riot’s top priority is to campaign to free the band’s two imprisoned members, and it would call on other members for help.