Band Members in Putin Protest Said to Face Harsh Conditions
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Version 0 of 1. MOSCOW (Reuters) — Two women from the punk band Pussy Riot who were sentenced to prison terms for an anti-Putin protest in a Moscow cathedral face harsh prison camps with inadequate medicine and no hot water despite subzero winter temperatures, according to a recently released bandmate. The freed member, Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30, spoke in an interview in a small McDonald’s in a town just outside Moscow because of concerns about her security. The first part of the interview was filmed, and took place outside in a howling cold wind because the restaurant would not allow TV cameras inside. “The system itself is crumbling,” she said, adding: “Those in power have very strong fears, and their behavior is more and more wild. We could end with a total collapse like the Soviet Union.” She and two bandmates were given two-year sentences for what prosecutors called “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” for a punk prayer in Moscow’s main cathedral last February, during which the balaclava-clad women appealed to the Virgin Mary to get rid of President Vladimir V. Putin. Ms. Samutsevich, however, was freed in October, when an appeals court apparently accepted her lawyer’s argument that she had played a relatively small role. She described harsh conditions at the prison camp in Mordovia, about 300 miles southeast of Moscow, where bandmate Nadezhda Tolokonnikova has been sent to serve her two-year sentence. “There is no hot water in Mordovia and there are only special prison clothes given out which are very cold for the weather,” she said. “There is no medicine.” She said that “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. Mr. Putin is now starting a fresh six-year term as president, having won an election in March with 63.6 percent of the vote. Opponents said the Kremlin’s dominance over the mass media, obstacles placed in the way of the opposition, ballot-stuffing and the extensive use of government resources meant the vote was not free or fair. Last Thursday, he said that the women “deserved what they got” because their protest in the cathedral amounted to “group sex” and threatened the moral foundations of Russia. Polls have shown that in Russia’s predominantly conservative society, in which Orthodox Christian believers are a majority, most citizens approve of the jail terms for the band members and dislike their actions. Asked about popular hostility to the band, Ms. Samutsevich said the Kremlin had used state television channels to present a distorted picture. Viewers, she said, “didn’t see us, they didn’t hear us because the federal TV channels have done their best to cut out our speech.” Any section where the lyrics could be heard was cut, she said. “When people hear the lyrics, they immediately understand the purpose of our action,” she said. The lyrics began, “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish Putin, Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish him, we pray thee.” |