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Released Punk Rockers Keep Up Criticism of Putin | |
(about 11 hours later) | |
MOSCOW — Two women from the punk group Pussy Riot who were nearing the end of two-year prison terms for staging a protest performance against Vladimir V. Putin in Moscow’s main cathedral were released on Monday under a new amnesty law. | |
Unbowed, they immediately seized on their sudden freedom to slam Mr. Putin, accusing him of using the Russian justice system to bolster his image before the Winter Olympics to be held in Sochi in February, and insisting they did not want his mercy. | |
The case of Maria Alyokhina, who was set free from a prison in the western city of Nizhny Novgorod on Monday morning, and her co-defendant, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, who was released later in the day in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, had drawn widespread condemnation of Russia for suppressing political speech, and made the punk group’s members an international sensation as famous musicians and artists spoke out in their defense. | |
The release of the two women came three days after Mr. Putin granted clemency to Russia’s most famous prisoner, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the former oil tycoon, who was removed from a penal colony in northern Russia and flown to Berlin. | |
The amnesty law and the Khodorkovsky pardon are widely viewed here as an effort by Mr. Putin to eliminate opportunities for criticism of Russia during the Olympics. Already, there has been much criticism in the West of Russia over a law viewed as suppressing gay rights, and there was little doubt that Western governments and rights groups would have used the Games as an opportunity to draw attention to the plight of high-profile prisoners. | |
Mr. Putin has asserted that the amnesty law is an effort to make the criminal justice system more humane and that Mr. Khodorkovsky was similarly released on humanitarian grounds because his mother is ill. Critics, however, have said the releases simply underscore the arbitrariness of the Russian justice system, and Mr. Putin’s singular authority not just over the Kremlin but over Parliament and the courts as well. | |
Ms. Tolokonnikova, who has been the most outspoken of the Pussy Riot defendants, said she regarded the amnesty to be as illegitimate as her arrest and conviction. “They put me in; they let me out,” she said in an interview on the radio station Echo of Moscow. “One thing was funny and the other no less funny.” | |
She said it was obvious the amnesty was tied to the Olympics and called it “ridiculous,” given how close it came to the end of her sentence. Although convicted in August 2012, the women had been jailed since the previous March. | |
“We could easily stay there till the end of the term without this humoristic gesture of our authorities,” she said. | |
In a telephone interview on Monday, Ms. Alyokhina similarly said that she did not want amnesty, and that officials had forced her to leave the prison. She said she would have preferred to serve out her sentence. | |
“I think this is an attempt to improve the image of the current government, a little, before the Sochi Olympics — particularly for the Western Europeans,” she said. “But I don’t consider this humane or merciful.” | |
She added, “We didn’t ask for any pardon.” | |
The two women were convicted of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred, along with a third woman, Yekaterina Samutsevich, whose sentence was later suspended on appeal. The women had insisted that they were motivated not by antireligious sentiment but by opposition to Mr. Putin and to Russia’s political system. | |
The amnesty law was also expected to bring about the release of the Greenpeace activists recently arrested while protesting oil exploration in the Arctic. | |
A pattern of high-profile defendants being the first to benefit from the new amnesty law seemed to support the assertion of a public-relations campaign on the part of the Kremlin. | |
Mark G. Denisov, who works for the Public Supervisory Commission in Krasnoyarsk, which is responsible for monitoring prison conditions and prisoners’ rights, said he expected that about 1,000 convicts would ultimately be released under the amnesty program out of about 23,000 held in jails in the region. But he said that the process was slow and that so far he was not aware of anyone going free other than Ms. Tolokonnikova. | |
In November, she was transferred to Krasnoyarsk, which brought her closer to her grandmother who lives in the city, and where Ms. Tolokonnikova spent many summers as a child. More than 2,600 miles from Moscow, Krasnoyarsk has often been a destination of exile for political opponents by Russia’s rulers, and under Stalin, the city became a major hub in the gulag system. | |
A sign on the front of the prison that held Ms. Tolokonnikova seeks to set the current correctional system apart from this history. It says, “Today the criminal penitentiary system is not a gulag — it’s a center of socio-psychological help for convicts and a system of transitional technology.” | A sign on the front of the prison that held Ms. Tolokonnikova seeks to set the current correctional system apart from this history. It says, “Today the criminal penitentiary system is not a gulag — it’s a center of socio-psychological help for convicts and a system of transitional technology.” |
Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting from Moscow, and Patrick Reevell from Krasnoyarsk, Russia. | |
Andrew E. Kramer contributed reported from in Moscow, and Patrick Reevell from Krasnoyarsk, Russia. | |
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: | This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: |
Correction: December 23, 2013 | Correction: December 23, 2013 |
An earlier version of this article misstated the date of the Decembrist rebellion. It took place in the 19th century, not the 18th century. | An earlier version of this article misstated the date of the Decembrist rebellion. It took place in the 19th century, not the 18th century. |