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Freed Pussy Riot members say they still want to remove Vladimir Putin | Freed Pussy Riot members say they still want to remove Vladimir Putin |
(about 11 hours later) | |
For two women who have spent almost two years in a notorious prison system, Russia's Pussy Riot activists appeared unabashed and defiant on Friday, as they vowed to persist with their attempts to oust Vladimir Putin and replace him with a more tolerant, open type of leadership. | |
Speaking publicly for the first time since their release this week after 21 months in jail, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina said they had emerged from prison even more passionate about politics, with a plan to bring about a "cultural revolution" in Russia's prisons and better conditions for those behind bars. | |
And in a nod of deference to another recently released Putin foe, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, they added that the former tycoon would make a far better head of state than the incumbent. "We still want to get rid of him," said Tolokonnikova of Putin. "I would very much like to invite Mikhail Borisovich [Khodorkovsky] to play this role," she added. | |
Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina seemed somewhat subdued, and certainly quieter than the activists in balaclavas whose antics in a Moscow cathedral nearly two years ago briefly threatened to make a laughing stock of Putin. | |
But equally they did not look like they had spent years in a prison system in which tuberculosis is rampant and violence a fact of life. Tolokonnikova's vivid letters from jail focused on the brutal treatment of Russia's prisoners, and she proudly told journalists that conditions had improved during her sentence. | |
"The 16-hour working day is now a thing of the past," she said. But both women appeared to be concerned about fellow prisoners who helped them collect information and testified to human rights observers about conditions in the prison. Alyokhina called on the authorities to release a female inmate she had befriended, who is dying from cirrhosis while being badly mistreated by prison officials. "It's only a question of whether she dies at home or in jail," Alyokhina said. | |
The women said they were setting up a human rights organisation that would help Russian prisoners. They had briefly considered using the Pussy Riot commercial brand to fund it, but decided against it. "It was a very rapid decision. We are not a part of the commercial world," Tolokonnikova said. | |
The women arrived in Moscow having been reunited in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, where Tolokonnikova served the final stretch of her jail term. Alyokhina was released earlier from Nizhny Novgorod prison, 250 miles outside Moscow. Friday's press conference – held at the offices of Dozhd TV, an independent channel not afraid of covering the opposition movement – was the pair's first official appearance since their release. To get there, they had to walk past Jesus Christ the Saviour cathedral, where they staged their daring anti-Putin performance in March 2012, whereupon they were arrested, prosecuted and sentenced to two years in jail. The women said that in the near future they would focus on human rights, but – as Alyokhina stressed – they would "use political methods" in their struggle. | |
"Our attitude to Putin hasn't changed at all. The message of our action in the cathedral is still valid. By Putin we mean the bureaucratic machine he has built," Tolokonnikova said. She described the president as a scared man, vulnerable to deception by his entourage, and believing in the mythical threat from the west. "He said wild things about Pussy Riot, but it was evident that he actually believes in what he says. I don't want to live in his nightmare," Tolokonnikova said. | |
They appeared to feel little gratitude to the Russian president for their release. "It was not an act of humanism. The authorities have simply backed off under pressure coming from inside Russia and from the west. It is not Putin and his parliament we are grateful to, but people who supported us. It was like a miracle," Tolokonnikova said. "My prison guards were freaking out when letters started pouring in from everywhere – America, Turkey, Bulgaria, even China. I was carrying three huge sacks of letters when they transferred me to another prison." | |
It is the fear that political prisoners could undermine the Winter Olympics in Sochi in February that forced Putin to release them, Tolokonnikova said. | |
The Pussy Riot members were due to be freed in March 2014, but the Russian parliament granted them an amnesty three months earlier, along with a number of other political prisoners. | |
However, many more remained behind bars, including people who took part in a rally in Bolotnaya Square in Moscow in May 2012 that ended in clashes with riot police. Most of them are rank-and-file opposition activists or completely random people caught up in the political upheaval. They enjoy little attention from the media, although some of them have spent 18 months in prison awaiting trial. "I am really scared about what might happen to them, because their trials will take place after the Games", Tolokonnikova said. | |
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