About six years ago, a group of women wearing colorful balaclavas made international headlines after storming Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, thrashing around the altar, and chanting, “Virgin Mary, mother of God, put Putin away.”
The women belonged to Pussy Riot, the anti-Kremlin protest collective and feminist punk band that formed shortly after Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012. Following the “Punk Prayer” demonstration, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich were imprisoned and charged with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”—an ironic conviction, given the group’s frequent criticism of Russia’s lack of separation between church and state. The highly publicized trial resulted in the sentencing of Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina to two years in a penal colony (Samutsevich was freed on probation).