Words Will Break Cement by Masha Gessen – The Pussy Riot Story review

A vivid account of the arrest and imprisonment of Pussy Riot. What is the significance of their protests?

• Tony Wood - The Guardian, Wednesday 5 February 2014 

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot at a press conference in Amsterdam. Photograph: Paulo Amorim/Rex

On 21 February 2012, five women entered the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, put on brightly coloured balaclavas and began to dance along to a prerecorded song beseeching the Virgin Mary to "drive Putin out". After less than a minute, they were bundled out by security guards. Neither they nor anyone else could have known that this almost-performance would become a watershed, marking the start of a new political era in Russia. The arrest, trial and incarceration of three members of Pussy Riot was only the most notorious example of a crackdown on dissenters that followed Vladimir Putin's return to the presidency in 2012. It was also the opening salvo in a culture war that has come to define Putin's third term, in which regime opponents have been tarred as destroyers of "traditional" Russian values.

The punishment of Pussy Riot deservedly attracted public outrage worldwide, but this is the first book-length account of the affair. Gessen has been a prominent journalist in Russia since the 1990s and is a longstanding critic of Putin: in 2012 she published a stinging portrait of him, The Man Without a Face. An activist for LGBT rights, she also recently announced that she, her partner and their children would be moving to the US to avoid falling foul of homophobic laws passed last summer. 
Gessen offers a lively and sympathetic portrait of the three women at the centre of the storm: Nadya Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Ekaterina Samutsevich ("Kat"). We are given a clear picture of their qualities and flaws, as well as their backgrounds and the ideas that shaped their thinking. For Tolokonnikova, who grew up in the grim Arctic mining town of Norilsk before going to Moscow State University, it was conceptual art and philosophy; Samutsevich was a computer programmer but then switched to photography; Alyokhina was an environmental activist and journalism student.
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