Free Pussy Riot Banner at Champions League Match

Great to see this Free Pussy Riot banner at tonight's football match between Manchester City and CSKA Moscow. It may have been swiftly removed by stewards, but the image of it is already going round the world.

This week's the family of Nadya Tolokonnikova  complained that she has been 'disappeared' in the prison system. According to the Independent (2 November 2013):

'A Pussy Riot member imprisoned at a Russian camp hasn't been heard from for 10 days, her family has said. Nadya Tolokonnikova was moved from her prison colony in the Russian republic of Mordovia on 21 October. She is currently serving two years for her band's performance of a crude song in a Moscow church in February 2012.She had been on hunger strike over conditions in the prison.

Her father, Andrei Tolokonnikov, told Buzzfeed: “No one knows anything. There’s no proof she’s alive, we don’t know the state of her health. Is she sick? Has she been beaten?” Her husband, Petya Verzilov, has been protesting outside the colony regularly. He said: “We think they moved her to a big city to hide her. It seems they got sick of these protests. They want to cut her off from the outside world. When they moved [political prisoner Mikhail] Khodorkovsky, he was also kind of absent for two weeks. Nobody knew where he was, then he suddenly appeared in Chita."

During the offending protest the all-female punk band ran into Moscow's biggest cathedral sang a song calling on the Virgin Mary to kick President Vladimir Putin out of office. Tolokonnikova and fellow member Maria Alyokhina are serving sentences for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” following the performance'.

Meanwhile 28 Greenpeace activists and 2 journalists remain in prison charged with hooliganism after a protest at a Russian offshore oil rig in the Arctic in September. These high profile cases are just the tip of the iceberg. Last month (27 October) thousands of people took part in a rally in Moscow in solidarity with political prisoners.

London Drum Riot for Pussy Riot

Global Day of Action in support of Pussy Riot next Saturday September 15 - London action is 11 am - 2 pm opposite Russian Consulate, Bayswater Road. Facebook details here.

There's also a Free Pussy Riot benefit gig tomorrow night (Sunday 9 September) at the Hoxton Square Bar and Kitchen with PEGGY SUE, GAGGLE, NEUROTIC MASS MOVEMENT and SKINNY GIRL DIET.

Translations of Pussy Riot letters and documents at this site. Here's a letter from Maria Alyokhina (20 Aug. 2012), one of three members of the collective jailed in Russia last month for two years for hooliganism motivated by religious hatred after an anti-Government punk performance in a Moscow cathedral:

'Right after the reading of the verdict, we were taken to the cells, accompanied by guards with dogs. After a few minutes my guard asked for an excerpt from the verdict. A few minutes after that, a special forces cop burst into my cell and started swearing at me, telling me to get my things together. Evidently I wasn't fast enough, and he started twisting my arms. This was very strange, because in the past we were generally treated less roughly. So there must have been special instructions. The rest of the procedure went like this: we were loaded onboard a bus full of these special forces types and then, accompanied by numerous police vehicles, including two other buses full of armed police, were driven halfway across Moscow in a "corridor" specially cleared through the dense traffic. What is the meaning of all this? Even terrorists and heavy criminals aren't given this kind of special convoy treatment. Doing so for three girls is a clear sign of FEAR. The depth of this fear came as a surprise. It would be nice to think that it will all end happily, but these events would seem to indicate otherwise'.