Maria Alyokhina, a punk poet against Putin

Luis Granena

The place is the White House, a papier-mâché White House, the one inhabited by Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright in

.

The year is 2015. Maria Alyokhina,

has already been imprisoned and released more than once.

She has begun to write her book, a vonnegutesque memoir,

, still unpublished in Spain, in which she recounts: 1) how each of the actions of Pussy Riot, the punk feminist collective that has turned into the kind of star who can make a combative cameo in the political series of the moment;

2) day-to-day in prison, giving special prominence to the horrendous cold that is spent there, the systemic mistreatment and forced labor, which seems not to have changed one iota since Dostoevsky's time, and 3) its necessity, from girl, of not abiding by any rule to prevent the world from continuing to be one of those who rule.

More information

The leader of the Pussy Riot flees Moscow disguised as a delivery girl: “Putin does not scare me.

He is nobody”

The chapter in which both Masha and her wrestling partner Nadya Tolokonnikova refuse to toast Viktor Petrov, the Vladimir Putin of the series, Lars Mikkelsen, is the third of the third season.

The act is an act of protest inserted in an artistic product that considered them part of History, with capital letters.

Actually, questioners of it.

"As a teenager," says Masha in

, “I used to do graffiti on one of the school walls”.

The wall was painted with historical motifs depicting a Russia she hadn't seen and didn't believe in.

"I liked seeing how the graffiti were gaining ground and began to mix with those historical episodes, giving shape to another truth, ours," she describes.

She already thought of the adolescent Masha as an activist, without being one yet.

Born in Moscow in 1988, Maria Alyokhina grew up in Russia in the 1990s, and she remembers “people queuing everywhere, queuing for food, clothes, vouchers”.

Something she, she says, has not changed.

"They tell us that the country has changed, but I keep seeing the queues."

She is the daughter of a math teacher, whom she did not meet until she was 21 years old, and a programmer who was a single mother, she hated the Russian educational system and changed schools up to four times.

“They taught you not to think.

They wanted us to just follow the rules.

Obviously, I didn't like it at all,” she once said.

Poet, actress and mother, Masha, who studied journalism and creative writing and was a Greenpeace activist, has always had the legacy of performance artist and political time bomb Aleksandr Brener very much in mind.

In fact, the first action of the Pussy Riot was in the exact place where Brener stood before the Kremlin with a pair of boxing gloves - he was dressed as a boxer, the image is mythical - and asked Yeltsin to go outside. quarrel.

“And there were eight of us, like the eight dissidents in 1968 ″ who protested against the occupation of Czechoslovakia, he recalls.

Although the snapshot that went around the world and forever changed the conception that the West had of that Russia that supposedly no longer had anything to do with the Soviet was that of the Moscow Cathedral.

The action that landed them in jail for the first time.

In it, the collective asks the Mother of God to become a feminist and free Russia from Putin.

Masha dresses in green and wears a yellow balaclava.

And she is doing something very necessary, says Lara Alcázar, founder of Femen Spain.

“The protest seeks to arouse an opinion, a series of questions.

It has always been necessary, but right now there is an emergency.

It shows you the other side.

In your case, where are those who oppress and where are the oppressed”, says Alcázar.

That Masha is today hiding somewhere in Iceland, after having fled from Russia with her partner Lucy Shtein, both disguised as delivery girls, and her life is in danger of her, does not stop showing that other side of history, with capital letters.

Alcázar also points out that when a woman dedicates herself to activism, she transgresses many limits, and that, as in Femen, the value of the Pussy Riot protest is that it does not ask for permission and is based on direct actions and provocation, which which doubles the effect.

Carol Paris, Spanish editor of

(Roca Editorial), considers that the most interesting thing about the group is that it eliminates the idea of ​​individuality and of the subject.

“They show us how we can become active free agents.

We should all be Pussy Riot."

And yet, as Monika Zgustova, writer and translator, points out, we cannot forget that Masha and the rest of the Pussy Riot "are in real danger, a danger of being killed with a bullet to the forehead or a sophisticated poison, as already It has happened to so many people who made the Kremlin uncomfortable.”

That danger “provides value, weight and seriousness to its message”, a message that, as Tolokonnikova says in

, has a lot of “political, barbaric and primitive cabaret”.

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