where is she? pussy riot member missing in Russian prison system
image via Wiki Commons
You may remember the news headlines earlier this year about Russian punk-rock band ‘Pussy Riot,’ if not, here’s an update about what’s going on:
Pussy Riot made headlines worldwide with their fluorescent, flash-mob performances of noisy free speech, which nevertheless were harmless.
The band, consisting of three young women in their twenties, two of them mothers, performed in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in February this year.
They were protesting mainly against the re-election of Russian President, Vladimir Putin, which, in their view, means that supposedly secular Russia was soon to become fully religious and corrupted. They were all arrested and then trialed in August, where two of the women were sentenced to two years in prison.
Since that sentencing, not much has been heard about the fate of these young women, until recently. One of the members, Nadya Tolokonnikova was imprisoned in a penal colony in Mordovia and was involved in a hunger strike, protesting the ‘slave labour conditions’ that she and fellow prisoners were subjected to.
Authorities decided to move her to a new prison, probably a play to get headlines about her to decease, however since that move the news has picked up an even bigger story – she has not been seen or heard from in many days.
Her friends and family are concerned, as are the rest of the world. Her husband, Pyotr Verzilov believes that ‘they want to cut her off from the outside world,’ they being the Russian authorities who won’t disclose to him where his own wife is. The only information he has is through a source inside the Russian prison system that tipped him off by saying she is currently being moved to the Krasnoyarsk region.
However, without confirmation, Verzilov and the rest of Nadya’s family just cannot be sure whether she is alive and well or whether she has been subjected to a whole host of mistreatments.
No one can be sure the next time we’ll hear news of her, and we can only hope and pray (albeit pray in a punk-rock manner) that she turns up somewhere.
