Pussy Riot is a Russian feminist protest and performance art group that became popular for its provocative punk rock music which later turned into a more accessible style. Founded in the fall of 2011 by the then 22-year-old Nadya Tolokonnikova, it has had a membership of approximately 11 women. The group staged unauthorized, provocative guerrilla gigs in public places. These performances were filmed as music videos and posted on the internet. The group's lyrical themes included feminism, LGBTQ rights, opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin, his policies and his links to the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church.
The group gained global notoriety when five members of the group staged a performance inside Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in February 2012, an action condemned as sacrilegious by the Russian Orthodox Church. Three members of the group were arrested, tried, convicted, later amnestied and released on probation. The trial and sentence attracted considerable attention and criticism,According to BBC Monitoring, in the worldwide press there was "almost universal condemnation" of the two-year sentence imposed on the three members of the group. particularly in the West. The case was taken up by human rights groups, including Amnesty International, which designated the women as prisoners of conscience, and by a number of prominent entertainers. Public opinion in Russia was generally less sympathetic towards the band members.
In December 2025, the Russian Ministry of Justice added Pussy Riot to its list of extremist organizations.
Origins
Pussy Riot is a collective formed in late 2011 in response to national politics in Russia. Its name, consisting of two English-language words written in the Latin alphabet, usually appears that way in the Russian press, though it is sometimes transliterated into Cyrillic as "Пусси Райот". The group consisted of around a dozen performers.
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, her husband, Pyotr Verzilov, and Yekaterina Samutsevich were members of the anarchist art collective "Voina" from the group's early days in 2007, until an acrimonious split in 2009. Following the split, they formed a separate Moscow-based group, also named "Voina", saying that they had as much right to use the name as Voina founder Oleg Vorotnikov.
Tolokonnikova and Samutsevich gave a lecture on punk feminism in 2011, in which they refer to the "Pisya Riot" band as a striking example of punk feminist art in Russia, but did not reveal their relation to the band until their arrest in 2012.
Membership The group was started by 15 women, several of whom were previously involved in Voina. While there is no official line-up and the band says anyone can join, it usually has between 10 and 20 members. The members prefer anonymity and are known for wearing brightly colored balaclavas when performing and using aliases when giving interviews. At the start, the group was relatively unknown, but this changed following a February 2012 performance in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Following the performance, three women, Maria Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, were publicly identified and eventually convicted of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. Two other women involved fled the country and have never been named.
Tolokonnikova is seen as the face of the group. She was born in Norilsk and studied at Moscow State University. Tolokonnikova and then-husband Pyotr Verzilov were members of Voina from 2007. They were involved in provocative art performances that included drawing a penis on a bridge and having public sex in a Moscow biological museum. Alyokhina is a single mother, poet and previously did work as an environmental activist. She was a student at the Institute of Journalism and Creative Writing in Moscow.
Samutsevich joined Voina in 2008, at the same time as Alyokhina. She is a computer programmer and a former member of Moscow's . Samutsevich's hooliganism sentence was commuted and following release, she disappeared from the public eye. During the trial, Verzilov lobbied on behalf of all three band members, but was later dismissed after it was reported that he was the band's producer. The prisoners wrote a letter saying "The only person who has the right to represent the group is a woman with a balaclava."
Following release, Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina said they were no longer members of the group, although they appeared at various events around the world using the name Pussy Riot. Other members tried to distance themselves from the two, saying that although they were glad for their release, the members were anti-capitalistic and did not support their use of Pussy Riot to make money from songs and tours. After failing to prevent them from using the Pussy Riot name, they declared the group dead.
In 2015, Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina went their own ways and although they still follow similar paths and keep in touch, Pussy Riot is seen by some as more Tolokonnikova's project than the collective it started out as. Alyokhina created her own show, Riot Days (based on her memoir with the same nameRiot Days at Goodreads), which recounts her life as a Russian activist, and tours various fringe festivals.
During the 2018 FIFA World Cup Final, members identifying with the group invaded the pitch wearing police uniforms to protest wrongful arrests. They were Verzilov, economics student Veronika Nikulshina, journalist Olga Kurachyova and Olga Pakhtusova.
Musical and performance style
In an interview with Gazeta.ru, a band member described their two-minute concerts as performance art, creating images of "pure protest, saying: super heroes in balaclavas and acid bright tights seize public space in Moscow." Another band member, who went by the pseudonym Garadzha, told the Moskovskiye Novosti newspaper that the group was open to women recruits with limited musical talents. She said: "You don't have to sing very well. It's punk. You just scream a lot."
The group cited British punk rock and Oi! bands Angelic Upstarts, Cockney Rejects, Sham 69 and the 4-Skins as their main musical influences. The band also cited American punk rock band Bikini Kill, performance artist Karen Finley and the riot grrrl movement of the 1990s as inspirations. They stated:
Pussy Riot used situationist-style guerrilla performances. Tolokonnikova stated:
Pussy Riot's performances can either be called dissident art or political action that engages art forms. Either way, our performances are a kind of civic activity amidst the repressions of a corporate political system that directs its power against basic human rights and civil and political liberties.
Costumes
Costumes usually consisted of brightly colored dresses and tights, even in bitterly cold weather, with faces hidden by balaclavas. During interviews, band members used nicknames such as "Balaclava", "Cat", "Seraph", "Terminator", and "Blondie".
Ideology
Civil society In an email interview with The St. Petersburg Times, the group explained their political positions further, saying that members' perspectives ranged from anarchist to liberal left, but that all were united by feminism, anti-authoritarianism and opposition to Putin, whom members regard as continuing the "aggressive imperial politics" of the Soviet Union. Group concerns include education, health care, and the centralization of power, and the group supports regional autonomy and grass-roots organizing. Members regard unsanctioned rallies as a core principle, saying that authorities do not see rallies that they have sanctioned as a threat and simply ignore them. For this reason, all of Pussy Riot's performances were illegal and used co-opted public space. Interviewed by the BBC during rehearsals the day before the Cathedral of Christ the Savior performance, band members argued that only vivid, illegal actions brought media attention. In an interview with Slate in the spring of 2018 during the band's first North American tour, Tolokonnikova stated that economic inequality "is a big issue for Pussy Riot", highlighting that such inequality was a notable feature of both Russian and American society, and that discussion of inequality was absent from mainstream political discourse in both the US and Europe.
Feminism The group was organized in part due to anger over what members saw as government policies that discriminated against women, citing legislation that "placed restrictions on legal abortions". According to Tolokonnikova, Pussy Riot was "part of the global anti-capitalist movement, which consists of anarchists, Trotskyists, feminists and autonomists." For Pussy Riot, their music, politics, and performances stand in solidarity with other leftist freedom movements. In a February 2012 interview with Vice magazine, Pussy Riot member "Serafima" named her major feminist influences as Simone de Beauvoir, Andrea Dworkin, Emmeline Pankhurst, Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, Rosi Braidotti and Judith Butler.
Pussy Riot saw themselves as feminist artists who were influenced by the riot grrrl movement and musical groups such as Bikini Kill, Cockney Rejects and by writers, activists and artists like Alexandra Kollontai, Judith Butler, Karen Finley, Simone de Beauvoir and Vladimir Bukovsky. The media tended to overlook the meaning behind Pussy Riot's feminism; the cultural context of it was vastly different from that of Western feminism. According to Elianna Kan in The American Reader, Pussy Riot's feminism focused on the repression of authoritarian regimes that created idealised ideas of sexism, sex and family life. Pussy Riot strove to make it clear that feminism in Russia was still an issue and that post-feminism had not been achieved. The Russian cultural context had to be acknowledged and its feminist notions had to be seen differently from those of Western feminism because in places such as the United States, feminism evolved to general "women's issues", whereas in Russia that was not the case. In Russia, feminism was seen as something "that could destroy Russia", as said by Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church.
LGBTQ issues
Pussy Riot members were outspoken in their support of LGBTQ rights, and in a 2012 interview confirmed that the group included at least one member of a sexual minority. Both Tolokonnikova and Samutsevich participated in the banned 2011 Moscow Pride rally in Moscow, and were briefly detained after the rally was broken up by police. In a 2018 interview Tolokonnikova spoke about the importance of transgender rights to the band, explaining that she rejected gender essentialism and stating that "we believe you don't actually have to have a vagina or clitoris to be a woman, and having a clitoris doesn't necessarily make you a woman... We are always saying that anybody can be in Pussy Riot, and we really mean it". For Pussy Riot, Putin upkeeps the status quo of LGBT persecution and in Russian political life.
Songs and videos
From 2011 - 2012, Pussy Riot released seven songs and five videos. An Associated Press reporter described them as "badly recorded, based on simple riffs and scream-like singing" and stated that critics had dismissed them as "amateur, provocative and obscene". The A.V. Club described them as an "excellent band" with "fuzzed-out guitars and classic Riot Grrrl chants". In an opinion piece for The New York Times, Pitchfork Media reviewer Michael Idov wrote, "judging [Pussy Riot] on artistic merit would be like chiding the Yippies because Pigasus the Immortal, the pig they ran for president in 1968, was not a viable candidate."
Pussy Riot have never released their early songs as an album, however, their songs are freely available for download on a number of Internet sites, collected together under the bootleg titles Ubey seksista ("Kill the sexist") or In Riot We Trust.
On January 31, 2018, Pussy Riot announced their first North American tour.