Pussy Riot‘s Yekaterina Samutsevich, who was freed from prison on 10 October, has declared that the Russian punk band will continue mounting protest concerts. “We are not finished,” she said in her first interview since leaving jail. “We [just] have to somehow get round the authorities to deceive them in some clever way.”
Although two of Samutsevich’s bandmates remain behind bars, the 30-year-old shows no sign of abandoning the movement that turned the three women into enemies of the Russian state. She has reunited with other members of the protest group, telling reporters that Pussy Riot is “more united than ever … fighting for the freedom of Masha and Nadia!”
In an interview last night with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Samutsevich underlined Pussy Riot’s plan to continue. “[We are not] going to end our political protest,” she said. “The situation in the country has deteriorated since our performance and the trial itself is a testimony to that.” They will just be “more cautious”, Samutsevich explained, in light of Vladimir Putin’s “mega authoritarian project”.
“We have to act in such a way so that they do not know, do not learn about the concerts ahead of time before it’s too soon, so that we wouldn’t be caught and jailed afterward,” she said.
During her imprisonment, Samutsevich said, she and the other sentenced Pussy Riot members were kept in separate holding cells, each with three or four other women. “We were always recorded; we were always on camera,” she said, but they were never abused and she “never felt scared”. Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, who have been ordered to serve their two-year prison sentences, are “very, very upset” about being taken away from their young children. “But they are holding up very well.”
Samutsevich also denied that there is any kind of splintering within Pussy Riot, leading to or as a result of her suspended sentence. “There’s never been any kind of split,” she said. “We remain together and that’s why we’re strong … And if anyone tries to picture us as being split, this is completely untrue.”
Pussy Riot are still discussing the location and nature of their next public protest. It will definitely not be at the Moscow cathedral where they performed their “punk prayer” in February: not only does the band wish to make clear that they have “no religious hatred”, they never go back to the same site twice. “Once we have one performance in one venue, the next performance will be in a different spot, in a different place on a different subject, on another political subject, but very different,” Samutsevich said. “Anything is possible.”