One of the jailed members of Pussy Riot has been denied a request to postpone her prison term while she cares for her five-year-old son.
Maria Alyokhina, 24, appeared at the city court in Berezniki, 1,200 miles north-east of Moscow, near where she is being held with fellow musician Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. Alyokhina had applied to defer her two-year sentence until her son, Filipp, is 14. “I’m in a situation where I have to prove here that my son needs me, which is obvious,” she said.
However, the judge ruled that “no new circumstances” to justify postponement had been presented in the appeal. “The fact that Alyokhina has a young child was taken into account [in the original sentencing] by Moscow’s Khamovnichesky court,” the court ruled, according to the Russian news agency Interfax. A similar request for deferral, by 21-year-old Tolokonnikova, is still pending. Both women are due to serve another year at the prison colony in the Ural mountains.
In addition to the issue of Alyokhina’s child, the hearing also reportedly focused on complaints about her behaviour in the prison. She has allegedly received several disciplinary reprimands, including the complaint that she did not respond to a 5:30am wake-up call. Alyokhina protested that she had not heard the guard’s knock on her door, and officials have since prevented her from airing grievances with the camp’s disciplinary committee. “I would be very tempted to mention Gogol, Kafka and Orwell at this moment,” she said.
Meanwhile, in Moscow, a Russian Orthodox priest who declared support for Pussy Riot has been relieved of his duties. Father Dmitry Sverdlov, who is also a well-known blogger, wrote an online editorial in March 2012 proposing that there “are people in the church … who agree that the problems [Pussy Riot] voiced do exist”. This week, Sverdlov was suspended from his duties for at least five years. The imposed leave of absence is “in no way connected” to Sverdlov’s comments about Pussy Riot, church spokesman Nikolai Balashikhinsky told RIA Novosti, but no other explanation was given.
It is almost one year since Pussy Riot staged their 40-second performance at Moscow’s Christ the Saviour cathedral, protesting against prime minister Vladimir Putin and his government’s close ties with the orthodox church. While Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova remain imprisoned, a third woman, Yekaterina Samutsevich, was released on appeal last year. “We want to continue performing,” Samutsevich recently told the Guardian, “but we can’t do anything immediately, because our security conditions have become complicated.”