Riot Days

From activist, Pussy Riot member and freedom fighter Maria Alyokhina, a raw, hallucinatory, passionate account of her arrest, trial and imprisonment in Siberian jail for standing up for what she believed in. 
 
'One of the most brilliant and inspiring things I've read in years. Couldn't put it down. This book is freedom' Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick 
 
'A women's prison memoir like no other! One tough cookie!' @MargaretAtwood 
 
'Once you begin reading, you are completely disarmed, unable to put it down until the last page' Marina Abramovic 
 
People who believe in freedom and democracy think it will exist forever. 
 
That is a mistake. What happened in Russia - what happened to me - could happen anywhere. 
 
When I was jailed for political protest, I learned that prison doesn't just teach you to follow the rules. It teaches you to think that you can never break them. 
 
It's inevitable that the prison gates will open at some point. But this doesn't mean that you leave the 'prisoner' category and go straight into the category of 'the free'. 
 
Freedom does not exist unless you fight for it every day. 
 
This is the story about how I made a choice.

Reading: RIOT DAYS, by #PussyRiot member MariaAlyokhina. A women's prison memoir like no other! One tough cookie!

Riot Days could so easily have been a straightforward, from-the-horse's-mouth confessional account of one of the most publicised political protests of recent years. Alyokhina takes on a far greater challenge: creating a text that is not just a reflection on a piece of art, but becomes one itself, and one that, in many places, lives up to her own criteria of protest: that it must be "desperate, sudden, and joyous"

The literary equivalent of guerrilla street art

[An] energetic and enjoyable prison diary ... A search for meaningful protest in an age in which presidents often appear to be playful performance artists

Alyokhina's eye for surreal detail gives Riot Days a welcome dose of dark humor ... Through the chinks in the abusive system, Alyokhina glimpses human beings

Strong, brave, honest, touching, bitter and sad

Vladimir Sorokin, master of contemporary Russian literature

One of the most brilliant and inspiring things I've read in years. Couldn't put it down. This book is freedom

Fascinating and important ... What's most striking is its universality

Maria Alyokhina is a political activist, artist and member of Pussy Riot collective. Her first book Riot Days was highly acclaimed and translated into many languages.

Maria Alyokhina

Vivid, dreamlike, jagged... Political Girl is exceptional, a devastating record of Russia now

A vivid diary... Alyokhina’s writing captures the extremes of life as an enemy of Putin’s state

A defiant memoir... The book is a field guide to the official and subcontracted repression of modern Russia. The state wants to make cogs of people; Political Girl answers with bodies, art, and the stubborn resistance of individual acts

Reads like a mash-up of a jail diary, a news bulletin and a Kafkaesque novel… a useful history of some of the most dystopian moments in the Putin era over the past quarter-century

Maria Alyokhina doesn’t surrender, and her new book glows with the revolutionary power of hope, art and solidarity

A rollicking, funny, street-level, first-person account of life in Russia today for anyone with an opinion or idea that does not fit. An important and witty piece of social history

Political Girl reads like a mash up between a diary, a news bulletin and a Kafkaesque novel. Alyokhina’s caustic wit stands alongside her steadfast faith — a striking contrast to Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Orthodox Church and Pussy Riot's first enemy — whom she dismisses as “a bearded KGB agent in a cassock.” With an array of deftly drawn Kremlin stooges, cops, judges and prison guards, this is a brilliant account of what it takes to be an activist in Putin’s Russia

Witty, urgent, and unflinching, Political Girl is a visceral journey into the heart of authoritarianism and an enduring cry for justice. From the cold concrete of prison cells to the surreal act of eating “enemy” cheese, from moments of quiet resistance to the front lines of protest, Maria Alyokhina offers a raw, fearless testament to the power—and price—of defiance. Though rooted in Russia, her story speaks far beyond its borders, to anyone who believes that protest can be art, and that art can confront, disrupt, and even destabilize authoritarian power. Political Girl is a fierce, inspiring portrait of a true star of conscience

Life and Fate in Russia

2014: Russia prepares to host the Winter Olympics. Russia invades Crimea. Putin is re-elected president. Several political prisoners are amnestied and released early from prison.Maria Alyokhina is among them. She had spent two years in a penal colony after performing the punk prayer ‘Virgin Mary, Banish Putin’ with her friends in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. They had warned the rest of the world of the dangers of authoritarianism but the Russia she finds when she gets out of prison is even more oppressive.What can you do, she asks, when your country has been seized by all-powerful men who are waging war against another country and their own citizens?As Maria recounts her brave and colourful protests, we are drawn straight into the world of grassroots opposition and witness the absurd measures the Russian state takes to contain protest. And when the full-scale war against Ukraine starts and the Russian opposition is repeatedly silenced, Maria and her activist friends continue to resist despite the high stakes. They fight increasingly absurd cycles of detention and house arrest: sometimes with the smallest acts such as going for a walk or having a rainbow ice cream, until, faced with a new prison sentence, she escapes Russia in May 2022 dressed as a delivery food courier. Her story, like her life, is fiercely courageous, darkly funny and highly inspiring to anyone who wants to stand up for the truth.

Maria Alyokhina

Praise for Political Girl

Vivid, dreamlike, jagged... Political Girl is exceptional, a devastating record of Russia now

Angry, tragic and funny

A vivid diary... Alyokhina’s writing captures the extremes of life as an enemy of Putin’s state

Vivid, dreamlike, jagged... Political Girl is exceptional, a devastating record of Russia now

Angry, tragic and funny

A vivid diary... Alyokhina’s writing captures the extremes of life as an enemy of Putin’s state

Vivid, dreamlike, jagged... Political Girl is exceptional, a devastating record of Russia now

Angry, tragic and funny

A vivid diary... Alyokhina’s writing captures the extremes of life as an enemy of Putin’s state

Books by Maria Alyokhina

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter