Eyes like gimlets, with a dancer’s posture and bright green curls in short blond hair, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova walked into Veranda, the coffee shop in Moscow where Russia’s middle-class recovers from a hot summer day. Even if she hadn’t been wearing a black miniskirt and leopard-printed shoes, the co-founder of Pussy Riot would still stand out in public, and she knows it.
Anything can happen in Russia to someone with her profile and commitment to rebellion. In the the past year alone, Tolokonnikova, who defines herself as a “politician,” has been publicly whipped, pummeled, pepper-sprayed and doused with a green antiseptic chemical in various regions of Russia. Still, she refuses to give up haunting downtown Moscow, whatever the risks.
“Now, when they are killing us, we’ll go ultimately far in our efforts to change the Kremlin,” Tolokonnikova told The Daily Beast in an interview Saturday, recalling the night in late February, when she learned about the fatal shooting of former deputy prime minister and opposition leader Boris Nemtsov. Tolokonnikova blames the assassination on a climate of fear and hated that hasn’t just been allowed to develop in Russia but has been actively encouraged by the government. Death threats against Tolokonnikova are frequent. Still, she declines to be afraid. Last Friday she was briefly detained for attending a peaceful protest, wearing a prison uniform and trying to sew together a flag of Russia.
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But Tolokonnikova is unbowed and is staying put. “The life of an exile would mean a big personal tragedy to me,” she said. Any nightmares about jail? “Nothing like that.” Her prison term happened “terribly long ago,” she said, rolling her eyes, but not before acknowledging that prison and prisoners were constantly on her mind.
“Focused,” “established,” “shaped up”—Tolokonnikova’s answers came like automatic weapon fire. When she and her friend Maria Alyokhina were freed from prison, or what in Russian slang is known as “zona”—meaning the “zone,” and connoting life inside Russia’s gulag system—in December, 2013, they decided to created their own zones, ones to fight lawlessness. Together with 13 fellows activists, Tolokonnikova and Alyonkhina founded Zona of Law, a prison reform NGO, and Media Zona, a news website covering news from Russian prisons, courts, and law enforcement agencies.
Two months later, Pussy Riot staged their first big protest in Sochi, the site of Russia’s 2014 Winter Olympics. Tolokonnikova told me at the time that she came to Sochi to sing a song devoted to “political prisoners”—friends she and Maria made on the inside. Every performance Pussy Riot staged in Sochi resulted in further detentions and beatings, while locals accused the band and its two most famous members of living the life of parasites and spoiling Russia’s long-waited international sporting event.
Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina can be faulted for anything save laziness. To raise money for their prison-reform efforts, they performed at festivals, participated in international fora and film projects. In the U.S., they were treated as celebrities—punk rock Solzhenitsyns. Madonna introduced their speech at a concert in Brooklyn organized by Amnesty International; both had prominent cameos as themselves in a House of Cards episode that made no attempt to disguise its Russian president as a thuggish stand-in for Vladimir Putin, who Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina boldly snubbed at a state dinner in the Kevin Spacey White House. In late June, the women are planning to deliver another barnstorming speech at London’s Glastonbury Festival.
If they stick with being prisoner rights’ crusaders, they’ll have their work cut out for them. Russia has the 10th-largest prison population in the world, with an estimated 671,000 people incarcerated as of 2015. Among the most important problems of zona, Tolokonnikova cited poor medical treatment. She herself suffered terrible headaches for weeks while in jail. “We could have been collecting the money we make abroad in our pockets but we decided to contribute our honorariums to help prisoners with HIV and other health problems,” Tolokonnikov said.
By law, she’s prohibited from being involved in Russian politics for 10 years, owing to her conviction for hooliganism.
Not that 10 years is a career-killer to a world-famous 25-year-old. Asked whether she was planning to lead a political party in her late 30s, she shook her head and laughed. In her view, Russian society in 2025 may be even more conservative and intolerant toward counterculture, freedom of speech and minorities than it is now. “I don’t think anybody would think of me seriously and elect me,” she said.
Besides, she freely admits that her character isn’t exactly presidential material, especially in Russia. “I like to tell truth, express myself the way I feel, without wriggling.” She refuses to shake hands with people she doesn’t respect—a precondition for any successful political career. “I think I can be much more useful for our society if I stayed faithful to myself. But who knows—let’s not rule anything out.”
