You sometimes walk in a gray crowd on the subway - and suddenly strange, slender girls in multi-colored tights, dresses and colored hats pulled over their faces begin to shout over your head in bad voices:

“It's never too late to become a mistress.
The batons are loaded, the screams are getting louder,
Stretch the muscles of your arms and legs.
The policeman licks between your legs.
Release, release, release
брусчатку!»

You take your friends around Red Square: the Historical Museum, the Mausoleum, St. Basil's Cathedral, and on the way, on the Execution Ground, colorful crazy girls scream with guitars:

“Dawn attack? I won't
mind
For our and your freedom with a whip
punish.
Madonna in glory will teach you how to fight,
Feminist Magdalene went
for a demonstration.
The riot in Russia is the charisma of protest.
Riot in Russia - Putin pissed."

I decided to have a drink at Denis Simachev’s bar, and here on you:

"Occupy the city with a kitchen frying pan,
Come out with a vacuum cleaner, have an orgasm,
Seduce battalions of police girls.
Naked cops rejoice at the new reform,
Pi…dec sexist, er…nym
Putinists!”

You end up sitting in a special isolator, and suddenly from the garage opposite:

"Direct Action is the Future"
humanity.
LGBT, feminist, defend the fatherland.
Death to prison, freedom to protest!”

The leitmotif of all the speeches of strange unknown girls in multi-colored overalls: Putin is a disgusting macho, sexists must be fought, the police are aggressive, women are oppressed, women need to organize a revolution.

The group Pussy Riot (literally translated from English - “Pussy Riot”) is four months old. There are eight girls in the group, calling themselves Balaklava, Manko, Tyurya, Garadzha, Shayba, Schumacher, Blondie and Pokhlebka. They have 4 song videos in their arsenal.

During the first performance, employees of the “E” (counter-extremism) center were among the audience - they introduced themselves and filmed what was happening on their mobile phones. For convenience, the group members put all their songs, thoughts and interviews in their LJ. To look more presentable, they even specifically asked photographer Igor Mukhin to film their rehearsal. It’s hard to dream of a better press release: the image of a group of left-wing activists appeared immediately – and quite vividly.

Pussy Riot seems to give interviews even more often than they perform, and despite all the secrecy and anonymity, they agree to talk immediately and willingly. You can contact the group members through their LiveJournal and by telephone, which has been circulating between editorial offices for a long time - they immediately call back and schedule a secret meeting. We meet on the street near the Tretyakovskaya metro station, Tyurya, wrapped in a scarf, takes us to a friendly bookstore, where Shayba and Garadzha, already equipped in tights, dresses and hats, are waiting.

Pussy Riot members never meet alone - they give all interviews together so that no one thinks that one of them has representative functions. They often repeat: “We have no hierarchy, all members are interchangeable.” Hats, tights and dresses, it seems, are also common, at least they change them often. It is not surprising if they sometimes change their nicknames so that their individuality does not stick. The participants do not say anything about their lives or themselves. “It doesn’t matter,” they say. They do not have real names, history, “another life” and may not even exist at all: “Everyone can put on a mask and, following a certain form, become a member of the group.” Producers of girl bands should take note of this technique - they shouldn’t bashfully select similar girls into the regional lineup of “Strelok” and “Brilliant”, they should frankly insist that it doesn’t matter at all what they look like or who they are specifically.

The participants met at different times at gay pride parades, rallies on the 31st on Triumfalnaya, and in monkey bars. They took the creation of the group seriously - to decide on positioning, they conducted a kind of marketing research: “We looked at different forms of cultural protest, studied which ones exist in the West, which ones exist in Russia. And we realized that there was a real lack of a feminist punk band.”
However, there is no unity of political views in the group, partly because they are different for different participants, partly because no one wants to formulate them: “We are not political scientists, and it is difficult for us to unambiguously determine the totality of our views. We have anarchists, we have left liberals. We agree on only one thing - we are against this regime, that’s for sure.” The basic idea of the group is “to create an attractive, charismatic image of protest from the point of view of sexuality and brightness. We can say that we were united by the form: someone came up with hats, others dresses. We came together as a working team to work on this form.”

“We do not reject rallies, we say that they are needed and this is a very cool, necessary, traditional form of protest that we always support and participate in them ourselves. But at the same time, this must go somewhere further; a network structure of people who do things beyond these permitted ones must be organized. And we are doing this,” says Tyurya.

Lyrics and music are invented according to the burime principle - one line, another line. This is how it turns out:

“Egyptian air is good for the lungs,
Make Tahrir on Red Square,
Spend a wild day among the strong
women.
Search the balcony for a crowbar, release
paving stones".

Hence the rhyme “legs” - “legs”, repeatedly cursed by everyone. Music is written and produced in much the same way. Despite this, Pussy Riot insist: they are a musical group.

There are so many good girls