And if the authorities decide to prosecute Pavlensky, the case should just be picking up steam by March—just as the two remaining Pussy Riot prisoners, Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina, are due to be released after completing their two-year sentences.

In many ways, a Pavlensky trial could turn into a Pussy Riot redux—another example of guerilla artists taking on The Man.

Writing in the online magazine Russia! Sean Guillory of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies called his Red Square action "an assault on the stasis that grip contemporary Russia" and a challenge for it to rise up.

"The greatness of Pavlensky’s work is that by nailing himself to the pavement, he neutralized police power," Guillory wrote.

"With a nail, a hammer, and a naked body, Pavlensky symbolized Russian society’s impotence at the same time he reveals its potential power."

If the Pussy Riot trial in the summer of 2012 was, in the words of the playwright Natalya Antonova, "a circus of grandiose proportions and with sinister overtones," one can only imagine what the spectacle of Pavlensky in the dock might entail.

"Opening a criminal case against me would be the the authorities' latest colossal mistake," Pavlensky said. "It would only serve to amplify my actions."

During the Pussy Riot trial, media in Russia and around the world endlessly played the video of the feminist collective's "punk prayer" appealing to the Virgin Mary to free Russia from Vladimir Putin.

In a prospective Pavlensky trial, we would presumably see—over and over again—the artist, nailed to Red Square's cobblestones and shivering naked in the cold November rain in the shadow of the Kremlin.

Clever, personable, and articulate, the three Pussy Riot defendants showed remarkable poise and dignity during their trial. They used the stage they had been given to get their message out and, in the process, impressed even many who were appalled by their protest.

Pavlensky also comes across in interviews as smart, likable, and lucid. And he clearly has the courage of his convictions. He would, no doubt, turn any show trial the state tried to stage into an opportunity to showcase his political message.

This, after all, is a man who has a history of putting his body through incredible pain to make a political point. It is somebody who, in an act he called "Carcass," wrapped his naked body in barbed wire in front of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly in May.

If Tolokonnikova, Alyokhina, and Samutsevich made for sympathetic defendants, imagine a young man on trial for an act of self-abuse that the renowned theater director Kirill Serebrennikov called a "powerful gesture of absolute despair."

And if Pavlensky is tried, and if this happens after Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina are released, it will give the feminist punkers a golden opportunity to return a favor.