Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, one of three members of the Russian feminist punk-rock collective Pussy Riot now serving time in prison for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred,” spends her days in a four-woman cell on the outskirts of Moscow, trying to read. She assumes that she is filmed by her jailers and spied on by her cellmates; her infrequent meetings with her husband, Petr Verzilov, are monitored, too. Her notes are confiscated during daily searches and she is told that she had better not even try to draw up “illegal escape plans.” The cell is cold and malodorous, though Nadezhda counts herself fortunate: most cells hold thirty or more prisoners. Ordinary prisoners pay up to ten thousand dollars a month in bribes to get into a four-person cell. Above the din, she has been reading Foucault, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, the Bible, and, in recent weeks, the late essays of Tolstoy. “One good thing about Russian prisons is that they have a halfway decent library,” said Verzilov, who was in the States this week to campaign for the release of the Pussy Riot Three. “No Foucault—she gets that from outside—but good Russian classics!”

The women from Pussy Riot—a group modelled on riot-grrrl bands like Bikini Kill, all with a heavy dose of performance art, left-wing feminist politics, anarchist spirit, and critical theory—were convicted of “hooliganism” after they and two others descended on the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, on February 21st, and, wearing balaclavas and interesting skirts, lip-synched (and filmed) the song “Punk Prayer—Mother of God, Get Rid of Putin.” The performance lasted around forty seconds before it was broken up. Neither Vladimir Putin nor the Russian Orthodox Church was amused. Both the regime and the Church targeted Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich as blasphemers of Russia.

The ensuing prosecution and conviction of Pussy Riot is only the best known of many gestures by the Putin regime signalling an over-all crackdown on liberal, pro-Western dissent. (Masha Lipman has written about the case.) The women received a two-year sentence; it will be appealed on October 1st, but Verzilov told me that the chances of its being commuted or reduced are slim. “It would take an absolute miracle,” he said.

Verzilov was in New York with his and Tolokonnikova’s daughter, Gera, an adorable four-year-old. On Friday, he and Gera were at the Ace Hotel, where Yoko Ono and Amnesty International presented Pussy Riot with the LennonOno Grant for Peace. Ono thanked Pussy Riot for “standing firmly in their belief in freedom of expression and making all women of the world proud to be women.” Among the other honorees were Christopher Hitchens, the essayist and journalist who died earlier this year, and Rachel Corrie, a pro-Palestinian activist, who was killed when she was run over by an Israeli Army bulldozer in Gaza, in 2003. In Washington, Verzilov met with the Burmese democracy activist and opposition politician Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and various congressmen. San Suu Kyi called for the release of the members of Pussy Riot and said that the only good reason to crack down on musicians was if they couldn’t sing very well.

The current Russian Prime Minister and former President Dmitri Medvedev said this week that it might be a good idea to release the three members of Pussy Riot. Medvedev said that he was “sickened” by what the women had done, but that “the prolongation of their incarceration in the conditions of jail seems to me to be unproductive. A suspended sentence, taking into account time they have already spent [in jail], would be entirely sufficient.” Verzilov said that Medvedev’s comments didn’t give him much hope, because, in recent months, Putin and the silovki—members of the security agencies and the military—have made it clear that they intend to wipe away any traces of liberalization that Medvedev allowed when he was President. The atmosphere, which wasn’t particularly free under Medvedev, has soured considerably. When leaders of Amnesty International tried to present representatives of the Russian Embassy, in Washington, with a petition calling for the release of the Pussy Riot members, they were roughly dismissed, and the petition was tossed away.

“You can easily see why something like Pussy Riot makes Putin so angry,” Verzilov said. “These are ordinary girls, like you might have met during the pro-democracy demonstrations in Moscow [last winter]. People can relate to them. Not everyone, obviously, but many. And Pussy Riot is so Western in its ideas and its influences—musically, politically. For people to see the state go out of its way to crush these women, well, they say, ‘Whoa, is this Iran we’re living in?’ It’s complicated; of course we are not Iran. And yet the state will not let these women out of jail. So who are we?”

Photograph by Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty.