Twenty-one months after they were detained for barging into a Moscow cathedral to record their “punk prayer,†calling on the Virgin Mary to prevent Vladimir V. Putin’s return to the Russian presidency, two members of the feminist band Pussy Riot were released from prison colonies on Monday under a new amnesty law.
Both activists, Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, immediately dismissed the amnesty, issued just three months before the end of their jail terms, as a “cosmetic†publicity stunt tied to the Winter Olympics that Russia is hosting in Sochi in February.
Subtitled video of Ms. Tolokonnikova’s remarks to the television crews waiting for her outside the Siberian prison hospital where she had been held for the past month was posted online by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the American-financed news network.
Asked about her future plans, Ms. Tolokonnikova told Russia’s TV Rain that she and Ms. Alyokhina had “a plan for a human rights organization to help prisoners in Russia.†According to an English translation of her complete remarks prepared by The Interpreter, a website supported by the dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Institute of Modern Russia, she added:
I don’t consider this time lost for myself. I acquired a unique experience. Therefore, it will be much simpler to be involved in concrete human rights activity than before. I have become more mature and have come to know the state from inside; I saw this little totalitarian machine, what it is like from inside. Russia is really built on the model of the colony. Therefore it is so important to change the colony now, so as to change Russia along with the colony. The colony and the prison are the face of the country.
“We didn’t ask for any pardon,†Ms. Alyokhina told my colleague David Herszenhorn. “I would have sat here until the end of my sentence because I don’t need mercy from Putin.â€
Mr. Khodorkovsky, the former oil tycoon who was suddenly released on Friday into de facto exile in Germany after a decade in prison, said something similar in a news conference on Sunday in Berlin.
Mr. Khodorkovsky, who described the circumstances of his release to the journalist Yevgenia Albats on Saturday, told Russian reporters at the news conference that their attention had been crucial in his case and also “helps very many people who remain unjustly in our Russian prisons preserve their lives, health and hope for freedom.†He urged the journalists not to see his release “as a symbol that there are no political prisoners left in Russia.â€
“I would like you to take me as a symbol that the efforts of civil society may lead to the release of people whose release was not expected by anyone,†he said.
TV Rain also captured video of Mr. Khodorkovsky’s emotional reunion with his parents as they arrived in Berlin from Moscow to be with him.
