As my colleague David Herszenhorn reports, the two best-known members of the Russian art-protest group Pussy Riot, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, were arrested in Sochi on Tuesday, and managed to tweet an account of their captivity from detention.
First Ms. Alyokhina shared a photograph of her view from inside the police van.
Minutes later, an image of Ms. Alyokhina peering out from behind bars appeared on Ms. Tolokonnikova’s Twitter account, followed by updates on the path of the police vehicle taking them to the station.
Then Ms. Tolokonnikova posted her mobile phone number, for the convenience of journalists, and, as the New Republic correspondent Julia Ioffe reported, she “even picked up the phone and talked, allowing this reporter to hear Alyokhina yelling at someone in the background.â€
Images of the two women working their devices were also transmitted to Twitter from the police van by a fellow detainee, Semyon Simonov, a local activist with the nonprofit organization Memorial.
Several hours later, when the women emerged from the police station with three fellow activists, all wearing the group’s trademark balaclavas, and were engulfed by a scrum of waiting journalists, Ms. Tolokonnikova’s husband, Pyotr Verzilov, was in position to document the scene on his @gruppa_voina Twitter account.
The two women, who were recently freed from prison after spending nearly two years in jail for mocking the close alliance of church and state in Vladimir Putin’s Russia in a music video recorded in a Moscow cathedral, said they had traveled there to perform their new song, “Putin Will Teach You to Love the Motherland.â€
Given that a significant part of the world’s media has congregated in Sochi for the Olympic Games, and the women’s telegenic brand of activism has made them global celebrities, the decision to detain them, and so propel them back into the spotlight, baffled even some leaders of the opposition.
“How stupid do you have to be to arrest Pussy Riot in Sochi during the Olympics?†the anticorruption blogger Aleksei Navalny asked rhetorically on Twitter. “There is no Ketchum in the world that can help you on this one,†he added, in reference to the Washington public-relations firm hired to improve Russia’s image by submitting opinion pieces to prominent newspapers, including The New York Times.
Follow Robert Mackey on Twitter @robertmackey.
