You're reading: Russian premier argues for Pussy Riot members release

PARTSA, Russia — Russia's prime minister said Friday the women in the Pussy Riot punk band serving two-year prison sentences should be set free, while a band member's husband tried to visit his wife in jail in a central Russian region known for its gloomy Stalinist-era gulags.

 

Three members of
the band were convicted on hooliganism charges in August for performing
a “punk prayer” at Moscow’s main cathedral during which they pleaded
with the Virgin Mary for deliverance from President Vladimir Putin.

One
of them, Yekaterina Samutsevich, was released on appeal last month, but
the other two, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alekhina, were sent to
prison camps to serve their sentences.

Prime Minister Dmitry
Medvedev said Friday that he detested the Pussy Riot act, but added the
women have been in prison long enough and should be released. He made a
similar statement before October’s appeal hearings, fueling speculation
about their possible release. Medvedev’s latest comment is unlikely to
take effect, since he is widely seen as a liberal yet nominal government
figure whose pledges and orders are seldom followed through on.

Also
Friday, Tolokonnikova’s husband, Pyotr Verzilov, was turned away by
authorities when he tried to visit her at a prison camp in the village
of Partsa in Mordovia, a region well known in Russia for the Gulag camps
here filled with the tens of thousands in the 1930s.

He had
brought paperwork regarding the ongoing legal drama of the Pussy Riot
trial, which should have enabled him to meet his wife on prison grounds.
But he was told that she remains in quarantine for several more days.

Tolokonnikova
and a team of lawyers are planning an appeal to a regional court,
requesting that her sentence be put off until the couple’s daughter,
4-year-old Gera, is 14, Verzilov said.

While both Tolokonnikova
and Alekhina both have small children, their lawyers’ frequent reference
to that fact has had little effect on Pussy Riot members’ two-year
sentences, which were upheld in an October appeal.

Verzilov said
his wife has been treated well by prison officials, but he attributed
that to the publicity stirred up by the trial.

The band members’
imprisonment has come to symbolize intolerance of dissent in Putin’s
Russia and caused a strong international condemnation. Their cause has
been taken up by celebrities and musicians, including Madonna and Paul
McCartney, and protests have been held around the world.

For
Partsa — a dot on the map where most working-age adults are dressed in
uniform — newcomers and journalists attract suspicious glances and
hostile questioning.

“All that would be needed here would there be
an order from someone high-placed in Moscow who’d say, ‘Press her, make
her feel the real Russian prison,'” said Verzilov, hopeful but
skeptical about the good treatment. “People follow the instructions they
are given from the top.”

The women are woken up at 6:30 a.m., and
their workday begins at 7:30 a.m. and continues for eight hours by law,
but sometimes more. Most of the women in Tolokonnikova’s prison work in
the sewing industry, where they make clothes for the well-padded
echelons of Russia’s special and civil services.

Tolokonnikova has
not yet begun working mandatory shifts, but was offered the chance to
break some asphalt within the prison compound last week, a task she
undertook with fervor after being cooped up for too long, Verzilov said.

Relatives
are allowed to visit the women inside the prison for several hours, six
times a year. Conjugal visits, for three days, are permitted four times
per year. With the right stack of paperwork, prisoners are allowed
food, books, medicine, and clothes — in black, the uniform of the prison
— from relatives and friends.

Even if Tolokonnikova lobbies to
have her sentence delayed until her daughter is a teenager, her effort
may have effect only if and when the political tide in the Kremlin turns
her way.

Svetlana Brakhima, a lawyer arrested in the wake of the
politicized trial of her boss, oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was sent
to the same penal colony where Tolokonnikova now lives.

But
despite having two children, aged 2 and 6 at the time of her arrest,
Bakhmina was only released early when she became pregnant in prison. She
was released in 2009, several months after the birth of her daughter.