How Nadya Tolokonnikova turned her body into a missile

Pussy Riot entered international public consciousness in 2012 when the feminist guerrilla group released a video titled “Punk Prayer.” Four women in brightly-coloured dresses and balaclavas thrash in a crafty split between disorder and unison at the lectern of Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow to a live audience of angry nuns, swooning worshippers, and eventually, police. Not a great crowd, but the encore has lasted over a decade. 

Nadya Tolokonnikova, a founding member of what has become a global collective of pink balaclava-bearing feminists, has been living in exile after serving a two-year prison sentence for her role in the show. “Me and my colleagues ended up in jail over my obsession with Rachmoninoff," she tells me. "That’s how the ‘Punk Prayer’ was born. I was in my kitchen one day playing Rachmaninoff ‘Rejoice, O Virgin’ but I changed it to a feminist version: ‘Please Get Rid of Putin.’ The rest is history.” 

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Pussy Riot’s first full length album, CYKA, performed by Tolokonnikova, combines utopian longing and hard wrought revenge in the continued effort towards the collective’s aspirations; to end Putin’s dictatorship in Russia, to end the war in Ukraine, and achieve total freedom for women and queer people across Russia and the globe. 

The collective uses music as one of many mediums to undermine dictatorship. Written on the heels of Tolokonnikova's museum exhibition POLICE STATE, CYKA, which (put this in your backpocket) means “bitch” in Russian, plays as the soundtrack to their most recent protests. 

The music video for “DISOBEY” was shot at the Venice Biennale, a global art world get-together that warmly welcomed a Russian pavilion of state-sanctioned artists despite the war in Ukraine. Outside, Pussy Riot blasted the song, which screech-shouts “disobey!” over a baseline built to churn up a righteous circle pit, eliciting fear and confusion in the local police force (mon dieu!). Fear in the eyes of police officers, Tolokonnikova tells me, is better than orgasms. The day must have been orgasmic: Russia temporarily shut down the pavilion then accused Pussy Riot of censorship. “What kind of weak ass shit that you as a country who has fucking nuclear weapons to destroy half the world complains that a little Siberian girl with no power, no money, censors you. My god! Let me give you a handkerchief to cry into,” Tolokonnikova says.

Pussy Riot does, of course, have power even if they lack nukes. The music of CYKA evokes curious cringes to a similar effect of Die Antwoord's “I Fink You Freaky” and teases like Chicago electronic group Pixel Grip, yet the threat to dictatorship rings out. Tolokonnikova identifies as a conceptual artist more than a musician. The titular song “CYKA” opens with a dialogue between an English interviewer and Vladimir Putin. In translation, Putin refuses to speak the band’s name and calls them immoral for making the world utter the word [pussy]. There’s power in a name. “There are some people who say even Russia should be renamed because the word Russia is associated with so much blood and suffering,” Tolokonnikova explains. A new name for Russia, perhaps? She proposes: “We could call it the Pussy Federation.” 

Tolokonnikova wrote two of the songs on CYKA, “GOD LOVES THE FIERCE” and “UTOPIA,” before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2020. “GOD LOVES THE FIERCE” imagines “a world where the paddy wagons used to pack protesters in Russia are turned into toy stores, or some childish thing. Or, if you go to Burger King they give you food for free. It sounds like bullshit, or stupid stuff a child would imagine, but it’s a useful exercise to hold onto this childish part of ourselves.” On that note, “UTOPIA” (featuring Salem Ilese) opens with what sounds like a toy xylophone. She wrote the rest of the album five years into the ongoing war. 

“It’s increasingly difficult [to dream] in this world,” Tolokonnikova admits. “It’s an everyday battle. It used to be so much easier. Maybe it’s easier for all young people. Before I went to jail it was so much easier. I was 22 when I was thrown in jail. After that it became a battle to reclaim imagination.” 

When the bravest of revolutionaries struggle to imagine the future, revenge offers clarity: “What has kept me going the last few years is turning my body into a missile that will destroy people who hurt me and hurt people who I love and hurt countries that I love like Ukraine; meaning Vladimir Putin and everyone who supports his war machine," she says. "Every morning I wake up and I think if I can hurt them a bit more today then this day isn’t wasted.”

CYKA reminds audiences Russia is more than a geo-political big bag wolf. “PAIN” describes the story of Masha Moskaleva, a young Russian girl whose father was jailed because she made an anti-war drawing at school. The lyrics translated from Russian go, “You’re losing patience, I’m losing control / War runs through your veins, only pain through mine.” 

On the track “GORE,” Tolokonnikova collaborated with American rapper B-Real, formerly of the group Cypress Hill. The two met last year at a show organized by DEFEND LA at The Echo in Los Angeles as ICE raids took over the city. After the raids temporarily shut down her POLICE STATE exhibition at MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art), Tolokonnikova felt the universal power of resistance. “GORE” exists as a genre, language, and culture mixing track of global anti-police solidarity. In such moments of unity Tolokonnikova feels, “We all become one body, one political animal.” 

Notably, Pussy Riot wore those balaclavas before ICE.

Tolokonnikova and Pussy Riot released an EP Matriarchy Now in 2022 and several singles in collaboration with artists like Big Freedia and MARINA. CYKA makes Matriarchy Now seem quaint. On CYKA, “CANCEL ME” calls out the pettyfoggery stifling leftist resistance efforts at the same time as the Right coalesces on one front: misogyny. And “GODSLEFT” whispers a windy vision of the world when dictatorship prevails: “Ashes fill the sky / They say raindrops never die / They say dead men learn to fly / I see sorrow in your eyes.” Released as a single, “CANDY DOPAMINE” explores Tolokonnikova’s struggle with prescription antidepressants. 

CYKA’s final two songs, “OUTRO” and “BLIZZARD,” strike particularly devastating notes on an album swarmed with ghosts. In “BLIZZARD,” Tolokonnikova has a conversation with a childhood friend who died by suicide. “OUTRO” is an homage to Tolokonnikova’s mother whom she lost this past year. Their last words took place over Zoom. Tolokonnikova would face immediate arrest if she returned to Russia. 

Punk music pundits, if such a thing really exists, place Pussy Riot at the end of the line for feminist punk. The last stop on the train. As if generations of feminist punk have culminated in the great Pussy Riot. Pussy Riot is punk in practice, but the music is only a gesture in the larger oeuvre of their activist performance art. On stage, I’ve seen Tolokonnikova dance in styles evocative of K-Pop routines (the screaming and woman in lingerie behind her besides). Her tiny skirt bounced above a crowd sprinkled with newly purchased red balaclavas. The show, in the middle of the day in a tiny corner of America’s Pacific Northwest begged the question: “'This is one of Russia’s most wanted criminals?” She wore pink platform boots! Singing to the tune of “London Bridge”! 

Tolokonnikova prefers tracksuits, an attire much like prison uniforms, but she says, “I usually wear the skirt because it increases the sense of absurdity.”

The contrast between Tolokonnikova’s lived reality as a formerly incarcerated activist and exiled artist behind the experimental electro-pop/rock album CYKA, and her on stage persona, evokes one of Tolokonnikova’s favorite phrases: The emperor has no clothes. 

There is something to be said about a Siberian girl and her colleagues, as Tolokonnikova likes to say, who send shivers down Vladimir Putin’s spine and frowns across the brows of his bishops. Perhaps the emperor should put on a skirt.